The art of Heikala
The story behind the picture: Gary Evans meets the Finnish illustrator who is as enigmatic as her art
How can a popular social media artist also retain a sense of self and elusiveness? We find out.
Heikala wants her art to be a glimpse into the life of a character, a little moment in a larger story. You see it in her illustration of the solitary cloaked figure walking in the snowy wilderness accompanied by a tiger, the girl and her cat staring at a meteor shower at night, the witch who appears to be migrating with a flock of birds.
To get to these glimpses, these little moments, the Finnish illustrator often finds herself throwing around some unusual thoughts.
“If witches travel abroad, do they use aeroplanes or do they fly across continents on their brooms? Do they need passports? Do witches have to go through customs and declare their potion-making equipment? I like to play around with these things in my head and sometimes the ideas become nice paintings where the viewer can figure out the story behind the picture.”
Heikala lives in a large house in Oulu, Finland. She has a whole room to handle stock and postage for the online shop she started straight out of university and has since built into a very successful small business. In the corner of her workspace, the house’s former living room, she keeps equipment for making and editing the videos that have helped her earn nearly two million followers on social media. Her desk stands in the same room, under the big window that lets in lots of light, and here she keeps the pens, paper, brushes and coloured inks used to give her illustrations that distinctive look – tools she’ll soon release as part of her own range of art supplies.
This makes Heikala sounds entrepreneurial, influencing, hustling. But she describes Oulu as a good place for an introvert. She doesn’t disclose her full name and never posts photos of herself. The story behind this requires a bit more figuring out.
Maybe the answer lies in the bottom of two drawers of the drawer unit beside her desk under the big window. It’s here that Heikala keeps her most prized possessions.
GOING IT ALONE
Heikala was always drawing. It was animals when she was very young, then Pokémon arrived in Finland and for years her sketchbooks were full of Bulbasaurs and Charmanders. At school, she had an art teacher who encouraged her to experiment with a range of materials and techniques. She sculpted. She got into oils. In the early 2000s, manga appeared on magazine stands in her hometown Oulu, so Heikala advanced to sketching humans in the style of Japanese comics such as Ranma ½.
At 16, she was accepted into a high school specialising in art in Helsinki, a six-hour train ride away, which meant leaving home. Her parents were always very encouraging and so, after high school, she went on to university in Lahti. It was on the five-year graphic design course that she first learned about the importance of branding, product design and visual storytelling.
These days, Heikala does the odd bit of illustration work for clients, but only if it comes with complete creative control. Still at uni, she started going to conventions, to artist alley, where her artwork sold surprisingly well. This meant she was torn between getting a job at a graphic design studio or trying it make a living from her own art. She tried freelance graphic design, but learned pretty quickly it wasn’t for
I didn’t have to worry about getting a job to support myself during the studies
her. After graduating, she started building her own business: “Thanks to the free education system in Finland I didn’t have to worry about getting a job to support myself during the studies, and nor did I have to take out a loan to study. I’m extremely fortunate that it all worked out.”
Working for herself means she has time to experiment on her own largescale projects, like her book published in 2019, The Art of Heikala, and the range of art supplies she hopes to release in early 2020. Most of the supplies she uses herself are only available in Europe and Japan. So she spent a year contacting suppliers and putting together a range she will sell world-wide through her online shop. The aim is to encourage more people to make things with their hands.
“Since it’s a project that’s close to my heart, I didn’t want to compromise on any aspect of it, so I decided to make this happen from start to finish by myself, but that also means that I’m taking the financial blow if it doesn’t end up working out.
“Making solo projects is of course a big risk financially, but I’m at a point in my life where I want to prioritise projects with full artistic freedom over doing something that I don’t have my heart in – even if it ends up being a financial failure.”
HUNTING FOR INSPIRATION
Heikala doesn’t wait for inspiration to find her. She goes looking for it. Often it’s a numbers game: she sits down at her desk and sketches as many as 30 matchbox-sized images, but will usually develop only a few. Before that, for an idea to take shape, she has to take in a lot of visual stimulation. She looks through a ton of images on Pinterest and in her own photography.
Japan still plays big part in her art. She’s visited the country seven times and is going again this year. She’s also
into magic, fantasy and mythology. Finland’s wealth of natural beauty increasingly influences her work, as do Finnish children’s book illustrators like Rudolf Koivu and Tove Jansson.
She sketches very quickly with a pen or ballpoint pen and never erases anything. Mistake are worked around. Details aren’t important just yet. The small sketch is scanned, printed large and finished with coloured inks.
THE ART OF BRANDING
“In my opinion, as a commercial artist, it’s good to have skills in branding and creating a visual identity for yourself. When thinking about brands, it’s not only the logo that some company has, but everything that company does.
“I think about the brand that I want to maintain for Heikala in every aspect of the things that I do: how I interact with my followers, what kind of art I want to make, the subjects I want
I think about the brand that I want to maintain for Heikala in every aspect of the things that I do
I want to prioritise projects with full artistic freedom over doing something that I don’t have my heart in
to tackle in my art, what kind of products I want to create, and how I want to utilise my social media. I’ve made a conscious decision not to do sponsored content on my social media for whichever company, and I carefully choose the people I want to work with and make products with. Most of these things, I guess, basically come down to my own ethics.”
In the same way that Heikala wants the viewer to figure out the story behind her art, she seems to want the viewer to figure out the story behind the artist who made it. She gives us glimpses into her life – little moments in her larger story – but the rest she keeps for herself. It’s good for business. It’s an excellent bit of branding. But it’s much more than that. Heikala has not only solved the age-old problem of making money versus doing the thing you love to do – she’s turned the solution into a story, into a work of art. And that means she’s free to focus on the one thing that matters most.
PRIZED POSSESSIONS
Whenever Heikala finishes a piece, she puts it in one of the bottom two drawers of the desk unit under the big window, the place where she keeps her most prized possessions.
“I try to create paintings that are true to who I am. I may not always succeed, but that’s something I actively strive to achieve. If those works that are important to me speak also to the audience that views them, then I can feel happy knowing I’ve reached people who also feel my paintings are true to them. There’s so many different kinds of art in the world, and so many different people to experience art, that I find it easy to accept that not everyone will love my art, in the same way that I don’t love or understand all art. But I’m so extremely happy to have found the way I love to make art, and to have found my niche and the people who also like to view the art I make.
“Those drawers are used only to store finished originals and whenever I can slide one of those drawers open and place a new work inside I feel this huge sense of accomplishment.”
I try to create art that’s true to who I am. I may not always succeed, but that’s something I actively strive to achieve