Paul Antonson

This past Saturday while strolling through Central Park I stopped to draw the rocks and tree above. Later in the weekend a great idea for a children’s book dawned on me and I added the elusive creature as a nod to the inspiration.

I created this illustration for this past week’s Wall Street Journal Economic Forecast Report. It’s been a long bout but according to a bunch of economists, Bernanke has the bear on the ropes. If I were that bear I’d lose the gloves and start utilizing a strategy of claws, paws and fangs.

A couple sketchbook pages made while wandering the grounds of Rockefeller University.

With Washington Square park mostly under construction the array of musicians have been squeezed into a denser area. This makes for some quality sketching and as well as some outstanding musicianship. The older gentleman with the saxophone wore a Members Only jacket and operated his instrument with amazing fluidity.

The lonely yeti surveys his kingdom. These were separate drawings compiled and colored in photoshop. I thought the near-empty sky (with the exception of some owls) would be a good location to place some text at some point.

A few recent pages from the sketchbook.

Recently I was perusing the website of illustrator & mad-genius Roger DeMuth whom I was lucky enough to have as a professor at Syracuse University. There’s a great video interview of Roger on his site as well as a ton of his drawings, paintings, pop-ups, sketchbooks, boxes, plantlife etc and I immediately set about some creative output of my own. After I finished the drawing above it slowly dawned on me the DeMuthesque nature of what I’d done and I realized: I was under the influence of Roger.
I recall he gave me some of the best and most frank advice I ever received as I was preparing to graduate. He said “Paul… just go out there and fail.” Roger has graciously accepted our offer to do a bit of guest posting on InvisibleMan so you’ll see some of his amazing works here soon.

This is the eighth year of illustrating for the Siren Music Festival and I went with a half land/half sea composition. Props to Jon Keegan for encouraging me to go aquatic. The Creature from the Black Lagoon makes a strong showing this year but then again he does have centuries of passion pent up in his savage heart – so it sort of makes sense. Click on the image for a larger view.

Testing out a new Lamy pen.

Recently broke out one of those watercolor sketchbooks that Moleskin make and did a few draintings (just made up that word) of Alaska using GoogleEarth as reference. Volcanoes in the Aleutian islands and the Kenai mountains, rendered with watercolor pencil.