Meet laika and her website

Meet laika

I am a painter and a visual artist.
laika started as my alter-ego a long time ago. She is a mixed breed of wolf, fox and dog. She got wings in the early 90’s and when I got on the net that seemed like a good username since the name comes from my first, middle and last name
If you ever run into laika take my advice and be somewhat careful, since she’s known to be.. um.. unpredictable..
Oh and in case you’re wondering, my name is Laura I. Kansanen-Stavale.

I am originally a painter and that’s where the roots of my work lie. I do lot of different things. Label me as you wish but don’t ask me to agree because I’m not fond of labels. Check out my portfolio to find out more and the gallery to see my latest work.

I work with pens and pencils, paints and inks, all sorts of materials, Olympus E-400 and of course a Mac and yes, I’m very passionate about Macs. Macs are better and more beautiful.

I admire many artists and designers but the biggest influence, mentor, idol in my whole life has been Peppi Pitkätossu (Pippi Långstrump – Pippi Longstocking), by the Swedish author Astrid Lindgren. I spent my childhood being Pippi. If you’re not familiar with her, I strongly advise reading the Pippi books – and I would urge you to get to know the original version though.

If you like my work (and I hope you do) and would like to purchase, please email me for details.

About the site

New version of laikanet. Still very much in progress and things may change. If you were familiar with the old site, you notice many sections like tutorials and ecards gone. Yes, they’re gone. They may be eventually reborn, but I do not know yet.

I hope you find navigating the site easy. Whenever you see a link with a little arrow, it means the link will take you away from my site and you will have to press your browser’s back button in order to come back here.

This site is built on Textpattern. It took me a long time to move to Textpattern and I cannot say it was easy. I had procrastinated about learning Txp for soooo long and in the end I think it kind of became an obsession. I was considering different CMS’ to use, but somehow, sometime, somewhere I had gotten this idea about Textpattern into my head and it wouldn’t go away.
I’ve still only scratched a surface and will I stick with Textpattern? Time will tell. There are many things I like about Textpattern but there are still many things I find kind of cumbersome. For now, this will do since I’m way too busy with other stuff..