My beautiful sister

My sister, Isabel said that she wasn't able to celebrate her upcoming birthday, because she's working all weekend in the musical Guys and Dolls.

–The only way of doing it would be if someone came to my apartment with a cake, like early in the morning!, she said and laughed. Like that's ever gonna happen...

I saw it as an invitation, so this morning me and our little sister, Celeste, ended up outside her home with a cake, a candle and ballons. I made this piece for her. Her facebook-picture in a new costume.

Success!

Timebending dreams

So I've caught the flu.

A most odd experience. Just lying in the sofa all the day, with a terrible ache allover. Tired of talking in the phone, eating, creating or even thinking...

But the strangest thing about it is how your dreams behave. The whole night is a walking in and out of doors and jars, jumping with heavy weights on your back and trying to tuck a rabbit into a pair of jeans.

Here's a little movie concerning dreams that I did a week ago. My first animation in Flash. So Happy! It took some time to loaded it up. Wanted to have the right sound. I must have made the movie the hardest way possible, with the brush... next time I will try out other tools so that it doesn't take three hours to create 13,8 seconds.

Numbers + letters = poem

Made a poem constructed by numbers. Hard to understand (especially if you don't speak swedish) - but kind of hot...

Robosketch

Recently made some robot sketches in Painter for a friend. Partly inspired by another friends visit to a robot-fair in Tokyo, partly inspired by Wall-e, the Tin Man etc. Here's one of my sketches.
An interesting project is the source of this sudden robocreativity. I'm not telling you more.

Odosketch - only frustrating

The Odosketch site doesn't work today...grrr. But we can still make our sketches by hand - that's kind of a "getting back to our roots" thing.

Odosketch - fun and frustrating

Today I tried Odosketch, a sketching site. I didn't try to undo anything in this sketch and I don't think you can anyway - I didn't find that button...

This is a frustrated sketch, because on Odosketch there's few bright colours - and I hate to sketch, paint or what ever without bright colours and sharp lines.

TV before puberty

Before the rise of my sexual life, before the love stories and the heartaches of real life, I followed the TV-show "The Bold & The Beautiful". Every day + the Sunday Special with 5 reruns in a row. I loved the luxury, the haircuts and the quarrels in the Forrester family. Good friends in a foreign paradise!
The only thing in my life that could give me a scent of the B&B-life was to enter my big sisters bedroom and look at her beautiful things, sniff on her perfume-examples from Yves Rocher and on the way out borrow a Harlequin-book from her shelfs.

Illustration Friday - Welcome

It's difficult to say if we have a visitor coming or going here. But this is my way of saying welcome to my trial of Painter 11. Some things are just too much freedom...

Stop being a perfectionist - Try Alchemy!

I found an interesting app-project today -Alchemy - A sketching device with few, but fun, tools. No ability to undo is present in the app so it definitely makes your drawings more haphazard, faster and with a new look. And it's free of charge...

Making a cartoon in Photoshop and InDesign

So I'm going to try out something new with my students. Tomorrow they will see fellow students making two scenic pieces on the nordic myths. Then they will photograph it and later interpret the scenic piece into the context of a cartoon.
Well... here's my example for the students. Nothing concerning nordic myths but a story in swedish about understanding what you are... or not

A dreaming process

The pictures invaded me in the morning. They are nine, we were five. Now it's up to me to wake them up.

Hen, the new word for people

In the swedish language, as in most languages, we have different ways of titulating a person. We have JAG (I), DU (you), HON (she) and finally HAN (he).

Sometimes we find ourselves in a puzzling situation when talking about a someone with a undefined gender. We can't call a human being DEN (it), can we? We can say PERSONEN (the person), HON ELLER HAN (she or he) but as soon as we know the sex we have the obligation to use the word that clarifies exactly what kind of a human being we are talking about.

The use of HAN and HON also defines the expected roles in our society. How many times have you talked about a unknown doctor as HAN, a unknown kindergarten supervisor as HON and a unknown partner as a ...?

Now, as the feminists, parents and pre-school teachers of Sweden has worked hard for the implementation of the word SNIPPA (a nice and rather neutral word for the vagina) in the swedish dictionary, maybe it's time to start fighting for the use of the word HEN instead of HON or HAN.
If we give ourselves a chance to talk about people without labeling right ahead we might also learn to judge people out of their abilities and personalities instead of their gender.

That culture thing...

As we were going to meet her brother, Alfons, after school my daughter suddenly pointed and said:
–Mum, who made that... culture thing? (swedish: kultursaken)
–Well, I don't know, I responded. Do you mean that it's an art piece? (swedish: konstverk)
–Yeah, that's the word, art piece!
Well, we couldn't tell who the artist was, there wasn't a sign or such to read it from. But from now on it's our piece of art. We can call it "No title"...

Mamma Ågren

Suppose you do get a bad conscious now and then, suppose you try to compensate for it. Then suppose that others know that the bad conscious is present in your mind and want to see you compensate it a little bit more.

Even when standing in the hallway with my jacket and shoes on my daughter clinged to my legs crying out: –Mum, please don't go!

But since I'm a coldhearted and egoistic being - I left. All of the evening I nursured the bad conscious as if it was the best asset for me as a mum at the moment. But being at the cinema with a friend could mean so much more than that. At the return to the mothership I made two pictures for my kids to colorize. My way of giving peace to myself before going to bed.























In the morning I heard them in the livingroom talking about which colours to use. After a while they wispered and then they jumped into the bedroom with the coloured pictures. What a beautiful sight! And the colours were great, just as I had imagined as I drew the pictures in the dusk.

But then it came: –Mum, read the text! And in the cutest way they wanted me to, for once, let them watch TV in the morning. "A ticket for Bolibompa in the morning. For 2 persons. We demand!"

Illustration Friday: Celebrate

An old piece but still going strong.

Bokutmaningen

Jag vet inte vad som hände men helt plötsligt sa jag det:

–Jag slår vad om att jag hinner läsa ut min Flash-bibel innan du hinner läsa ut första boken i Spiderwick!

Alfons som vill att vi ska kunna göra spel och filmer var med på tåget. Allt för att stötta mamma... Han har dessutom sett och beundrat omfånget på den bok jag ska läsa, så han bedömer antagligen sina chanser som stora...

Jag tycker ändå att han ser lite plågad ut på bilden och mitt krampaktiga leende säger väl allt...

Vinnaren ska bjuda den andre på Lejonet och Björnen.
–Och den gången får man ta tre kulor glass! sa Alfons.