Continuing to work on my Three Friends story and a subsequent animation to go along with it.  These three pals live inside a large treehouse and I thought it would be a good exercise to illustrate that interior.

I recently had the opportunity to work with Anna Rosenblum Palmer and winwinapps to create a background illustration for their recent iPhone app: Patience.  It was a cool challenge as one end of the illustration had to flow continuously into the other end.  The purpose of the app is to create a pleasing way to implement impulse control with the illo slowly scrolling along against some nice chill music.  The app is free as well.

During a recent roadtrip to Colorado my wife and I stopped to observe some petroglyphs in the middle of Nevada.  While visiting this site a kangaroo rat came a-bouncing up to my slightly startled wife. She was rather taken with the fellow.  It should be said in the name of preserving the kangaroo rat’s reputation that it is a rodent with no formal relation to actual rats (not that there’s anything wrong with that).  They can bounce 7 to 8 feet and also store food in the pouches in their cheeks.

Anyway, I’ve been continuing to formulate and illustrate new children’s book characters and perhaps this traveling troupe might make an appearance in the Three Friends story I’m working on – or perhaps they’ll get a story of their own.

My wife and I hiked up to Cathedral Lake on July the 4th and I sketched this fallen tree.  It had very expressive branches. Cathedral Lake is nestled on one of Mt. Tallac’s arms in South Lake Tahoe.

Whoa. It’s certainly been a while. Eeegads…over a year! Well my excuse is now walking around our house jibber-jabbering and busy being ridiculously cute. Becoming Blake‘s Dad has drastically cut into my “project” time, but still, I should be ashamed. So here’s a little reminder that I do in fact still have sketchbooks with blank pages, a good mechanical pencil, and the will to use it if given the right amount of leisure time.

These are drawings of Little Moose Lake, up near Old Forge, NY. Beautiful part of this great state.

Here are a few of the early sketches in the process of creating Snowmastodon! Snow Day Adventure. We had a very short window of 3 months to come up with the story and create all the illustrations so there wasn’t too much time for sketching.

I think ‘Always Cute’ was a good motto to keep in mind as I worked through the illustrations.

Well… Invisibleman certainly has been quiet for a while.  Dusty even!  I’ll briefly speak to my own absence: Around November of last year I set about writing and putting together a dummy for my Three Friends story. Just as I’d wrapped that up and was plotting getting that out into the world I received an email from a old Syracuse classmate Amiee White Beazley.  Amiee was looking for an illustrator for a children’s book she was writing based on the recent amazing paleontological find in Snowmass Colorado.  The story was to be about a young mastodon and her friend the giant sloth and titled “Snowmastodon! Snow Day Adventure”. The only trick was we had a very short turnaround time of three months and the story was in rough draft form.  So the last 3 months have been a blur with a lot of early mornings and late nights in the studio (aka The Garoffice) but I’m incredibly stoked to have the opportunity to work on this project. People’s Press out of Woody Creek Colorado is the publisher and they were really great to work with. And a huge thanks to fellow invisibleman Jon Keegan who passed my info along to Amiee. Jon has connected me to a lot of incredible opportunities over the years. I’ll have a lot more to blab about and show over the coming weeks but here are some of the final illustrations sans text.  Should be published about two weeks from now and copies can be purchased here.

The above image is from the title page. I ended up illustrating the cover text and dropcaps as well.

Snowmastodon and sloth make snow angels while deciding to climb the big mountain.

Snowmastodon!

It seems these two were early proponents of winter board sports.

The publisher allowed me to create endpapers which I was greatly excited about.

More images, sketches and photos to come relating to Snowmastodon – even a couple incredibly cool songs my brother and fellow invisibleman James is creating for the project.

My wife and I just returned from a great trip to Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks.  We hiked among the big Sequoia trees, gained amazing views of the Great Western Divide and walked along cliff-trails that plunged 2,000ft to the valley floor.  Our last day there we took a leisurely hike into Kings Canyon and found a clearing to sketch and read in.  Among the sketches above are: Sphinx Mountain, Bucks Peak, Kristina reading and an old stump.

You see lots of fire damage throughout the parks – in fact, fire is a crucial element in the reproduction of Sequoia trees: the fire causes the giant tree’s tiny pinecones to release its seeds.  I’m not sure what kind of tree this burned fellow is but I enjoyed sketching it.

The lower ramparts of Glacier Monument in Kings Canyon.

First off: I have finally redesigned my website!  For a long while I’ve been wanting to move away from a Flash based portfolio to some good ol’ html and css, which I created through the folks at Indexhibit.  Here’s the new site in all its ipad/iphone-friendly glory: www.paulantonson.com

So as I’ve mentioned recently, I’ve been hashing out a story while simultaneously gearing my portfolio more towards kids books.   These three friends are the protagonists of my story so far: Toad, a Mourning Dove and a Glasswing Butterfly.  Throughout this process I’ve found myself increasingly influenced by the color and dynamics of today’s comics and I’ll be applying that more going forward.

Sketched this treehouse while on a plane recently.  I’ve been hashing out a story about 3 critter-friends who go on a journey and this was drawn while thinking about their potential living quarters.