Mikko Saarainen
Lahti, Finland4 prints, from £35
Mikko Saarainen is an award-winning illustrator, children's author and comic artist from Lahti, Finland. His pictures are funny, expressive and packed with detail: a cruise ship where every passenger has spotted something different, a family car loaded past the roofline, a knight losing an argument with a dragon. He works in a bold line and flat, faintly grainy colour, and keeps the detail going right out to the edges, so the drawings get read as much as looked at.
Prints by Mikko Saarainen
4 prints
Everything happening at once
Mikko Saarainen, an illustrator, children's author and comic artist from Lahti, is the first Finnish artist in the gallery, and his prints all pay out on the second and third look. Cruise sails a liner through green waves with a saluting captain, a girl whose plaits stream out behind her and a fish leaping clear of the water. Family Trip loads an orange car past the roofline and fills it with children, a grinning dog, a cat and a mouse. URF! is a whole comic page in one print, a knight in blue armour losing an argument with a green dragon. Journey is the quiet one: a red car crossing a stone bridge under mountains, in a muted autumn palette.
Saarainen suits the rooms where nobody is being careful. Cruise, Family Trip and URF! are 50 x 50 cm, the square format that sits well on a picture shelf or in a group, and they hang happily in a child's room, a playroom or a kitchen next to Simen Wahlqvist's squares among our illustration prints. Journey is the one for a living room or a hallway: 50 x 70 cm, calmer in colour, and able to hold a wall on its own. Every one is sold framed in wood, black or white, or unframed.
At a glance
- Based in
- Lahti, Finland
- Formats
- 50 × 50 cm, and 50 × 70 cm for Journey
- In the shop
- 4 prints
- Framing
- Unframed, or wood, black or white
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