Fête de crêpes - Papier peint - Chambre des enfants

Cecilia Heikkilä

Cecilia Heikkilä is a Swedish graphic designer and illustrator. She has worked for all major Swedish publishers and is one of two illustrators behind the new picture books about the MLire la suiteoomins. Among her clients are IKEA and Fjällräven, for which she has designed a limited edition of the cult-backpack Kånken.

There is a special warmth and luminosity in Cecilia Heikkilä’s illustrations, a humour that is subtle and sweet. Her style is both accessible and very personal.

In Cecilias own words

"I illustrated my first children's book when I was nine years old for Lewis Carroll.

It's true. On the cover page of Alice in Wonderland, plastered with red wax chalk, one can clearly read: ”Drawings by Cecilia Heikkilä, merely nine years old." In addition, I have been modest enough to emphasize the word "merely".

Then there are scattered illustrations that accompany the story squeezed into the margins and at the smallest gap in the text during the next 192 pages.

It is probably at the same time, at the beginning of the nineties, that me and my mother lie down in my bed under the apricot-colored duvet cover in the house in Borlänge and she reads, I listen. Although we are not really there because we are in the deep forest together with Dinah, Dorinda, Silver falcon and Golden puma. Something has happened, the Golden puma is injured and dies. Curtain. The chapter ends.

When my mother closed the covers of It blows on the moon written by Eric Linklater and left the room I lie awake for a long time and mourn in secret.

A few years later we read the Narnia books, and then I accidentally hit My Neighbor Totoro on TV. Taken from these experiences, I fill the school's mathematics booklet with characters and worlds far more exciting than equilateral triangles.

These occasions have one thing in common. They belong to my perhaps earliest memories of how stories can deliver a punch straight into the face of one's soul. Caught off guard. Drawing becomes a way to process and capture the worlds and to stay in them for a little while longer.

When – more than twenty years later – I sit in my studio in Malmö and have received a copy of the script for Singers melodi, I once again experience the feeling of being surprised and moved by a story.

It can be nothing but magic.

And Cecilia, just nine years old, had been very proud to know that I have drawn everywhere in the book, both over, under and between the text. Even on the very front."
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