Play | Cover art for 'Jeg vil vekk' (JKD & the Bastards)

Photo: Lasse Tomren, make-up: Jessica Ådland, model: Anna L. B. Malo.

Last year, I made a cover for JKD & the Bastards' new single 'Jeg vil vekk.' The song revolves around a young girl who, after leaving her homeland for Norway, ends up as a prostitute. To reflect this, they wanted a cracked, porcelain-like face of a girl on the cover. Here is how I created it.

The image was shot in RAW, which allowed me to make the skin look as pale as possible right from the start using Photoshop's Camera RAW plug in.

Original image.

After adjustments in Camera RAW.

Make-up had provided a good foundation by among other things adding fake (higher) eyebrows and lashes set further away from the eyes. This give a wide-eyed, doll-like look.

Close-up of make-up.

I first smoothed out the skin by copying the image and giving it a High Pass filter set to Overlay. A High Pass filter identifies details in an image and, depending on your setting, can either sharpen or unsharpen details. In this case we needed a porcelain-like skin, so the filter was used to smooth out the texture of the skin. To blend this with the underlying image, the layer blending mode was set to Overlay, which darkens dark areas, brightens bright areas, and fades out mid tones. The eyes and teeth were brightened to make them stand out more and give them a more artificial appearance.

High Pass filter.

Keeping only areas that need smoothing out.

High Pass layer set to Overlay. Eyes and teeth brightened with Levels adjustment layer.

Next, the area around the eyebrows needed a little extra smoothing because this is where here actual eyebrows are and were still showing slightly. I gave them an extra round with the High Pass procedure to smooth out the texture, and also painted in more colour to thicken the eyebrows.

Smoother skin over the eyes and darker eyebrows.

 As you can see, the fake eyelashes are set lower than the actual lashes. This makes the eyes bigger, but there is bit of unclear skin in between. I painted in a thin band of skin (with a Bevel and Emboss layer style to add the slight highlight to the lower eyelid) and of black to mimic the area where the eyelid meets the lashes.

Touch-up of eyelid and lashes (left) and original (right).

Part of the desired look was a cracked appearance of the porcelain. I found a few images of rips and cracks in dried paint and an eggshell. These were put in place over the face and worked into the image by masking out the undesired parts of the images and setting the layer blending modes to Multiply, which makes pure white areas disappear and darkens other areas. Perfect for showing only the cracks in these white images. The cracked eggshell needed a bit more work because there is a lot of grey in it and the cracks are so faint. By adding two copies of it, one set to blending mode Linear Burn -- the other to Luminosity, the cracks became visible.

Cracking the porcelain.

Blending mode: Multiply.

Masking out the unwanted bits.

You have to break a few eggs to make a bad pun.

Multiply and masking to add the cracked eggshell to the skin.

A final piece of white added to the crack to simulate the painted surface flaking off before cropping to 1400x1400 px cover size.

To add a little more of a distressed look to the skin, a marble texture was added. This made it look as if the porcelain was covered by a faint web of fine cracks. It was important to make these follow the contours of the face, so a Displacement Map was added. For this, a copy of one of the colour channels (Red, Green or Blue) with the most contrast is saved as a new document. Under Filter > Distort > Displace, this new document is added to whichever layer needs the distortion, in this case the marble tile. When this is set to Overlay blending mode, it makes the texture of the tile seem to follow the shape of the face.

The marble tile for texture.

Ready-made displacement map.

The tile after adding the displacement map.

Masking out the bits of tile that fall outside of the face.

Displacement map after blending in with Overlay.

 After that it was a matter of adding the band name and song title with a bit of shadow behind the words to make them stand out from the (mostly) white background. End result:

Play | Poster design: Multa Paucis

Earlier this week I made a promotional poster for Multa Paucis – a Bergen-based all-female (except for the conductor) choir. Some of the key-words I received for the design were elegance, femininity, and classical and traditional Norwegian music. Below is the final version. Read on to see a short step-by-step of the design process.

Final poster

Play | Creating a 19th century daguerreotype photograph

In this post I will give a short introduction to daguerreotype photography and show how I recreated that characteristic look to produce this totally smashing 'daguerreotype' of me:

Play | Iron Throne

Today, winter is coming once again! (That means a new season of Game of Thrones for those of you who live under rocks.) Which is perfect timing to show a making-of of something I created featuring yours truly on the Iron Throne. As I made it last winter, I couldn't quite remember all the steps, so this is less detailed than other design posts I've done but shows the main bits of work.

Play | Poster design: Becketts Ringar

Model: Marie Brottemsmo, all photography: Veslemøy Furuseth

I've done a number of poster for the student theatre company Immaturus in Bergen, Norway. I joined them when I was a student and was cast in the role of a mentally challenged boy. That's right. Perhaps not surprisingly, I let that be my one contribution as an actor, was on Immaturus's board and artistic board for a while, and, when the call came for someone to design a poster for a play, tried my hand at that. And that's how I got into print design. This is a making-of of a poster I did for them last autumn.

Play | Icon design: Wheelie bin

I have occasionally done some work designing or adjusting icons for a leading Norwegian software developing company. They make geographical information systems which are used by many municipalities (so if you work for a 'kommune' in Norway, there is a good chance you have clicked on some of my work!).

Play | Long, flat shadow-ish logo design

Just a quick making-of for the title banner of this blog, or logo if you like. It is of course heavily inspired by the long, flat shadow trend (which incidentally seems to be petering out). Not everyone is a fan but if the shadow isn't too overpowering I find it can be quite tasteful. Long, flat shadows (there has to be a better, shorter name) is an off-shoot of the flat design trend, visible in for example iPhone's iOS 7 and Windows 8. I believe the general consensus is that the UIs of smart phones and tablets have been instrumental in the increasing popularity of flat design.

Play | Poster design: De selektive

On Thursday, Teaterterminalen, a Norwegian theatre group fronted by artistic director Mari Sofie Andreassen and producer Charlotte Prydz Ottesen,  won the prestigious Natt & Dag's yearly Bergen Award for best theatrical performance with 'De selektive.' The play discusses the theme of selective abortion, i.e. whether to undergo an abortion if the foetus turns out to have a serious (or less serious) disability and the implications this has for society. It does so with guts, humour, and intelligence and has received very positive reviews.

Having worked with both Mari and Charlotte before, I was asked to create promotional material for 'De selektive,' including posters (it has been staged in a number of locations) and flyers. I decided to take this opportunity to show a few steps in the creation of the poster.