Taivalvuo Auvo

In the early 1950s, illustrator and visual artist Auvo Taivalvuo worked for the Fauni company in Järvenpää. Taivalvuo drew popular troll characters that appeared in comics, short films, textiles, and books. The troll figures even got their own troll park.

Perhaps Taivalvuo’s best-known cartoon for Finnish children is the Hippo character of the OP cooperative bank. The cooperative banks published plenty of different Hippo material and Taivalvuo illustrated the children’s Hippo bank magazine for years. Another fairytale character created by Taivalvuo is the ant girl Caru, who had adventures in books and in her own TV series. The programme was first shown on TV 1 in 1980 – 1981. Drawings from the TV series have also been used to illustrate Arabia’s decorative plate series. Taivalvuo has also illustrated many Anni Swan’s fairy tales.

Taivalvuo considers the most important works of his illustrating career to be the mushroom and plant posters he has drawn for the Finnish Association for Nature conservation, nature posters for savings banks and insurance companies, and machinery and equipment pictures for various large companies.

Auvo Taivalvuo’s archive consists of hundreds of drawings. Here you can see the catalogue of the archive and explore the digitised drawings, click here, here, and here.