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.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is our idea of having fun at work. But we’re only hopeless rednecks. According to Markus Landrø‘ s girlfriend. But that was before we added the bikini.

Markus is an avalanche expert and author of Skredfare. In the middle of some complex writings last winter, about the mechanisms behind an avalanche, he must have lost it for a second and started to think about women. Hot women in cold places, apparently. Read the rest of this entry »

Right now a British woman is being prosecuted in Sudan for having allowed her elementary school kids to call a teddy bear “Muhammad”. A name which is apparently common in the area.

You probably remember Lars Vilks, the Swedish artist who this summer received several death threats after having drawn the prophet Muhammad as a “roundabout dog” for a street art project. Here is a drawing I did right after that, commenting on “The new reality of contemporary art after Al-Qaida started doing art criticism”. The guy to the left says: It’s a double portrait of Lars Vilks and Muhammad, drawn with invisible ink. Whereas the guy to the right answers: Funky concept! How much is the bounty?

The Aung San Suu Kyi t-shirts are printed! No, they’re unfortunately not free, like the headline suggests, but they’re not expensive either. Show your support to the Burmese people with this limited edition B&C tee, screen printed by hand on 145 g. cotton. Girls’ and guys’ models available.
For each t-shirt you buy, a donation will be made to support the burmese radio journalists in exile in Norway.

Go to the webshop to order your tees right away! Click on the picture for details.

Make sure to visit the AVAAZ website to sign the petition to the world leaders and donate to the campaigns for Burmese struggle for freedom and democracy.

How can an illustrator accept to draw this kind of image? Shameful. Nationalist questions have always had a central position in Swiss electoral campaigns, but this kind of imagery seems to belong to another time.