Starting your working-eating-sleeping-routine (the equivalent of the Parisian metro-boulot-dodo) is really no big deal if you’re settled in a hotel where they serve breakfasts like these. On your table, not from a buffet. The price (15 Brazilian reais) and the lack of more than one glass/cup/knife suggest it’s for one person, but the amount of food could feed a family.

Although it’s sweet to have breakfast served every day, I’m glad I’m done with hotels for a while. I’m now enjoying the temporary luxury of having my own fridge in São Paulo’s inner city Jardins area. My flat doesn’t come with breakfast, but I noticed the housekeeper (she comes in every day) cleans my dishes. If that’s not perfect for the bachelor trying to feed himself by cooking wholesome meals, I don’t know. Oh and there is a swimming pool on the roof.

The illustration on my screen was a leftover assignment from 2009 that I had to retouch. Right now I’m doing web design only.

Our web app Conta Inkasso has been up and running publicly for about a month now, and we’re very happy with the feedback so far. It’s a debt collection service designed for small and medium sized companies in Norway, that want to get paid in their own name instead of turning to a more expensive (and less effective) debt collection agency.

We expect this app to do very well in 2010, and consider porting it to other languages and legislations. We also have more cooking for the same target group. New members of the Conta family are to be rolled out in the first half of next year.

Until then, I wish readers, clients, freelancers and my business partners a happy holiday season and all the best for the new year.

I really enjoy the challenge of developing our new web services company, so I have decided to take a break from my illustration job until next spring. Maybe longer. The market for illustrations isn’t exactly booming at the moment, and has given me motivation to try something new. The one shown here is one of the last ones I did. I still keep a few steady clients though, who’s assignments fit in between everything else. Mostly on Sundays

I’m currently working by the pool outside our apartment complex in sunny Brazil. This is where the third partner of the new company is located. Jonny is our sales manager and head of quality control. He takes care of employing Norwegians here in Brazil, who work with clients via IP telephony and email.

My job is planning and organizing the development, and I’m also the user interface designer. I work closely with developer Eivind, striving to give our users the smoothest possible experience while using our upcoming services. We are going to have an international, multi-lingual website ready for launch in a little more than a month, and two other services for the Norwegian market ready for beta testing in December and January. Stay tuned for more.

In a few weeks I’ll head out traveling again. This time on an open ended world tour, without a return ticket in my pocket. So I decided I needed a better way of transporting my mobile office. This sturdy camera backpack turned out to be a close to perfect choice. It has enough space for a laptop, a skinny flatbed scanner*, a Wacom tablet, a Nikon 300D, chargers, cables, books, and all the other gadgets I need in order to work (and play). The stuff that used to float around at the sandy bottom of my previous hand luggage can now be stored in the nifty compartments I won’t need for extra camera lenses.

On the picture you can see that I drag around a HTC Diamond Touch Pro mobile phone (not lightweight at all, but it has a good keyboard), card reader, wall outlet adapters (I got more of these, just have to find them…), various sim cards for South America, alarm clock, reading light, waterproof watch for surfing and mud wrestling (or whatever), cheap compact camera (for dangerous backstreets), mp3 player, laptop mouse, wallet, passport, a minimal collection of black and white drawing gear, ear plugs, glasses, LAN cable, document pouch, and apples from the garden (needed some color in the picture - but apples are life savers when you get hungry on the plane, in the middle of the night).

I’m considering leaving the software CDs behind and transfer everything to the mini hard drive (black WD passport front left). In addition to this, I’ll probably bring my guitar too (an acoustic Takamine in a semi hardcase, I hope it will be ok). Needless to say, I’m not going to be ultramobile. But when you make “anywhere” your home for a year or so, you just need a few extra things you would otherwise live without.

I’m starting out in southern Brazil where I’ll concentrate on an exciting new web service I’m designing, together with fellow freelancer Eivind. More about that later this fall. We’ll stay put for as long as a tourist visa will allow us to, and from there: Improvisation. I might head to Asia via Polynesia or via South Africa. Time will tell.

*) CanoScan Lide 25, which replaced a CanoScan Lide 500F that got badly crushed in the overhead compartment on the plane to Nicaragua.

Over the last six months I’ve been bringing my office with me to South and Central America. I’ve been drawing under a palm leaf patio in a private garden in Nicaragua, and worked online from a beach bar where salt and sand would rapidly fill up the keyboard if it wasn’t protected by cling film.

I worked on the balcony of a hotel where I’d occasionally be interrupted by the crazy owner, an obvious crack head who had a huge boa constrictor living with him in his room. He would knock on the door and beg me to lend him money or pay the room in advance so he could “go catch a bus to the dentist’s” or “pay the lawyer”. I stayed there for a month and probably financed quite a lot of drugs, but the place was nice and I got work done, despite the interruptions. Besides that, the local rhum was excellentissimo.

The beauty of being a digital freelancer is the freedom to  work from the beachfront terracce above (7 a.m., Los Cardones, Nicaragua) just as well as from a bed in a friend’s apartment (11.40 a.m., Oslo, Norway), where I’m right now writing this blog post.

Click on the “read more” link to see pictures from a few of the other places I have worked lately.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.