I have never exhibited in my hometown Os, but this year I was asked to do so together with my dad. He is a former arts and crafts teacher who makes landscape paintings. We are exposing in Galleri Oz for two months this summer. The gallery is a little, ancient wooden house that I remember literaly came rolling through town Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t like to be treated like an idiot, and that’s exactly how Crestock.com treat some of their customers and collaborators. This is the reason why I from this point on don’t want to have anything to do with them, and it’s also why I would like to warn fellow freelancers about sending them images. Read the rest of this entry »

The last few weeks I’ve been working on another series of educational illustrations for a major Norwegian publisher. They are going to be used for text books for foreigners who learn Norwegian. The publisher’s immediate thought was obviously to make the content acceptable for people from all cultures and religions, which means that the illustrations can not contain any bare shoulders or overly exposed body parts. The initial thought is to be nice, and that’s fine. But read on.

I also drew a plate of traditional Christmas food, including a chunk of pork roast, but the client later deleted this one from the list and replaced it with something else. Whether this was part of the “don’t offend them” thinking is impossible to say.

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I’m happy to announce that the book I’ve been working on since earlier this year has been published. It’s a complete handbook for Norwegian freelancers that covers everything you need to know in order to set up a company, manouver the bureaucracy, get the jobs, get paid correctly, get the contracts and accounting worked out right, and protect your copyright. Among lots of other things.

Yay, I finally got to photoshop one of those products with shiny web 2.0 reflections on the table

While working on it I told people it would probably end up at around 300 pages (A5 size). As I was new to both writing and designing books, it was pure guesswork. But when the whole text document of 508 050 characters and 199 A4 pages was laid out, it totaled exactly 300 book pages, plus eight color pages that show a few examples of what freelancers in Norway actually do for a living.

The project and the first few chapters had initially been accepted by three publishers. However, I finally decided to publish it myself, as I started believing I could sell just as many books as the major publishers just by knowing my niche market. None of the publishers wanted to get involved in the website Frilansinfo.no as a part of the package. This is the website that was the outspring of the whole book idea and it is a great marketing channel. If they didn’t want to market the book directly to the biggest group of buyers, I didn’t see why I should accept 13% royalty and sit back and see them promote the book to the book stores only, where it would most likely end up in a dark corner anyway. So I decided to go for the full freelance solution: DIY. I immediately granted myself a 90% royalty. Well, except that the extra hours and economical investments probably got my share down to say 17,5%… But hey, that will definitely change on a longer term (if there are enough freelancers around to break even, that is).

The extra work of setting up my own publishing company, getting a distribution deal, getting an ISBN number, putting up a website, designing the cover (and the 300 pages…), etc., came on top of the already huge job of pulling together the manuscript. I could finally send the pdf document to the printer after an intense final work period of two months where I basically worked 7 days a week, 17 hours a day (and a lot of nights, too!). Thanks to some good helpers I survived!

You’re more than welcome to check it out at www.frilansboka.no, where you can also buy it if you wish. About 100 copies have been sold the first week, so let’s hope it continues like that and reaches a level where the effort pays off.

Somehow Fri Flyt editor Erlend Sande managed to link skiing and the U.S. presidential elections in his last editorial, and asked me to portray senator Barack Obama on the slope. Backwards. I obeyed.

PS. Fri Flyt celebrate their 10th anniversary next month. Congratulations! Issue number 60 will be out shortly. I have contributed with two illustrations as usual.

I’m not yet a father, but lucky enough to be able to brag about being an uncle. The other day when Linea (4), the oldest of my brother’s two girls, visited us with her mom, she brought me a drawing for the first time. That’s what I call a sharp looking car!

Chickelacke and chic - what’s the connection?

I found this old girl’s magazine in Lyon, France last time I was there, at the stand of one of the traditional used books sellers along the riverside.

Nothing weird at all until I noticed that the girl on the cover illustration had blue eyes, a traditional “russ” outfit with hat and a bamboo stick with a flag colored ribbon (you’re a russ when you celebrate the senior year at high school). And then I saw the royal castle in Oslo in the background. Funky.

Why would a Norwegian drawing make it to the cover of a French magazine from the fifties? Or is this a French illustration about girls at Karl Johan, the high street of Oslo? Read the rest of this entry »

After a tropical summer vacation here in Norway, a tsunami of freelance gigs has forced me back to my office, which is a mobile one at the moment - temporarily installed on a dining table with a panoramic view of the Bjørnefjord.

I’m about to draw some 100 small illustrations for a schoolbook by Cappelen, another 25 for a new book about avalanches (another one!), all of it before September 1st. Let’s see how that goes! The last few weeks I did a cover for BTmagasinet as well as a few other magazine illustrations for various clients, and I just finished a two page illustration for the new edition of UTE, an outdoors magazine that was recently acquired by Fri Flyt. The image above is a cropped version of that one. The story is about a Norwegian climber who falls unconscious on his way up the Aconcagua peak in Argentina.

Well, as you understand there are a whole lot of other things to do than to spend time blogging. See you later!

I’m going to move in a month’s time and have to start thinking about packing down and wrapping up my office. I’ll not be able to take on any gigs until I’m back in business in July. Stay tuned!

The Highcamp poster is such a success (or so they say on the website at least - they even call it a collector’s item) that the organizers decided to print it in A3 format and put it on sale at the Eksponert.no web shop.

The last of this year’s camp events took place at Turtagrø this past weekend, reportedly with excellent sunny weather.

While drawing a viking king and his men for an educational book earlier this year, I unconsciously seem to have put myself in the role of one of the king’s bodyguards.

I just realised this, although I did the illustration a few months ago. My photos are flipped over so I look in the same direction as the viking version.

Some of the Burma t-shirts I made have traveled far since they went on sale from my web shop (still a few left!). The picture above is taken somewhere in the lush woods of Panama, and shows artist Luitgardo Broce and Panama’s former Minister of Justice, architect Mariela Sagel sporting their brand new Aung San Suu Kyi tees. Thanks for the photo, Luitgardo!

The one below is from the opposide side of the planet, from Hong Kong. Say hello to Bianca Tse, independent art director with some of the bigshot agencies over there. Nice fit!

Well, I have already drawn Judas, Michael Moore and even an invisible version of Muhammad, so it was about time I got to draw Jesus. It happened thanks to my old aquaintance Kristin Walstad, a graphic designer gone communications consultant, and now also an editor and art director for The Norwegian School of Theology’s bi-monthly magazine.

Finally back again after a long period of web geekiness and tech issues way above my competences. Will get back to that in a future post. Meanwhile, I wanted to show you two posters I’ve been lucky enough to work on lately. Pretty rewarding to work on these big formats for a change. The first one, in an attempted lithographic retro style, is for the ski event High Camp 2008. They wanted something reminiscent to the style of antique Swiss ski resort posters from back in the days but contemporary enough to attract the usual crowd of hip young skiers and snowboarders. Unusual approach and fun to work with.

The super glossy second one is for a charity event featuring music and sports stars. It was commisionned by the agency Aptum. Click the images to get the full view.

The German “Ö” did very well on the rock scene for a few decades, with Motörhead and Mötley Crue as the most prominent examples. These days the Norwegian letter “Ø” (pronounced like the vowel in “girl” = gørl) has quite some success in French advertising.

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