Minni Havas (b. 1983) is a freelance illustrator based in Helsinki. Having studied fashion design at the University of Art and Design Helsinki, her focus is mainly on fashion illustration. Minni uses colour pencils to draw detailed pictures with magical colours and arrangements somewhere in the borderlands of the real and the imaginary.
Known for her photorealistic drawings of girls, Minni grew up admiring her dad’s airbrush art collection and reading cartoons such as Roger Leloup’s Yoko Tsuno. “What a beautiful character,“ she says. “I love the way Leloup draws a human face.” As a child, Minni started imitating Leloup’s characters as well as drawing people from books and magazines together with her sister Milja – the dark-haired girl who often appears in Minni’s drawings today.“I’m intrigued by the possibilities of drawing,” Minni says. “I can draw things from my head that would be impossible to photograph.”
On the other hand, she gets very inspired by interesting looking models and the challenges of simulating reality – especially certain body parts. Minni’s favourite one is the mouth, which is also the hardest one to draw. Drawing bare skin takes the most of her time. “In addition to volume, it contains a lot of detail,” she explains. “Skin also takes up a lot of brown colour, which is the colour pencil that always runs out first.”
Lately, Minni has been working on illustrations for magazines as well as drawings for projects such as advertising campaigns or a series of stamps for the Finnish mail. She is also starting up a clothing collection with her friend Anne in order to expand her work into three dimensions. “The clothing collection will compliment my very detailed working with the illustrations,” Minni explains. “When it comes to fashion design, Anne is the more technical one of us two.” Like this project, Minni is open for contrast and multidisciplinary challenges in commissions to come – and dreaming of making a big fashion editorial for one of her favourite magazines together with her in-house photographer and stylist to be.
Excerpt from her bio MINNI HAVAS
Amazing I adore her work your at first sight. You blog is so inspiring! I can’t wait for your stores to reopen! x x x