July: Holiday fun for the whole family. A look of terror on daddy’s face was deemed inappropriate (I suspected it would be), but it would’ve been funnier.

August: Picnic lunch during the harvest.

September: The apples are ripe for picking. The dude’s putting the moves on the girl while the bull is putting the moves on the apples.

October: New feed for the piglets.

November: The hunting season. In the first sketch the hunter with his rifle was in the foreground while the moose was anxiously hiding behind a tree in the midground. But the nasty school shooting incident that happened here in Finland had happened just before I got started with this gig (and on my birthday of all days). So I had to pretty much redo the sketch, with the gun out of sight, the moose relaxed in the foreground and the hunter in the background (well, midground really). The first sketch sucked anyway, so I didn’t mind.

December: Christmas elf visiting the farm animals. Ham is the traditional Christmas dish in Finland, so this just might be the last meal for the pigs.

So, this is the first batch of the images I did for LSO Foods’ calendar for the year 2008. LSO Foods is a major meat producer in Finland, producing both pork and beef. The calendar itself was produced for the actual meat producers i.e. the farmers that grow the animals. Hence the style of images was slightly romantic, but couldn’t get too cheesy or sweet considering the business is about raising and killing animals for food, and everyone viewing the calendar is well aware of that.

I got a short brief for each month (from the folks at ad agency Oivallus, who did the calendar design), and was then let loose to sketch. Every image had to include the colors of the corporate identity – a certain strong red and blue – which meant that the other colors used had to be fairly saturated and strong too, for the color schemes to appear harmonious and work.

January: Price Boar. Initially, the two men of the house looked more alike.

February: Laskiainen. On Shrove Tuesday, it’s a tradition in Finland to do just what the kids are doing in the image – in addition to eating a certain type of bun with whipped cream.

March: Piglets and promoting a new web service, which I’m clearly not promoting here, hahah. There’s a logo on the screen on the final image.

April: Unloading piglets. New, excited piglets arriving to the piggery. I used Google Sketchup for the background, which was a good call since I had to do it several times over and that way I didn’t have to worry about the perspective as much.

May: Spring pastures. Letting the cows loose on spring pastures, as well as doing the spring sowing.

June: Juhannus. Celebrating the Midsummer in Finland includes everyone escaping to their summer cottages, raising the Finnish flag, eating loads of sausages, drinking too much, bathing in a sauna & doing skinny dipping, drunkenly pissing over the side of a rowboat or trying to swim across a river too wide and drowning. Makes me swell with pride and patriotism.

I’ll be posting the second batch in the near future, so stay tuned for that.