![](\"\/helen\/blog\/images\/daily_4\/3804_Lindenbaum_Jansson_etc_2.jpg\")
<\/p>\nIngrid and I saw an exhibition at Waldemarsudde with four popular Finnish\/Swedish\/Estonian illustrators of children’s books: Tove Jansson, Ilon Wikland, Pija Lindenbaum and Linda Bondestam.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Tove Jansson is, of course, the creator of the Moomin books, which I read already when I was a child. Ilon Wikland illustrated many of Astrid Lindgren’s books, many of which were also translated into Estonian already back in the 1980s. Back when the children were children, I read a lot of those books again together with them.<\/p>\n
I’m not sure how well known Pija Lindenbaum is outside of Sweden, but she is very well-known here. She has been giving out at least one book a year since, like, 1990, and some of the best ones came out just as Ingrid was in the picture book age, so we read those over and over again.<\/p>\n
Linda Bondestam became active more recently, after Ingrid and Adrian had outgrown picture books, so I hadn’t come into contact with her work before.<\/p>\n
![](\"\/helen\/blog\/images\/daily_4\/3804_Lindenbaum_Jansson_etc_3.jpg\")
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I loved this exhibition. There was lots of material, not just originals of the finished illustrations themselves (which were numerous) but also early sketches, notes, colour palettes, character studies, storyboards, etc. A fascinating look behind the scenes.<\/p>\n
The illustrations themselves were interesting. Sometimes much smaller than I had thought (especially some Moomin drawings were tiny) and sometimes much larger (Linda Bondestam likes to work on a large scale).<\/p>\n
Fascinating to see the tiny means by which a wolf’s eyes and snout can communicate its mood and feelings.<\/p>\n
Seeing the pictures all like this, without any text and story to distract from them, highlighted the importance of layout. A normal picture utilises a canvas in whatever way it wants: sometimes all of it, sometimes just a part. But an illustration (at least in modern children’s books) takes text layout into account from the start. Sometimes leaving room for a lot of text, sometimes just a line or two. Sometimes stretching out to overlap with the text, or reaching out of its assigned area to play with space.<\/p>\n
I was surprised to see how boldly Tove Jansson used colour in some of her works. In my mind the Moomin illustrations are black and white ink drawings, and where they are in colour (such as in Vem ska tr\u00f6sta Knyttet<\/i>) it’s mostly plain fields of colour. But here were some very dynamic scenes.<\/p>\n
Now I feel like re-reading all the Moomin books, and other works by Tove Jansson as well.<\/p>\n
![](\"\/helen\/blog\/images\/daily_4\/3804_Lindenbaum_Jansson_etc_1.jpg\")
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Ingrid and I saw an exhibition at Waldemarsudde with four popular Finnish\/Swedish\/Estonian illustrators of children’s books: Tove Jansson, Ilon Wikland, Pija Lindenbaum and Linda Bondestam. Tove Jansson is, of course, the creator of the Moomin books, which I read already when I was a child. Ilon Wikland illustrated many of Astrid Lindgren’s books, many of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,10,18,15,768],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art_entertainment","category-books","category-dailies","category-ingrid_johanna","category-photography-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20994"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20994\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20999,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20994\/revisions\/20999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}