Pandas always has this serious look on their face. I guess it is the mix of sunglasses, skull-like and goth features in their face. 1 hour sketch for the fun of it. No, I didn’t see the movie Kung Fu Panda. I just wanted to mix together a palette with attitude!
School has started up again. This is my final semester for my bachelors degree of computer science. Chop chop let’s get done with it!
Finalizing this year with my latest painting called Omega. Why not give me a chance to sum up my artsy year of 2008:
Made a series of paintings called ‘Meta Monks’ - a rather cryptic and esoteric collection of ink paintings suggesting recognizable meta-belief patterns. More closely described here [link]
The Meta Monks-series will be exhibited at the ByLarm festival in Oslo early 2009 [link]
Came in contact with a film producer and director who were interested in a short movie screenplay I wrote called ‘Black Milk’. Since then I’ve been working as screenwriter and production designer for my film. The film has been given money for production developement by Filmkraft Rogaland and Vestnorsk Filmsenter. Even though we are in pre-production, this usually indicates strong interest in full financing the project. More and more talented and great people gets involved and I believe this will be a killer milestone of 2009. Read more about Black Milk in my blog [link]
I was featured in Ilex Press’ new book Gothic Art Now with my two paintings Lost Circle (p.18) and Masquerade (p.17). It is funny to have my earlier work published today because these are paintings I did when I was just a teenager 
Anyways, the book was nicely done and I felt well accompanied with artists such as Giger, Joachim Luetke and Erlend Mørk I mentioned this in an earlier post
Started on a potential Hell-series with a couple of concepts lurking around. As many artists tend to portray their inferno like a hot and horned place, I would go rather introvert and personal. We’ll see what it turns out to be. The intro for the series could be concidered my latest painting, Omega [link]
I must admit my studies has taken a lot of my time this year. I am doing my last year on the bachelor degree of computer science and things got kinda busy. Everything went well this year though with grades and interesting projects. Actually one project worth mentioning was designing a prototype of a painter program specially made for people with no arms and legs. It worked
Mentioning studies, I’ve begun attending lifedrawing sessions every week and join café sketch crawling every sunday. So I actually draw more lines now comparing to 2007. In the army they say “Train hard, fight easy”. I say “Practice hard, draw easy”. My personal rule is however “Think hard, draw smart”
Goals for 2009:
Solo exhibition (already mentioned the exhibition at a music festival, but..)
Finish the short movie ‘Black Milk’. Clean up and pitch some of my new film ideas.
Apply for a master’s programme in (probably) human computer interaction to complement my prime field of interest in computer science.
Now I wish you all now a happy new year and good luck with everything!
Playing with colors and the effect they may have.. and butterflies are beautiful 
Done in about 1,5 hours
I was featured in Ilex Press’ new book Gothic Art Now with my two paintings Lost Circle (p.18) and Masquerade (p.17). It is funny to have my earlier work published today because these are paintings I did when I was just a teenager
Anyways, the book was nicely done and I felt well accompanied with artists such as HR Giger, Joachim Luetke and Erlend Mørk.
Color studies for a sunset illustration. I keep doing these small thumbnails just to get more familiar in how light and color behave. I study photos and try to mimic the light effects on clouds, silhouettes etc.
They are done very quickly and I have not really considered composition and detailing
If I were to extend the Batman concepts a little, I would do a sort of Bruce Wayne’s Inferno thing. I think it would turn out like a Batman meets Spawn, meets Max Payne? wtf. Anyways, playing with colors - somewhere between 1 and 2 hours.
Landscapes from imagination, 30-40 minutes.
Light studies of a person wearing christmas lights. I found these to be quite complex as there were multiple light sources in different colors and skin.. skin! As skin is both translucent and reflective, determining the behavior of the light and colors really feels uncontrollable.
So I tried to observe, enhance and simplify. Never mind the anatomy
Sketched down a few leg poses tonight. Hans Bellmer homage?
Click on the image above for wallpaper size
The game LittleBigPlanet is on its way.. I started a while ago as an experiment to take most of my original characters in my paintings and “transform” them into the sack boy characters from the game.
So, here is a not-yet-very-serious thesis: As an “academic” point of view, LittleBigPlanet is not much more than a new level- and character design tool made “consumerable”. The way the game developers have promoted their game using the tools seems both intuitive and effective (and fun?). I saw a video clip from a PS3 conference where the team behind the game had made a world map that worked as a presentation for statistical facts, charts etc. using the very same tools that are available in the game.
I play with the idea of using the tools in the game to create a virtual gallery to promote artwork and/or create levels and characters, whom in this interactive way, delivers the artistic concepts and stories within it - like a game, duh.
Obviously this is what the game is meant for - but art as an expression finds new ways all the time… This may be a more nailed down example where user generated content is made using games as mediums. For another example, check out Machinima who creates video shorts and episodes by recording in-game graphics in well recognized game titles like Halo, Half-life and Gears of War .. Anyways, I think a lot of the games in the future will be more concerned about realizing dreams and ideas for gamers rather than pushing pre-written material on them. Of course it is a great challenge to do this in a way that would be .. creatively inspiring by the fact that people spend money on this kind of entertainment. But this isn’t new. Ever heard of LEGO?
Speaking of LEGO. Lego must be one of the most clever toys designed for younger children. The perfected design of bricks suggests affordances of how and where they fit together. Their cylinders and holes suggests the major construction rule. Except for some specialized parts with cultural contraints (swords, hats, female hair etc), these rules are the only things being set, and the creative possibilities and complexities are almost endless - see Legoland, Lego Star Wars, The Brick Testament and a couple of million stop-motion Lego clips on youTube.
What I come to think of is that Little Big Planet reminds me of Lego for it’s part about creating. But Little Big Planet and other games triggers more brain activity by understanding fun and semi-realistic constraints like the laws of physics. You get the chance as a kid to experiment creating simple mechanics and environments in a world with gravity, material mass and kinetic energy. (Ok, I admit there are physical laws in the real world too, but they seem to be more important in the gameplay of LBP than with regular Lego).
That said, you also got the big thing about sharing your creations. The makers of the game can’t say enough about the opportunity to share the creations with everyone over the Internet. This is an interesting part because the huge potential in creative and technical influence will speed up learning a lot. If you give this game to a 5 year old child you will probably have a mastermind in construction engineering and design at the age of 15. In addition to this, ten years of experience working on projects globally using advanced communication technology!
The pictures included are sort of tests to see what my characters would look like in the LBP environment.. It also puts my characters to a test to see if they are strong enough to be recognizable in new contexts!
The characters in the painting refer to the following artworks (from left):
Also, I am including a work in progress video clip of the above painting. I made the painting digitally in Photoshop using a Wacom drawing tablet.
