Noukah Noukah

One of the books that’s currently in the making, has finally been announced, and it’s being illustrated by yours truly. This is quite of a surreal opportunity for me, and I’m very happy to be a part of this.

For those of you, who are reading my English version of this blog, I can explain really fast :)

There are these well known children’s books and TV shows in Sweden, that many people from my generation read and watched during 90’s. One story about a boy called “Bert”, and the other one called about a boy called “Sune”. However, they don’t have anything to do with each other, story- wise. These two characters been revamped, mostly through new movies a couple of times through out the years, and they’re still very well known, to this day. That was the short recap.

A fun fact, is that one of the authors, Sören, actually created and wrote the stories about Bert and Sune.

He, Martin and Leif are currently writing a new one together, as we speak, and I’ve been asked to illustrate their new book!

I’m so hyped, you guys!

The work is currently quite intense, and I’m dedicating a large amount of my freelancing hours to this book. Still got plenty of work left on it, but I have a good feeling.

In the meantime though, I can actually show you the jacket art.

Here it is again, plain, without the title.

I rarely paint night scenerey, so this was a nice challenge for me. It has to be colourful, yet not too dark, so that we won’t lose all the details when it goes to print. I think that this will work fine, though.

Look! It’s the very first thumbnails for the cover. So tiny and scribbly!

I often start thumbnailing on some random sheet of paper, with any pen or pencil that I can find. Keeping it super simple.

Some early character explorations

I wanted Luna to look a bit tomboyish, guess that’s just my personal taste when it comes to female characters ;) Not sure whether I can reveal too much of the story quite yet, but I can say that it’s a very special girl with magical ears, hehe.

I sketched three versions, and we went with the first one

I actually like the bottom one too though! But it’s probably, because it reminds me of that music video of that song “Sitting down here” by Lene Marlin. Which by the way, was one of my favorite songs during my teenage years :)

Throwing in some steps for you as well, to show the progress :)

1. Greyscale sketch
2. First color pass
3. Adding more details to the colored sketch. Both line art and coloring.
4. Starting to render everything, starting with the largest areas, and hiding all the layers with detailss for now.
5. Adding more and more details and keep tweaking the colors as I work. Flattening all layers, and start with the final polishing on top.
6. Done!

That’s all for now. This is a large part of my freelance life at the moment. I hang out a lot with Luna, trying to explore her characteristics, and the world she live in. Really trying my best to enrich the story around her, I really hope that I can pull it off.

You’ll probably see more of her, later this year :)

Had the opportunity to illustrate this year’s calendar for Kamratposten. I think it’s a super fun gig, maybe I should make my own calendar in the future? Perhaps one with foxes? ;)

Here’s the one for July. There’s nothing better than taking a bath in one of the lakes during the hottest(and oh, so rare) summer days in Sweden. Gosh, I’m really longing for when it’s safe to freely stroll around again. Feels like this summer got cancelled.

However, I learned a lot while working on this calendar. Color harmony, especially. Was struggling a bit during last year, while I subconsciously made my illustrations way too saturated. I thought that I had it all figured out, but nope.

Then, when I worked on this piece, something just clicked. I slowly learned how to control my colors better, without sweating it. Still not entirely sure, whether I know exactly what I’m doing. But perhaps I could cover this in a future post, once I gain better understanding of it. All i know is that it’s way easier now!

Got 5 more illustrations to show, as I made one for each month. Next one will be posted in the beginning of August :)