2011

North Korea - October 2010

In October I went one week to North Korea.
Needless to say it was an experience out of the ordinary and a trip I will never forget.
As always I took thousands of photos. Below I've posted 15 of them.
In case you are interested I have a lot more photos in my collection on Flickr with comments and all. There you'll also find photos from my stay in China (Beijing and Dandong) the days before and after my trip to North Korea.
And before you ask: Yes, it is possible to travel to North Korea - unless you're a journalist or from South Korea that is. I went with Koryo Tours which I would highly recommend.
Enjoy.

Merry Christmas 2010

Alvin Pang

The first two books about Alvin Pang are finally out here in Norway!
The Alvin Pang books are written by Endre Lund Eriksen and aimed at preschool kids.
I spent most of the spring illustrating these two books, each book containing 30 illustrated pages plus cover. The cover is 100% Photoshop, but the inside illustrations are done with pencil and painted digitally.
I'm very excited about the result. Designer Lise Mosveen did an excellent job putting it all together.
So after a fancy lunch today with Endre, Lise and the editors from Aschehoug celebrating the books, as well as having my illustrations fill almost one full page of a major Norwegian newspaper called Dagsavisen (and getting one on the front page), I felt it was appropriate to finish this Alvin-day with a blog post.

The first book is called Alvin Pang og en søster for mye and this is the cover:



Here are two single pages and one double page from the book (without text):





Here's the cover for the second book called Alvin Pang og verdens beste bursdag:



And again, two single pages and one double page from the book:





And finally two caricatures I did of Endre and myself for the back covers.
Enjoy. :)

28th World Wide SketchCrawl in Vannes, France

Last night I returned home from a week in France where I, after two busy days in Paris, spent the rest of the time camping with my good friends Guillaume and Claire outside the beautiful town of Vannes in Brittany.
The 28th World Wide SketchCrawl took place this Saturday and we attended from Vannes.
Here are some of my sketches:

Maria 30

Maria, my old colleague from Funcom, turned 30 and she held a great barbeque party this Saturday.
I finally got an excuse to do a caricature of her so I painted her this card.



The birthday girl with her card.

Goodbye Storm Studios

Today was my last day in Storm Studios.
I've only worked there since last autumn, but for several reasons I already felt it was time to move on.
My next stop will be Gimpville. I'll join the talented guys in August after some weeks of freelancing and a couple of weeks off.
It's been a busy time in Storm and since February I've mostly been doing traditional animation for the first time in seven years which has been great fun. I can't really show any of that yet, but after going through my harddrive I found a few things I could share which I haven't shared before from my time in Storm.
First up is a poster I did for the "Kindergarden Day" which took place in March. Not really a common task to get at Storm, but I really enjoyed doing it.



Storm also did a Subaru commercial around new year. All the mountain scenes were done by matte paint projection on geometry and I was involved in most of the shots.
Here's one of the concepts I did as well as a more traditional matte paint showing the plate, the matte paint and a final frame.

27th World Wide SketchCrawl

The 27th World Wide SketchCrawl was arranged yesterday and despite rainy weather we managed to gather four people in Oslo. Not many at all, but we had a good time sketching in a café and in Oslo Reptile Park.
Here are some of my sketches:























Some photos:









(See more photos on Flickr.)