FrikaWorld - GAZETTE

Tomte

2010-01-29T17:37:00.002+01:00

I don’t really know what it is but lately I have been having the urge for drawing tomte nissar (brownie, hobs, gnome), maybe it is the snow that is falling outside or that I have been eating Christmas porridge in the mornings.

When I was little I believed in gnomes without a doubt (now maybe not so much…) I grew up in the countryside in Sweden in a wooden house that made a lot of noises, specially when the wind was stirring up outside, and it was kind of nice to believe that there was a bunch of grumpy gnomes walking around instead of some other noisy fairy tale monster.

If you, like I do, like gnomes I would recommend an illustrator called John Bauer, he made great illustrations of gnomes and trolls and their magical world.

Cookies

2009-12-09T21:40:00.010+01:00

Stir sugar, butter and syrup in a saucepan, stirring constantly until the butter is melted. Place all of the dry ingredients in a large bowl, and then add the warm mixture.

Stirring until all the ingredients are well blended. Roll out the dough as thin as possible. Cut out a gingerbread shape, place the cookies on foil-lined cookies sheets and bake until golden brown, about 5-7 min.

Be warned if your patience level is not very high this cookies might not be the best think to do, I m quite a calm person most of the time but this dough did definitely get some screaming at it, the problem is that the dough is sticky, so use a lot of flour when you roll it out. Another thing that can be good to point out is that these cookies are quite addictive, so it is very easy to eat a few to many. Which means that you will spend some time in the toilet.

If you are really into baking cookies I would recommend to have look at this lovely blogs:

http://www.lottieanddoof.com/2009/12/12-days-of-cookies-4-lottie-doof-101-cookbooks/

http://www.nordljus.co.uk/en/menu-for-hope-iii-amai-story

Folke and his Sisyphean week…

2009-10-02T19:58:00.024+02:00

Meet Folke. Surely his moods through the week feel familiar to you all. At least I know they are familiar to me, and that’s funny since being a freelance illustrator my week is not as structured as it used to be when I was a schoolgirl. I mean that often I get to work on the weekend and rest (sigh) some other day, but for some reason, it seems that the “standard” weekly rhythm is embedded at a very basic level in our biological clock, because I tend to feel lighter as Saturday approaches…

So anyway, to all who read this I wish a very nice weekend, and Monday, and Tuesday, and Wednesday, well you get drift…

Put the little brown on and what can go wrong...

2009-06-17T18:48:00.004+02:00

Frikaworld is not yet making designer clothing but there is a new t-shirt design in my shop if you want to have a look (in section "KillerSlug" ). I put some more summer tops in there too for the sunnier days that I hope we'll all enjoy soon...

Can't be seen in these rags

2009-03-24T14:42:00.008+01:00

“Don’t make the mistake of treating your dogs like humans, or they’ll treat you like dogs” Martha Scott “Dogs”

I do wonder why some people have the need of dressing their dogs up, here in Madrid there is plenty of examples on this behaviour and I have to admit sometimes it looks cute but if you start thinking about how the dog must feel…

Nina Simone

2009-02-17T22:29:00.003+01:00

When the rain is hitting the window and there is no inspiration in sight there are few ways of reeling it back and I found out that one of them is to put on the deep voice of Nina Simone and listening to her sing “…my baby don’t care for clothes, my baby just cares for me…”

I really like the CD format (I guess all the designers out there that once worked on the LP format will sneer over this comment) but I think the limit of space is interesting and if you think about it the CD cover is fast becoming an old format as well.

New T-shirts designs in the shop!

2009-02-02T19:49:00.010+01:00

“ I wish people were more like animals, Animals don’t try to change you or make you fit in. They just enjoy the pleasure of your company. Animals aren’t conditional about friendship. Animals like you just the way you are” (“The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes” by Bill Watterson p.86)

"When it comes to long lasting wear and real action
get the Animal comfort collection.
So when life feels hard and there is no pet in sight
this is the design that will make you smile.
Come drape yourself in some comfort and go wild!"

This is one of my new shop sections Animal Comfort. In this section you will find more t-shirt designs to do with animals in different situations.

If you are more into "fashion" I would suggest that you visit the section below called Fashion Aid. So just click on the links or go to the shop and you will see some new t-shirt designs that I hope you'll be enticed by.

“Just wear a smile and a Fashion Aid design
Its so beautiful so don’t shy away,
Instead seek cover in a Fashion aid t-shirt
Who wouldn’t smile upon nature at its best?
Even more glamorous when it's wet”

Let me introduce the FrikaWorld "Haute-couture" collection: Fashion Aid.

In this section your fashion dreams truly come true.
With a lush and tempting design that you cannot resist.
So come on!
Get the jump on what is fun to wear.
Wear Fashion Aid and you will help saving yourself today!

Warning! "Adult Reading"

2008-12-31T15:01:00.003+01:00

When I was little I believed in Santa Claus. I don't really remember exactly when the illusion disappeared and reality dawned on me, but I can say I don't think I was very old.

By this statement I'm not pretending that I was an exceptionally clever child, it is just that when your dad/uncle/grandpa disappears in order to take care of odd errands precisely five minutes before Santa comes in... Especially when such Santa has a meager look about him. The (fake) beard is there and the clothes are nearly right, but as soon as he looks you in the eye and ask if you have been a god girl you just know…

I guess the distraction of presents can make you blind for a few years but then the question will come out and I guess that most families go with the same story: "Santa is so busy, too many children to visit, and dad kind of knows Santa so he helps out some times…"

I find it strange that we (Sweden as a nation) couldn't keep up a little bit more mystique about this guy. Why not a sneakier approach to keep the mystery alive for just a little bit longer...

Merry Christmas! anyway, I know it's a little late but I really do hope you all had a good one and will have a Happy New Year.

Lots of hugs! Ho ho ho!

Ladies and Gentlemen, here is, finally, Frikaworld shop

2008-12-03T23:23:00.006+01:00

So finally after a lot of talk about creating the Frikaworld shop I am now happy to say that it is up and running. It is starting out very small, with only one design so far but soon it will grow.

The shop is powered by Cafepress, which means that they take care of the orders, the payment and shipping. So I can just concentrate on coming up with interesting ideas (which I am sure will be fun).

Sarcastic food anyone?

2008-11-17T18:48:00.006+01:00

The other day I read that there is archaeological evidence that Homo erectus had barbecues at their campsites already 420.000 years ago. I do wonder when exactly it was that one of them went:

–Ugh, you half naked man why don’t you put this delicious green plant that I found into your roast chicken...

I guess that quite a bit of time passed before that occurred...

Today there are all sorts of labels on food ”Fast food”, “Slow food”, “Homemade food” and “Ecologic food” etc… “Tell me what you eat and I can tell you how you are”.

In this article they wrote that food reflects on people’s values. The question is, where do we get our values? From the commercials on TV convincing us that a meatball family recipe hasn’t changed for 80 years, or from the scientists that tells us every week about something new that will give us cancer, or do we get them from various religious texts?

“There are hot dog fillings which have more in common with meat than mere pinkness, whose lucky consumers don’t apply mustard because that would spoil the taste. Its just that people can be trained to prefer the other sort, and seek it out.” Terry Pratchett ‘The last continent” (p295)

So sarcastic food anyone?

Social Interactions

2008-10-23T22:29:00.002+02:00

When you live in a foreign country you start to notice not only the standard social behaviour in such country, but it also becomes clearer how the standard social behaviour is in your own country.

Here in Spain they have an expression, “Hacerse el sueco” (which roughly translates as “doing the Swedish”) for when someone pretends no to have understood or realized about something (like when you greet someone in the street just to see them blatantly look away). I have to admit that there is definitely some truth to this statement (hell! I do it myself sometimes to avoid being embarrassed).

There is no expression in Sweden about “Doing the Spanish”, but if there was it would probably mean putting your nose into anybody else’s business, specially when people haven’t asked for it, like when you are standing in the queue for the bus or the supermarket cashier.

Both these attitudes have good and bad points and it is usually when you start doing too much of one that it becomes a problem. I personally think it’s best to be “lagom” which is a Swedish word for the middle way, not too much, not too little. A little bit of both ends makes things perfect, but then again they say in Spain that perfect is enemy of good…

A bit of innocent role-playing

2008-10-05T20:28:00.003+02:00

A few weeks ago my boyfriend bought a book called “The elfish gene” by Mark Barrowcliffe. The book is about a boy that loves playing role-playing games, since I had no experience or knowledge of the world of fantasy role-playing games my boyfriend thought it was a good idea for me to read it and it was.

It did explain a lot of things and it made me realize that I had missed out on something; a world full of organized wizards, warriors and evil priest’s, where you can be God for a day or dream up your perfect maid…

So I warmly recommend this book for any one who would like to get an insight into what their role-playing friends (or partners) where into in their teenage years.

Trial slugs

2008-09-29T13:55:00.003+02:00

Now, in the next couple of weeks I'll be opening shop at cafepress, they take care of the printing, order-handling and shipping, providing a hassle-free experience of e-commerce to people without the experience or the technical skills required otherwise (like me).

The only thing that remains in order to take the plunge is to check the quality of their products, and in order to find that out I've prepared these two images, that I'll send to cafepress in the next couple of days to get a couple of sample products.

Like cat and mouse

2008-09-21T19:51:00.004+02:00

"Cat and Mouse" was a game we used to play when I was a child. The rules were pretty similar to "Hide and seek", you had someone playing the predatorial cat, trying to catch the slippery mice and the mice had a safe space where the cat wasn't allowed.

The twist to the game was that you as a mouse had to work toghether with the rest of mice in order to get everybody safely to the "nest". This didn't allways work out the right way, sometimes a mouse had to be sacrificed for the communal good.

There was some children who would allways want to play the cat, and some others who wouldn't play anything other than mice. I, for one, allways wanted to add the new concept of "the bird", but sadly it never caught on...

Irati hybrids

2008-09-14T17:45:00.005+02:00

Last weekend we were away from Madrid, for a little escapade to the north of Navarra. There is a beautiful beech forest there (the second largest one in Europe).

Irati (that's the name of the forest) reminded me of the "little people" that I imagined when I was little, walking in the forest back home in Falkenberg.

I think it's quite a common fantasy to think that the forest is filled with strange creatures, there is something about the forest that just gets your imagination going.

My creatures were hybrids between human and insect, and the only reason why I couldn't see them, was that I wasn't patient enough to stare into the woods for long enough...

A view to inspire

2008-08-31T18:55:00.013+02:00

Eventually, every once on a while, I go for a walk in Madrid in search for inspiration. What I'm looking for mostly is textures and colors that I can later use in my collage illustrations.

The one to the left I took for the organic texture of the stone and the strict square box with the happy swirly graffiti signatures.

I really liked the color on this one (to the right) and the stencil with the "evil man in a mask". To me it looks like the drawing next to the masked man could be either the severed head of a princess turned upside down, or a headless woman with funny legs.

In this one (left) the bricks are great, the simple, chunky "vector-like" shapes seem to work well with the "canvas". And the layers of posters add a bit of interesting color.

I love layers, the more the better...
Layers tell a story about time and the local people. I really like how the metal comes forward too, rust is a lovely texture.

Things just happen

2008-08-25T12:49:00.003+02:00

When I was little and walking outside in the rain, I used to entertain myself by picking worms from the pavement and laying them on the grass. Little did I know that they only came out onto the asfalt to escape certain death by drowning...

The invasion of the food critics

2008-08-17T23:18:00.003+02:00

Now in August Madrid is taken over by tourists and I often find myself observing them. It’s funny how much they (I am a tourist too every once on a while mind you) behave like cows, they like to travel in flocks and they are quite curious but easily scared.

In the metro the other day I overheard some loud speaking tourists as they discussed local food, and it went something like this: “the Serrano ham was too salty, the tapas too small, the wine too dry…” and so on. They came to the conclusion that to have a proper, fulfilling meal, they would need to go to one of the branches of a ubiquitous company we’re all very familiar with…

The same day I opened a Swedish newspaper and read a feature about Barcelona where the most recommended restaurant turned out to be “Los Vikingos”…

So you see, cows and we are not so different after all…we all want to venture on to the other side of the fence but when we get there we stick to what we know…

Dog

2008-08-10T23:50:00.004+02:00

This picture belongs to a series of illustrations, it is a project that I am doing about the relationship between our pets and ourselves. It explores aspects like how we humanize our pets, or how we deliberately genetically modify them to suit our own fancy.

Politeness

2008-08-04T01:49:00.003+02:00

There is about 30 million species of insects around the world so there's bound to be some polite ones out there. In Sweden we have some that are not very polite, not towards humans at least. It is quite a common insect, many countries have it, but it is the sheer amount of them that makes it scary in here.

I am talking about "the vampire of the north" the blood thirsty beast that just waits in long grass for a naked foot to come by so it can attach itself and spear its head into your body. It belongs in the bloodsucking family of "Ixodoidea" commonly know as "Ticks" and it can give you Lyme disease if you're unlucky, so just beware when you feel the temptation to run into the flower fields without socks or pat a soft kitten in the summer...

Birdie

2008-07-27T18:05:00.002+02:00

Why is it that all birds seem to always aim at the same target when dumping "ballast"?

I think I might make a T-shirt out of this one...

Bedmonsters

2008-07-20T22:56:00.006+02:00

I'm not talking about the ones who hide under your bed (or in your closet) but rather about the ones that are already lurking among your sheets.
When you're in bed and you feel an itch in your leg and you scratch and maybe even look, and there is nothing there, that is when you know you got the "bedmonsters".
You might not even notice them in your usual bed, but as soon as you go camping and you slip into your sleeping bag, you'll know what I'm talking about. The "bedmonsters" in such forgotten places are likely to be hungry since they haven't been fed for months (sometimes even years), so they will certainly feast on you mercilessly...

Holiday

2008-07-14T11:31:00.001+02:00

It's been a while since I last wrote, but this is not me giving up, it's rather due to a long awaited Holiday.

I had been looking forward to visiting a friend from Uni times, who now lives in Helsinki and I hadn't seen for too long. She had a baby boy last April and so that made it easy to decide where to go for our holidays this summer. It was more than coincidental that we also wanted to visit the Northcape in Norway during midsummer, and just about convenient to get away from Madrid when temperatures where reaching well beyond 35 degrees celsius in order to visit cool Finland.

After spending a day in Helsinki, we picked up our rented car and set out due north on the 19th of June. I won't pretend there wasn't any setbacks during the ensuing road trip, but the point is that we made it to the northenmost point in the European continent just about two ours before the summer solstice, which allowed us to bask in the cold midnight sun at that precise moment.

The whole road trip was probably best summed up as a transition from the lush green Finnish primeval forest to the barren coastal tundra of northern Norway, with a few wooden summer cottages and gazillions of kamikaze mosquitos thrown in for good measure...

Of course we also saw lot's of reindeer (of which I didn't expect to see so many), flaunting themselves on the road as if it were a giant catwalk, expecting to be photographed before they would let any vehicles through. Since we saw so many of them, and so fearless, we thought we would surely come upon some elk too, but appart from the stuffed elk head we saw at an Oulu café, the closest we got to seeing one turned out to be a brown horse, rider and all for the disappointment of my Spanish boyfriend.

Back in Helsinki we enjoyed some refreshing walks around town (as well as out of town) with our friends and their new "family member", and too soon it was time to get back to busy, hot, bustling Madrid.

Mosca

2008-06-15T23:03:00.001+02:00

I remember once overhearing a conversation about illustrators while on the train. At the time I didn’t know what it was exactly or how you became one, but it sounded very interesting. Outside the “Halländska kullarna” were passing by…
Little did I know that just a few month later I would be sitting in a completely different train, in a different country, trying to understand the gibberish coming out of the loudspeakers on my way to Southampton to study illustration (I ended up in Wales more than 4 hours away from Southampton and was reported missing to the police for a few hours, but that is a completely different story…)
Looking back, life in university is a bit like a bubble, you might wonder sometimes how you ended up in there but in the end it is a protected world, quite removed from reality. It is when the bubble bursts that the real “ooops!” begins….

Dinosaur Beth

2008-06-08T22:12:00.003+02:00

This week has been a very busy week and I thought I would manage to finish my blog on time but since I spend the weekend in Bilbao I couldn’t put the finishing touches to the picture that I was going to post, so you will see it next Sunday instead. For this Sunday I give you Beth instead, the outcome of my first Photoshop tutorial which convinced me to go digital. I came upon such tutorial in Anton Peck’s website.