Paul Antonson

More work for Flavorpill. Tourists and trees.

I’ve recently created some graphic works for Flavorpill. I took it as an opportunity to play around with different stlyes and take older projects and sketches and breathe new life into them. The city vs nature theme has crept in there as the image above can attest.

For this illo I wanted to give the feel of a graffiti wall of the sort you might find in Soho, with layers of paint, paste-ups and stickers. Also wanted to make it very cropable.

The Village Voice is having a giveaway for this Gibson Les Paul guitar. Gracing the surface of this guitar is the 3 headed Siren girl who I’ve been illustrating for the Voice for the last 6 years. This drawing was actually from the first year of the Siren Music Festival. Feel free to enter to win the guitar here.

Here’s the poster/ad art I’ve come with for this year’s Siren Festival in Coney Island. Click here or on the image to see a larger version. I’d initially come up with a blue/red/purple color scheme but after I began the color temperature felt too cool for this setting, so I added lots of yellow. Because Dave Bias designs a variety of ads and posters for the Voice at different sizes I gave him the final art with the Siren and her magic swirl on separate layers. The big open space to the left of the Siren will facilitate the names of the bands playing the fest. And yes, that is John “Stumpy” Pepys (Ed Begley Jr.) from Spinal Tap playing the drums by the big wave.

Some recent bits from the sketchbook; subway riders, post-snowboarding doodling and a rendering of InvisibleMan’s founding father.

Last week I created this illo for The Wall Street Journal Online of the new Fed chairman Ben Bernanke trying to impress upon reporters and economist’s what kind of tough chairman he’ll be.

Making custom photoshop brushes has become habit forming.

Here’s some sketches and color studies done in my awesome new sketchbook which Keegan constructed for me. The paper is not too thin, yet takes pencil, ink and watercolor really well.

Caught the Pixar show at Moma today with Keegan and it was pretty mind-blowing (more on that later). First thing I did when I got home was to refine my photoshop settings and create some custom photoshop brushes – which I’d forgotten was quite easy: [select object within 999×999 pixels and go to ‘Define Brush Preset’ under Edit]. Below was my test sheet.

I always try to use photo reference when working on an illo. If the situation calls for drawing a recognizable person I like to build a photoshop collage; maybe shoot seperate reference photos for the pose or incoporate parts of a sketch. The example above was an illo I did for wsj.com… a portrayal of the Worst President Ever.