Reflection 11

Torstein Nordstrand depicts everything you could think of that would be considered mythical. He creates golums, ninja type characters, dragons, ogres, goblins, elves, iron-man type warriors, magis, sorcerers, surreal real-life situations (someone tagging a brick wall), and skull hunters to name a few. He is from Norway where he lives currently with his wife and two daughters. His art is received very, very well in the art community right now. He is a freelance illustrator for one, and you can’t exactly make money doing that if you’re not received well, and he is an in-house concept artist and Funcom, which is a video designing company. One could argue that video games aren’t really the art community, but it can be depending on your definition of art (hence our other blogs). What drew me to his work was I was on a page listing a bunch of different modern fantasy artists and his name stuck out to me. I love his work because even if it were depicting more real life things such as a garden, his whole style of working is slightly fantastical. He works on the computer mostly in Photoshop; that is where he paints. He also dabbles in other 2-D and 3-D software programs. On his website it shows mostly 2-D as far as I can tell. I was initially drawn to his colors throughout his works which are muted and not very vibrant but all have a sense of urgency and vitality. I see this in most of his works online. His faces of people aren’t the greatest, but then again in real life they can sometimes be not so great as well. And I like that he depicts them accurately but with a sardonic twist.