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Illustration for a Christmas greeting card I made for Skanska.

Client Forma PG
Publisher Ica Bokförlag
By Nathan Berkus (?)
Main Photographer Per Magnus Persson
Art Direction Staffan Millqvist

Tags: Art Direction, Book

The Onion wrote an article in 2004 about gillettes' then top of the line three blade Mach 3, and the absurdity of possibly going to five. Now, just shy of three years later, the world appears to be ready. Gillette Fusion is here with the mind-boggling five blade razor... Five. Is it feasible to go even higher in the future, or will they introduce a retro model in another three years? Time will tell, I can't make any predictions, but I'm absolutely impressed by Gillettes determination in flogging new models to all men. They haven't even got any serious competition, which means their only threat is the previous model.

I bow to greatness.

Upcoming illustration.

I went to Paris to attend my aunts birthday. I spent a few great autumn days there with my family and girlfriend. We had dinner at Gare d'Lyon wich sports a fabulous "belle epoque" restaurant, "Le train bleu", with a breathtaking ballroom like dining room. If you're around, go there.

A crop of an illustration for Forma, Hus&Hem. Above: Me (bad hairdo) and my cousin at "Le train bleu".



We stayed at "Belle vue" on rue de Turbigo, also in belle epoque style. The hotel is a bit rough, but mostly in a good way. That's where I found the wallpaper for the illustration. I'm collecting things like that.

Upcoming illustrations for Hus&Hem. This time it's supposed to illustrate fireplaces. A warm, cosy, fuzzy feeling. Hope they don't mind I'm showing a preview ...

I haven't done many illustrations lately, as I've been working pretty much at Family Living and Mama ... It's nice for a change. Somehow, when you don't work regularly with something, it usually takes a while longer to complete. I worked all day on these. I photographed a dress for the wallpaper, so that's a stolen design. It's probably stolen in the first place from a wallpaper design, so I don't feel bad about that. It's recycling.

More like telephone jots. I have no idea when I made them, or why. I think I made them when I got my Wacom tablet and Painter. Probably they're made on a Powermac 8600. Old stuff. I haven't had time, or the "inspiration", to do much of these lately, so it's fun to find these old things. Some are pretty good, others are not ...

I found these old drawings just now. I barely remember doing them. They're called blomma A, B and C. I think I made them after a trip to Beijing, some six years ago. They fit to this page in an almost scary way...

I was tipped off about this page, where my illustration is shown. Erasmo Spicker also keeps a "best of" of blog posts by artist Nick Currie, previously mentioned here.

Larger version of the
illustration can be found here.

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I read about a swedish company that had developed a paper with a liquid display. Among the uses would be changing wallpapers. Sometimes I wish you could enter a suspend sleep mode, and wake up when all these things actually exist. On the other hand, if I had gone to sleep in the 50's and assumed we would be flying saucers by now, I wouldn't have been impressed.

The first product using something touted as based on e-paper was the Sony Librie, but it seems it didn't really take off. Not outside Japan anyway.

A test with a book of old illustrations...

It seems it doesn't always work as it should, keep that in mind. In fact, it sometimes crashes my Safari.

Illustration of a little girl in wellingtons, yet unpublished. It's for a pretty meaty article about damp houses, and what to do about them. Put rubber boots on it and be happy, I say...


(Due to issues with transparency, this post looks dull in Internet Explorer... try Firefox if you're viewing on Windows)

Illustrating interior lighting. Maybe I should start designing wallpapers or lamps... or green turtlenecks.

edit:
A friends brother is a designer. Some would probably say nutty inventor, but he makes all kinds of funny and beautiful things. Lamps, chairs and jet engines. You can see him here

Depicting Muhammed is obviously forbidden by islamic law, but if you're not a muslim should you obey that law anyway?
No, all you could expect is some consideration for other people. Drawing Muhammed with a bomb in place of a turban couldn't be seen as anything other than a statement that religion drives people to killing, and ironically some voices has been raised that al-Qaida should bomb Denmark; thus making that statement true (for those particular "voices").

Sadly this "incident" has made cases stronger in both camps, the anti-islamic forces that do exist in Denmark got fuel on their fire. Dansk Folkeparti, a right wing populist party, have been riding this thing like a surfboard, and the burning of Danish flags in places all over the world speaks for itself.

Can one blame the artists behind these drawings? Well, I don't know what kind of picture I would have made, but the ones I've seen from the article are unnecessarily negative. I made an illustration for Amnesty in may 2005 about abortion rights. I used symbols for the west, middle east, christianity and the written law as a backdrop, with three young women in front of it. The consensus is, obviously, that religion is oppressing women in matters concerning their own body. What's important here is that the women shouldn't be victimized, but rather show a unified front. Unify is the keyword, not alienate.

A whole bunch of cute pets for kids, made for an upcoming "one shot" from Forma Publishing (Hus&Hem) about kids and families. One shots are a good way to milk every last penny of the advertisers. Like Pamper and Pedigree in this case, probably. Every publisher are into it now, and it's a good thing for freelancers because they often can't do them all by themselves. Also, the advertisers get more bang for their buck, because the target group is so narrow.

I like the dog, the guinea pig and the bunny a lot.


I made some layouts for this issue too, so if you happen to pick it up you can play a guessing game of which ones I did.

I made an illustration about building an extension to your house, or rather the economics involved in doing so. This is what I first came up with:

While nobody thought there was anything wrong with it, apparently it was too similar to this (which I also made for the same issue):


Well, back to the drawing board, and out came this rather different little piece. It's a cottage extended into a chateau:



This on the other hand nobody liked at all... If the problem is small the fix should be small too, so I remade the first one into this:


End of story. Everybody's happy.

(This post doesn't look it's best in Internet Explorer, because of issues with transparency)

Made for Forma, illustrating alternatives to real fire. How looking at a fire on TV could be seen as an alternative is beyond me, but at least the Eames looks nice. In all honesty, the article is more on the subject of alternative *burning* fires. Gel or gasoline burning in a smoke free way, which isn't a bad idea if you haven't got a real fire place.

Readers where asked to design the couch of their dreams, which would in turn be manufactured for real by Lammhult. Quite nice idea for reader input. I didn't want to lead anyone into any specific ideas, so I made this sort of abstract instead. looks a bit like pre pop-art...


It was for the November issue of Hus&Hem.