Minni Havas is a freelance illustrator based in Helsinki, Finland. 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. Already then, she found herself getting into details and drawing “in the right way”, jealous of the sister who wasn’t that strict. “I’m so particular about things,” she says. “Things need to follow a certain order.”

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