Merry Christmas!

A late late Merry Christmas for you guys!

I want to correct something from the last post - The show I was going to see in London wasn't "Live at the Apollo", but a pure Jimmy Carr tour show that was AT the place called Apollo and where the very TV show is recorded.

With that out of the way, I want to tell you that the London trip was great, except that barely two centimetres of snow apparently makes the whole transport system in Great Britain collapse. Which made my plane delayed by 12 hours. Fun!

Anyway, one evening, while my two mates were out drinking, I sat on the hotel room and sketched, and this ugly, almost grotesque self portrait, came up.

Jimmy Carr in London

Me and my mate are going to London to be in the audience of the show "Live at the Apollo". If you're not familiar with it; it's a stand up show with three/four different comedians each time to perform. Brilliant show!
And this weekend, my favourite comedian happens to be there. Jimmy Carr. What a genius.
Here's the first part of a two part clip of Jimmy Carr the last time he appeared on "Live at the Apollo"

Graphic Design

Assignment - Make five different designs using 10 different photographs and/or textures. Here's my five designs:

Dirk Kuyt - using a photograph from the internet and a picture taken of my Liverpool jersey (which is the C and the A of 'Carlsberg' to the far right). The design really reminds me of Coca-Cola, probably because the red colour to the C and A in 'Carlsberg' is very similar to the label on the Cola bottles.


Liam Gallagher, Oasis - Using an old drawing I made of Gallagher some years ago, added some texture (a red brick wall) and the word 'Victory' split up. The combination of the word and Liam Gallagher/Oasis shouldn't add up, it was a coincidence.

Markus (MarQs) - Using a photo of Markus, adding a little filter and some letters.

Self portrait - Using a small part of my self portrait in coal with the cover of The Stone Roses' self titled debut album and a texture I had from before of.

Martin Skrtel - Using an old drawing, adding up a texture of a wheel track in the snow and mixing it up with some effects and letters.

Off topic: Futurama

Hi there!

I've got just about nothing new to post (or actually, I do, as we're doing some graphic design at school nowadays, but I'll post a little later)... anyway, we'll leave the brackets there - I just watched the Futurama Holiday special episode, in which I discovered that almost every of the main characters in that TV show is left handed!

If you already didn't know, I'm left handed and proud of it. And according to some internet sites, Matt Groening is left handed too.
In addition, I've noticed Bart, Marge and Moe from The Simpsons being left handed as well. This is probably useless facts for you, but for me... cool!

More annoying things

Woah... There you go! When I think it's been just a few days since last update, it has actually been twelve days. Bravo, Espen!

Anyway, here's an update on the school project where I chose annoyance as a theme. The idea of a book or calendar was apparently compromised as my teacher guided me to focus on the quality of each drawing instead of the quantity.
So here you go - two of the three drawings I finished - the one at the top being the 'waiting for the bus'-scenario and the bottom one where someone blows tobacco smoke in your face.

A little peek (annoying things)

Some sketches to give you an idea of what I'm doing for a project at school nowadays - I'm going to draw 52 annoying things (one for each week of a year, to make a calendar of it), like stepping into a puddle or spilling liquid all over yourself.

Cubistic exercise + Self portrait

Lack of new material to show. Again.

This is what I've been up to lately.


This must be some of the best things I've ever accomplished in drawing, to be honest. I was not motivated at all because I'm bored of real life portraits and charcoal, even though I haven't used charcoal for ages. But this eventually blew my mind.
For once, one of my attempts on a real life self portrait actually looks like me!

The End (a tribute to Markus)

Just before I left Norway for Canada for two weeks, I felt down and didn't actually want to leave at all.

When I sketched this, it looked a lot like one of the drawings that my buddy, Markus, makes. So I decided to colour it the Markus way as well, in which I barely succeeded.
The yellow/green combination is vintage Markus!
(And no, Markus is not a friend that has died, because of the title 'The End' - he's alive :))

Paintings

This is the paintings that have kept me busy the past three weeks.

Based on a screenshot from Dumb & Dumber, right before they have to pull over. This was going to be painted in warm colours. For the first time in my life, I also painted after a picture which was upside-down. A tricky, new experience, you might say.

Here's the cold version of the same screenshot, though unfinished.

Moving on... still in movies. This is based on a screenshot from the first Naked Gun movie, which happens to be my favourite scene of all time. I'm not satisfied with how Leslie Nielsen turned out, but the guy on the left I am satisfied with. Taking a closer look, I see that this is not the finished version, there's still a tie missing on Leslie Nielsen.

One word for this assignment: Identity. After much hesitation as usual, this suddenly pop into my head and it turned into a surreal self portrait.
We even had to make the canvas ourselves before painting, which was pretty cool.

So, there you go. I'm leaving Norway for Canada in a small amount of hours, so I doubt I will be posting for the next two weeks, but I will when I've made something I think is worth showing off.
Cheers

Darren Fletcher

I just felt like getting his face out of my head. Just a quick sketch, I should have done a lot different if I wanted it to look like him 100%.

Raptus (comic convention)

As I mentioned in the previous post, I took a small trip to Bergen to visit my very first comic convention. I am not a typical comic guy, collecting everything and reading everything, so just about 10 or 20 percent of the whole convention was familiar to me. But it was nevertheless a fun experience and I got a much needed inspiration.

The lovely Astrid Hansen drew her character for spectators.

Nevin Martell tells us about his book "Looking for Calvin & Hobbs", where he searches for the very shy Bill Watterson.

Mads Eriksen and me shaking hands after a rather nice chat about football, of all things, while he kindly autographed and drew in my book. Nice chap!

The one and only Don Rosa seemed to be quite relaxed as he walked around, having a chat with people who dared to go up to him and speak, like this girl. I guess he was comfortable with the size of this small Norwegian comic convention compared to the ones in his native USA.

Rubbish

My friend has the world's crappiest car filled with... yeah, crap. This is how it looks when me and my buddy opens the door to get a lift.

Sorry for lack of posting lately, but as mentioned, I've been swamped. One of the things that kept me occupied was a little trip to Bergen, attending my very first comic convention, which was fun. Will post picture(s) later.

Left hand

Woah, a whole week has passed already since last post! I'm so swamped nowadays, I don't notice when a week is gone!

As I have nothing new to post, I'm afraid there will be more text than pictures in this one - and I choose to write about a subject I find very interesting - lefthandedness.

I've read just about everything there is about this on the internet. I know, internet isn't always reliable, but one statistic said (huzzah, statistics ftw!) that because left handed people most commonly are creative persons, you're likely to see that 50% or more of students in a creative sort of class at school (drawing, etc.) is left handed.
About 10-12% of the world is left handed, and the ratio of left handers compared to overall students in my art classes through the years have been way above that percentage.

So I tried to find out if that was the case in my new class. Out of 32 students, only me and one other is left handed. The statistics fail big time as that means that 1 out of 16 is left handed in my class, which I find very odd.

Anyway, speaking of lefthandedness:

Update (lino cut)

Since school began, I have been incredibly busy, with school, travelling to and from school by bus, football, homeworks, work in the local newspaper... you name it!

This week saw me reunited with lino cut, a technique I haven't done since first year of art school (2005/2006), and the result was a rather cartoony lino cut of Formula 1 driver Ayrton Senna:

Nothing complicated, as you can see. So I felt to make it up with lino cut this time, where all the students carve themselves in the lino board (?) and then make prints. Here's one of my twelve prints that I've made 'til now.

Clint Eastwood (man with no name)

(sorry for crappy photo)

I've drawn Clint Eastwood's face god knows how many times, and decided to finally paint again, about one and a half years after I last painted at all (and that was watercolours!)

Bear with me, I suck at painting, but with enough patience and will, I would try everything to succeed. So I tried it out. This is by the way the first time I've ever attempted to paint a caricature rather than drawing it!
So, paintingwise - I'm satisfied with my efforts despite the huge lack of skills with the brush
Caricaturewise - Could always be better, but I'm satisfied. All in all.

Klaas Jan Huntelaar

This is the first sketch of Klaas Jan Huntelaar. Didn't quite get his eyes, and I think the whole shape of the face could have been much better. In fact, he looks a bit more like Martin Skrtel when he had hair!

On the second attempt I managed to correct some of the things I spotted from the first one. I'm not sure if it's just me, but I think the lips got too big and his face looks too much of a monkey.

Frustration

The story behind this one is that I've been doing the fanciest acrobatic finishing moves for the goal for the past three times I've played football with my friends, but every time the ball has gone everywhere from in the post to 20 centimetres outside at the most, which obviously has left me with big frustration.

I think I've never actually drawn a single comic strip with no words in it (except the sound of the ball hitting the post).
Not a technically good drawing, nothing fancy nor original, just the frustration needed to be done on paper, that's all.

Synnøve

Due to the lack of time compromised by work and seeing people before the autumn gets here, I'll post an old drawing. This is of my friend Synnøve. Considering the small amount of time spent on this one, I'm pretty happy. Everything went spot on on the first try.

A funny story is that Synnøve and I walked around in town just hanging around, when we met upon another friend of mine who wasn't familiar to Synnøve. I introduced them and we stood there talking for a while, before that friend looked at Synnøve's face carefully and recognised her face from this drawing, which he had seen me posting on Facebook.

I laughed as we stood there, because I thought that was really cool!

Sergio Ramos

A rather unsuccesful attempt on Sergio Ramos. I was trying something new for once (though not too different from the usual). If you wonder what the red spot on the bottom is, I can tell you that I was scratching a mosquito bite until I started bleeding on my fingers without noticing and then touching the paper. Oh well, could have been worse - it could happen to a better drawing than this!

Introduction

Hello there and welcome to my (highly unfinished) blog!

My name is Espen and I love to draw, mainly caricatures. I like to watch blogs of other artists and they're a huge inspiration for me - but their blogs is mainly a tool as they can get great feedback by showing their work, which I intend to do here.

I have set everything as more or less default in this blog for now as I feel I have to make my own design for this blog, and I hope I will be able to do this very soon and get the blog up and running!

In the meantime, if you've spotted this blog - please do check out my userpage on deviantart (here) to get a taste of what to come.

If you decide to follow me and give me feedback or just looking at my drawings for the future, I'm thankful.

Cheers
Espen