Haukanesekspressen

Haukanesekspressen is an illustrated children’s book, created as an advent calendar with the intention of being read every day between 1-24th of December. I created everything from the story and text, to illustrations and book layout.

The whole idea was to make an advent calendar book for my two young nephews – and when Christmas finally arrived, it was well received by children and adults alike.

The story follows the Christmas Troll and two brothers (my nephews) on a mission to deliver presents to animals in December.

However, unexpected things keep happening along the way, and it’s up to the boys to find out who’s being naughty!

When writing this story, I took inspiration from some of my favourite books from when I was that age.

There are also plenty of references to different songs and stories throughout the journey – such as the Wise Men and some Christmas songs.

Three stages were involved when creating the book’s visuals:

01. Storyboarding

Quick thumbnails of 1-2 min each, the storyboarding’s aim was to identify what drawings to do and find out which reference photos would be needed.

02. Sketching

The second stage, sketching, helped develop the characters and build a colour palette. This was still lacking personality as I worked on all illustrations simultaneously to create a fully consistent style.

03. Final drawings

The final stage was where personality was added. I aimed for a half-realistic style with visible brushstrokes and calm, warm colours (with the exception of snow).

Wanting to integrate the text and illustrations in a harmonic layout rather than side-by-side, each illustration was created with a lot of “white space.” By doing this, the text sits nicely within the visuals to further create the flow and move the story forward.