The Journey Here

Gather around this journal, and let me tell ye the tale of how I ended up here.

The Beginning

Born in 1984, I got to grow up with all the awesomeness of both 80’s and 90’s movies, music and video games, the forest and no internet which inspired me to dream of far away worlds, and made me become the nerd that I am today. Drawing had already been a passion since the age of two, when I drew cars and birds up side down. Fast forward a few years and the natural path for a creative person would be art school, so of course I entered the electrician course. After completing my apprenticeship in service electronics I felt like something was missing. This wasn’t what I wanted to do, so I applied to the 3D Design & Animation course at Noroff, in Oslo.

The Creative Rebirth

Three years later i ended up with a Bachelor’s Degree in Digital Character Animation. In my final year I also learned movie language and some camera work, which in 2013 led to my current job: editor, cameraman, and well, being the only film guy at NOAH – for animal rights, an (you guessed it) animal rights organization located i central Oslo.

This has been an incredibly creatively satisfying job, but something still felt missing. My work notebooks were full of tiny, stamp-sized drawings, and I simply could not stop drawing, so I gave freelance illustration a try. This filled a hole in my life, but I felt my work was still lacking.

The Future

My illustrations were very in a very traditional style and it was hard to think outside the box. I started to look at more modern book covers, which have a lot of abstract ideas and artwork. I simply couldn’t crack the code of to do this, until I found out about graphic design. This made me start appreciating all the clever work behind a lot of magazines, logos, book covers, labels etc., and I really wanted to do the same. So back to Noroff I went, and now I’m like a kid again!

I hope I can use all the knowledge from this course to find full-time work as a graphic designer or as an illustrator, and I can’t wait to learn more!

The portrait

Like I mentioned earlier, I do things a bit too traditional, but that’s also something I enjoy and strive to improve. For this portrait I was inspired by the styles of two of my favorite artists. John Singer Sargent and Norman Rockwell.

Sargent was very good at merging shapes, which I did with the hair and sweater. Rockwell is famous for his humorous caricatured Americana illustrations, but I didn’t exaggerate that much with this illustration.

It took around three hours to paint the portrait, with one brush in Photoshop. The complimentary colors in the background are pretty basic, but effective tools to make the image pop.