About Timo Vintturi

Adventure, creativity, imagination, inspiration and self-expression

General

I'm a self-taught photographer, graphic designer and illustrator. Currently residing in Kuopio, Finland, I was born and raised in Saarijärvi, Finland. I got interested in music and visual arts at an early age. Throughout 1990s I attended both the local music school and school of visual arts for children and adolescents. That, if not sparked, added to my interest in art.

Aforementioned experiences have created my childlike desire to express myself and learn new things by creating – whether it be something computer-aided or traditional visual art. Music, in form of singing and playing instruments, is also a way of self-expression for me. Besides creating, I'm very trained in the consumption of many forms of art. Movies, tv shows, rock music and poster art are among my favorites.

In 2010, I graduated from University of Jyväskylä with a Master of Arts (Education, M.A.Ed.) degree, majoring in Education (Teacher Education Department) and minoring in Visual Arts and History. Besides pursuing a career in primary school teaching, I'm leading a lifelong dream of doing all things artistically creative – with (and from time to time without) computers.

In early 2014 the aforementioned dream turned into reality when I landed a job as a professional graphic designer. This enabled me to develop my artistic skills well beyond what they might have been had I not gotten the job. Detailed information below.

Graphics

My introduction to computer-aided drawing was, like for many of us born in the early 1980s, Paintbrush of Windows 3.x. While fun to scribble with, it didn't exactly spur my interest in graphics in the early nineties. Once the World Wide Web became an everyday thing a few years later, I became increasingly interested in creating my own websites with HTML. Soon I realised I needed graphics for my coded creations. As a result, I got my first advanced raster graphics program, then Jasc's PaintShop Pro 4.x. Here's a link to one of my first poster designs from 1998.

At the time, my father did graphics at a local printing house, Saarijärven Offset Oy. He learned about my newly born interest in raster graphics and suggested that I'd give Adobe's PhotoShop 4.0, his professional choise of software, a try. This was in the summer of 1998. And the rest is history.

Since the "early days", I've familiarized myself with a good part of the Adobe product family (Photoshop, Illustator, InDesign, DreamWeaver, After Effects and Premiere Pro), thus diversifying my graphics skills to cover vector graphics, publishing and video editing (and rendering). As a result I'm using scanners and Wacom Intuos tablets as parts of my workflow. Coding-wise I've gotten into HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript in the recent years. A few years ago I became interested in Responsive web design. Its utilization can be seen in websites I've created since.

Landing a job as a professional graphic designer has really propelled my skills when it comes to all things vector, not forgetting bitmap work in Photoshop. I designed product catalogues, brochures, user manuals, price lists and over a 200 advertisements between 2014 and 2019. I've absorbed tons of knowledge about the possibilities of Adobe Creative Suite. However, there's still something new to be learned every day which keeps things exciting.

Photography

I've always been interested in photographs and photography. However, I've been photographing actively only since 2005. The possibilities of digital photography and, once again, my father contributed to the impulse. To put it short, my father got me my first (cheap) digital camera in early 2005. In 2007, I bought my first digital SLR, the sturdy Pentax K10D. I shot with it until I bought the Pentax K-1 full-frame DSLR in the end of 2019.

Working as a professional graphic designer has given me the possibility to up my game as a photographer as well. I've learned the basics of studio and product photography. I've shot and edited the photos of products and models for the marketing materials I've then designed. This has brought my confidence as photographer to a new level. The workflow is in my backbone, to say the least.