Riikka Kovasin - Paperiliitin: From the land of ice and snow to hot sand dunes of the Valley of the Kings

Moikka! Today I'm sharing a long post. It's connected to my June project for Art Daily Cafe. You can see the original post here (link) along with other inspiration for the Art Daily products.

This journal spread is my take on this month’s color (soft coral) and theme “Inner child”. The theme got me puzzled for a while. I first thought about doing something “kiddy” like finger painting or using crayons, but it didn’t get my ideas running at the time. Then I started to think what I wished as a child, what got my imagination lighting up back then and I knew what angle to take to the topic.

When I was a kid, I wasn’t that much into fairytales, if my memory serves me correctly. There were some story books that I liked, but it was more connected with the illustrations than the actual stories which I though were all in all, the one and the same story just with different spices added. There was at least one exception, though, as I recall having a high fewer and still wanting the see the movie version of the “Lumikuningatar” – The Snow Queen. It’s made 1986, when I was four, but I bet it aired later than that as I can still remember glimpses of it.

But even if I disliked traditional fairy tales, I loved tales and folklore. I took my first go at Kalevala a bit too early and even though I managed to read some of it, I didn’t understand much. The piece is written in “Kalevala metre” – trochaic tetrameter and naturally is a bit old language as well. But what really got my imagination running and still has a certain spell on me is the tales and imagery of old Egypt. I fell in love with the colors, the style and lines of the designs and also the tales. Whenever we needed to do a paper in elementary school, I usually chose Egypt as the subject if that only was possible. At one time we had a marathon write in school where we needed to write at least 8 or was it 12 pages about a subject. I didn’t have any problem filling the pages! More like what to leave without.

Inspired by the fascination to Egypt, my first dream job was an Egyptologist. As I soon realized that it was quite a tight niche, I broadened the choice for an archaeologist. Some years later, I found out that there’s an occupation called conservator, and that became my dream job. When I presented this to my upper elementary school teacher, he didn’t know about the job at all, but I knew it needed a university degree, so of to high school I went. During that time my goal then changed, but that’s another story.

I wanted to include several aspects of my love for the ancient Egypt in the page. I also wanted it to have a feel of digging into the history, so, I added three different spots for the journaling and hid them underneath the layers. They are in plain sight, though, but you need a little extra pull to see what’s written in them. I also wanted the center of attention to be the eye of Horus – such an iconic symbol. As I didn’t have it as a picture at hand and didn’t want to print one, I painted one using watercolors. Even such a simple thing felt really good – to sketch the eye and think about the colors and then color the piece. To tie the center of attention to the photo sticker I used in the other edge of the spread, I used the blue color. I used the same watercolor pencil to color the shield of the warrior as I used to finish the eye piece. I also added some hieroglyphs around the background here and there as the tale of the Rosetta stone captivated my imagination the moment I heard it. Such a wonderful job cracking the code! One more element to tie the page to the Egypt was the triangle stencil I used in the background with brown color – that reminded me of pyramids.

One of the story books that got my attention as a child was named as bluntly as “Satuja”, which means fairytales in Finnish. The stories were written by Raul Roine, but what really drew me in were the captivating illustrations. They were made using only three printing colors what I could tell – red, blue and black and thus always fascinated me as well. The little masterpieces were by the magnificent Rudolf Koivu. You can browse some of his work here (link). Coincidentally, one of his most famous illustrations is of Snow Queen. If you want to take a peek at the 1980’s version instead, here’s a link to IMDB page of the film (link). It was a massive production at the time and was an academy award nominee from Finland on the year of its release.

So, from the land of ice and snow to the hot sands of the Valley of the Kings, here was some trails of thought the theme provoked in my head. Have you documented your childhood dreams or what got you inspired then? There’s no better time than the now!

Thank you for your visit today! See you again soon!