Growing up I was voracious reader of adventure novels and comics; 20,000 Leagues Underneath the Sea, Lord of the Rings, The Count of Monte Cristo, the Three Musketeers, Tintin, Asterix, Blueberry, you name it I read it.  My own novel, Jörgits and the End of Winter bares a strong resemblance to the classic adventure novel; it’s about exploring the unknown, uncovering hidden plots, fighting prehistoric monsters, and enduring friendships tested by conflicts larger than ourselves.

In the Jörgits that conflict is global warming. There’s an evil villain too, Augustus Kauhanen the III, but he’s not the cause of the main conflict, he’s just an actor in it. Kauhanen represents the darker side of human nature, our relentless appetite for technological progress and perfection. With global warming the real villains is actually hard to pinpoint. Who can we blame? Is it a cabal of rich industrialists(Kauhanen and his Searchers), or our own desire for the newest iPhone?

Through the Jörgits I aim to introduce children to the complexity of the global warming. We start in Finland, my home country, in the middle of winter, when the temperatures are -20 and day light last but a few hours. Though Finns may hate winter at times, they also love it for all the things it affords us: hot coco, sledding, cross country skiing, and hours time spent together in warm conversations in front of a fire. What happens if we take away the snow that brings light but keep the time shrouded in darkness constant? 

To keep the story from being didactic, the global warming often recedes into the background, like Eye of Sauron, and instead we focus upon the Jörgits and how they perceive our strange world. Through their eyes we discovers how beautiful and mysterious it really is. My starting point in writing the Jörgits was the following, if our children don’t value nature, will they really see a need to save it?

In this first, novel much of the adventure takes place underwater. Is there a realm on Earth that still holds more mysteries than the deep blue? Surely not. With the Jörgits, I have spent a lot of loving care on the underwater illustrations and the strange things we encounter there: kelp forests, crabs, giant rock formations, luminescent jellyfish + a giant Squid named Alfons. What more could you ask for?

Today I want to tell you the story of how a toy became a cartoon that became a book, and then became an app and how we got here. This is a story serendipity, perseverence and how believing you can do something can make it come true, it’s also the story of how this Kickstarter came to be.

The original Jörgits

The story began four years ago when I first shared some of the writing and sketches of the Jörgits with my sister Eliza. Since we were both in the creative field we routinely shared work with each other, but I still wasn’t quite prepared for her reaction. She absolutely loved it! and moreover so did all the fabulous folks at the company she helped start, the Animaboutique. They suggested that we should develop my concept into a cartoon show. I was quite flattered but also a little worried. I had never written a script before and let alone any professional creative writing. I had begun writing the story simply to give my toys a home. But I happily agreed, after all, it was an opportunity too good to pass up. We quickly began working on scripts and concept drawings together, we we’re planning on showing the concept at the Annecy Animation Festival and we had no time to loose.

A Scandinavian color palette
In developing a style for the illustration my sister and I both looked to the Moomin Troll books by Tove Janson. Like most Finnish children we had grown up reading them and as adults we were still in love with them. Since the Jörgits was set in Finland we were conscioulsy trying to hit something similar to the whimsical, magical, but slightly melancholy style that Janson had captured so well. The character design came quickly,  Eliza subtley improved upon my designs by simplifying the lines to make them animation friendly and more iconic.

Eliza’s designs, simple and elegant

The color palette took a bit more time. The first drawings came back feeling a little too colorful for my taste, I wanted something more melancholy, yet sweet, something that would accurately represent how I felt about Finland.

First animation sketch by Animaboutique

We sent drawings back and forth across the ocean until one day we finally captured what we were after. When I saw it I almost cried, it was perfect.

The drawing that clinched it

The Book
Though our collaboration went well we both decided to put aside the idea for the cartoon for the time being, it was simply too costly and time consuming to produce on our own. I decided to move ahead with a new plan, to write a full length novel about the Jörgits but it would have to wait. Michelle and I had just moved to India, where I was teaching for the first time in my life, and I also wanted to concentrate more on developing the toys. After the first year of teaching was over and I had done a first exhibit of my toys, I picked up the story again.

The Apartment, my first solo toy show in Bangalore

I spent a month and half in Finland that summer writing feverishly. I would wake up everyday and write for 4-5 hours straight before my mind just went blank. Creative writng is the only task that I’ve ever done were you can only manage for five hours before you have to quit. Your brain stops working, it’s like your imagination just runs out. 

Finland during the summer

I become an illustrator too!
After I finished a first draft of the novel, I had to set the project aside yet again, I was starting my top secret Toy Lab at Srishti and planning a wedding in Greek Islands ( yes I know, I have tough life). A year later I returned for round three, newly married, but stranded in Mountain View(that story will have to wait for some other time), by now I knew that I wanted to create an app, the iPad had just been released and it was perfect for children’s books. But I had one problem, my sister was up to her ears in work and had a newborn son and no time for extra drawing. So we did the next best thing, we began to draw together. Well, I did most of the drawing and Eliza helped fine tune my skills. This was quite challenging for me, I had never illustrated professionally before, but I had spent a year half of taking design drawing classes at the Academy of Art, so I pulled up my sleeves and went to work. 

I used a number of drawings that Maria had created as a style guide, but I also searched far and wide for new inspiration. To understand Maria’s style,I began to look at all the illustrators that inspired her, but I also found favorites of my own:

Mike Perry

Jon Klassen

Sanna Annukka

Matthew Lyons

The style began to evolve into a new direction, the color palette expanded, texture and pattern found its way into my drawings. I’ve chosen a small number of drawings from the book to show some of the stylistic changes along the way. 

The Metropolis
This was the first drawing that really captured the mood that was I was after. I was striving for something that felt beautiful but also a little sad.

The Searchers
The bad guys were too cute in my first drawings. After seeing Dracula again, I decided to emphasize their lankiness and height. 

Socks
This is the first drawing where I consciosly incorporate pattern to give the illustrations a fun mood.

The Way is in Training
I began to bring my illustrator drawings into photoshop and digitally paint them after a workshop with my sister while Teemu watched after Rufus. This discovery gave my drawings more texture and atmosphere.

The KPP - Kaisan Puiston Porukka
Learning to draw characters has been the hardest part of this process, I still don’t feel I’m all that great at it, but with the KPP  at least I finally began to feel more comfortable.

The End of Winter?
All that I learned comes together in one drawing, architecture, multiple characters in action, and some rough brush strokes to give the drawing atmosphere and depict the wonderful winter weather that the Jörgits find themselves in. 

Conclusion
You never know where a project will take you, this project took me from a toy to a cartoon, from cartoon to a book, and from a book to an app.  And that app became this Kickstarter. Crazy but cool!

The Author & Publisher

Sidenotes or footnotes?
I’ve never been a big fan of footnotes in non-fiction, but I love them in fiction. In one of my favorite novels, The House of Leaves an extensive parallel narrative takes place in the footnotes. In the Moomin Troll series by Toove Jansson, footnotes are used to give fun facts to the reader from the author. The care put into Jansson’s footnotes is amazing and it makes her books a joy to read.

With books going digital this art is in danger of being lost. Most e-readers do not support footnotes or worse they downgrade them to the status of endnotes. Since Jörgits and The End of Winter relies heavily on footnotes to add context and humor to the narrative we’re designing a way for readers to enjoy them as sidenotes viewable on demand. I’ve always found sidenotes more elegant than footnotes and in a digital medium we can improve on this stylistic feature even more. 

In a traditional book footnotes and sidenotes can have the unfortunate effect of tugging at the readers attention needlessly and, as a result, slow down the reading experience. In the Jörgits sidenotes are hyperlinked and will open a side panel that contains the note. You can see a mockup of the proposed functionality below.

This allows the reader to chose whether they want to access the note or ignore it. It allows the author (yours truly) to have as much fun as I want with the notes. For example, there could be hyperlinks leading the reader to more in depth information, diagrams of the space ship or photographs that inspired the text, all without distracting the reader unless of course they want to be. 

Character Sheets
Having a large numbers of characters in a book can be fun, but it can also be quite challenging (remember War & Peace? it wasn’t until I was half way into the book and 3 months later that I finally knew who was who). In the Jörgits, we have seven aliens to keep track of, Jenny, Joonas, the bad guy and a slew of supporting characters. How will you keep track of who’s who? That’s where the character sheets come in. Each character’s name is hyperlinked and tapping on it will open a side panel that contains the characters image, a small description, and their latest tweets. What’s so fun about this? Well, over time we can be updating and enriching the character’s story as the series grows. 

Social Media Integration
Some of the critiques of apps and e-readers is that they are isolated from the internet. At first I scoffed at this critique.  I actually liked how the reading experience on an iPad was more quiet and zen-like than the incessant chatter of web pages with their comments, likes, and sharing. But as I thought about it more, I realized that Twitter presented a unique opportunity to share in depth information with the reader. 

One of the central themes in the Jörgits is climate change and envioronmental degredation. As an author I’ve been struggling with how much factual information I should share with the reader. However, I also realized my own limitations, I’m not a scientist, nor did I want this to be a science book and here’s where Twitter comes in. By having the characters tweet I can point readers to important information about environmental issues. Rather than having a lenghty paragraph about the danger of deforestation, I can have Joonas tweeting about an article he just read in the New York Times instead. This keeps the content both fresh and up to date. You can imagine how powerful this concept can be if we wield it with care. The characters can inspire the readers to take action and learn more for themselves. Of course, it doesn’t always need to be so serious they could also just be telling you about their favorite new discovery, coconut flavored ice cream with mangoes.