Anton Petrov is an award-winning illustrator who currently works at the Auckland-based collective of illustrators known as Watermark Ltd. In 2001, he illustrated The Book Of Pacific Lullabies which won the Russell Clark Award.
Early years
“I drew ever since I can remember. My parents say that when I was a kid they would leave me home alone with some pencils and loads of paper and when they'd come back I'd still be drawing. They must have saved some good cash on babysitters, I suppose. I doubt CIFS would allow such behaviour from NZ parents though haha. (I am Russian by the way and have spent my childhood years there and no, my parents were very good and loving parents.)” Anton’s parents encouraged him once it became obvious that he had a talent for drawing. “My mother is an art teacher so I was lucky to have a mentor by my side from an early age. She would set tasks for me every day in my early teens. That included sketches of people I'd see on the street, still-lives, etc. the usual grind. But it paid off in the end.”
Anton remembers one of the more notable experiences in his early art classes: “When I was about 14, the art teacher at my new school (I must have changed a hundred schools when I was a kid) really didn't like me for the first couple of months. Most of the projects she set for us were very arts and craftsy. I remember I did a cut out star which wasn't quite symmetrical, and I think that's when she officially decided that I am her worst student. Couple of weeks or days later I went out and I did sketches of a statue in our town, it was a drawing project she set out for us. When she saw my drawing she said it was as if a 25 year old drew it, whatever that means! She was a little strange. But anyway, I was in her good books after that.”
Anton’s high school years were spent in South Africa, where he attended the National School of the Arts. “I specialized in drawing, sculpture, painting and design for a few years there. Then when we came to New Zealand I enrolled into Elam at Auckland Uni which I graduated from in 2000. Now I work at an illustration company called Watermark with plenty of talented illustrators who I learn from all the time. So, still learning.” Anton does not have a set art practice routine nowadays, but his job inherently keeps his art skills sharp. “I do work a lot, 10 hours a day and more (boring guy yea? haha), so as soon as I get free time I just want to get out of the office and go do some sports or visit my friends. I try to swim every day, so that helps.” His advice to young aspiring artists is to “just paint and paint and you'll get better and better. Copy your favorite artists work because it will help you get into the mind of the artists that painted them. Copy for learning purposes obviously, I don't mean to encourage plagiarism here! Experiment with new techniques, etc.”
Career
“When I was in my last year at Elam I went out and showed my portfolio to a number of publishing companies in Auckland. One company in particular – Macmillan publishers – was just starting up then and they were looking to establish some connections with local illustrators, so timing for me was pretty lucky there. I got so much work from them that I decided to ask my tutors if I could integrate that paid work into my end of year projects. So I killed two birds with one stone sort of speaking, got plenty of material for my end of year show and also got paid for it. I worked for Macmillan for another couple of years after that as well as other publishing companies in Auckland. During that time I did The Book Of Pacific Lullabies which won the Russell Clark Award in 2001. It was great because I could use that backing to get more high profile work. With it I approached a company I work with now – Watermark. I was surprised to discover that they have an agent in America – Deborah Wolfe, who I have heard of before and was preparing to approach but wasn't sure how. So the Book of pacific Lullabies helped me to get into Watermark and get Deborah Wolfe to represent me in the US.”
Anton describes Watermark as a wonderful, inspiring place to work, and compares it to solitary freelancing – “I always liked the idea of working on my own, I think that illustrators are solitary beings by nature. But after working with Watermark that has changed, I've learned to love the studio environment. It's a lot more dynamic, we all share our ideas and our clients, all learn from each other, all help each other out when we are stuck. It creates a wonderful environment for us all to grow as illustrators, as a community. It presents more opportunities to work on fun projects or to meet new people, etc. Also you treat your job much more seriously then if you are working from home. It sets clear boundaries between home and work, otherwise it's too easy to blur those when you are working from home, too easy to slack off.”
Working with Watermark takes a lot of stress out of promoting himself as a freelance illustrator. “They have already established a great client base here as well as overseas and they organize ways to promote us. We still go out to deliver our (Watermark) portfolio and talk to our clients face to face and invite them to our functions etc. Before I joined Watermark I had to do it all myself, print the portfolio, make it look presentable, make a bunch of appointments with publishing companies , go see them and keep my fingers crossed hoping for work, which does come to you if you see enough companies enough times. It's always good to keep calling them after that from time to time though, just to remind them that you are there, otherwise they tend to forget about you.”
If you decide to go out on your own as a freelance illustrator, Anton has the following advice: “Be more persistent. Distribute your portfolios, send them little reminders or call them to see if they have any work for you and how they are doing. You definitely have to have a website too, no question about that, these days everyone expects you to have one. Also try to be as open to new projects as you can, and have a range of styles in your portfolio. I know some will tell that you need to stick to one and paint more and more of that. I agree with that to a degree. I am a believer in the fact that if there is talent in you it will only come out if you will be yourself, draw your own thing and stick with that. The only problem with that is that you might need to go on the dole if you decide to follow that path in NZ. Learning new things and working in slightly different styles will only broaden your horizons and give you an extra knowledge which you can apply to your own unique style if that's what you want to achieve.”
Anton finds his work extremely rewarding, and takes great delight in seeing a finished job in its final context. “I remember I worked on a Vodafone campaign once. I did a series of artworks which were based around well known fairytales. These artworks would appear in airports, the slogan on each was 'You are Never Far From Home' and featured the main character talking on a mobile phone. I remember coming back from Australia once I met some Brazilian tourists on the plane. When we got off in Auckland airport I remember looking at all the trolleys which had my art on them and saying, I did that. Then looking at the billboards and metrolites inside the airport, saying I did that. Then there was a huge one, a 30 meter billboard outside the airport , I have never seen my art being blown up that big before! It was Gulliver's travels, it had a bunch of lilliputs tying Gulliver down. The tourists knew I drew that one too. They must have thought I was NZ's only artist, you know how first impressions are. But anyway, it really felt like I came back home when I saw all that art around me. Another time was when we stopped at a little dairy on our snowboarding trip to Mt Ruapehu. There were only two two types of Bread on the shelf there and I did the illustrations for both of them! It's a good feeling, there was a little bit of me, far away from home.”
Looking forward, Anton would like to be able to get to a point where he can exhibit his own work and be able to sustain a living by doing that. “But at the moment I am pretty happy doing whatever illustration comes my way. The projects I get are diverse enough to keep it all exciting. I wish kid's books would have bigger budgets though, I would love to work on that sort of stuff.” Anton has tackled a multitude of subjects during his illustration career, and doesn’t have any set preferences as to what his favourite subject matter is. “I like to draw it all. Although I always have this desire to be able to portray the scenes from my dreams onto paper, I like the surreal and the weird in art. However I remember I got a job once where I had to do instructional illustration on how to use this new toothbrush they've created. It was so boring and so frustrating because the client kept coming back with all these changes, I still cringe when I think about it. I've decided after that project that I don't like doing instructional illustration at all, haha.”
Illustration in New Zealand
“If you want to become a freelance illustrator in NZ you have to be very versatile so that you can take on any project that comes your way, if you want to make some money out of this. But then illustration doesn't really require your physical presence in a country you work for. Just because you are in NZ doesn't mean you can't work for overseas. The only limiting factors with that are the time difference between countries and your ability to visit clients. Modern technology takes care of everything else.”
Anton stresses the importance of keeping well informed about the illustration scene, and finding out what other artists are up to. “I'd say it's mandatory to study the illustration scene. It keeps you informed and inspired, gives us illustrators more stuff to talk about, like did you see the latest from Mark Ryden? or check out Shag's new exhibition, what do you reckon? It's a colourful world out there, it's fun to know about it. But even from a business point of view it's important to know who did what for whom and how much it cost them.”
“Take New Zealand for example, it's a very small market and we kind of have to look after each other here. It would not be very fair if out of the lack of knowledge someone did a job for some agency and charged them $100 for it, when a week ago someone else did the same job for them but charged $1000, which is maybe what it's really worth. The first illustrator doesn't benefit from it because he could have been paid more, had he known what that work was worth. The second illustrator loses a client because the client now thinks that they can get that work done for $100 next time and so they'll call the first illustrator for sure, so both lose. You have to know the illustration scene out of respect for other illustrators.”
The Art
Anton works exclusively in the digital medium, and uses Photoshop and Painter with a Wacom tablet. “I never really liked working with paint, the idea that I have to wait for it to dry or that the colours can easily become dirty if you put a wrong one on top of the other. Their often unforgiving quality and the mess that it makes never really appealed to me. I like to get in there, get it done, and move on to something else, no mess, no wait, no problem. I tried digital art first on my mother's computer, she bought a Wacom tablet and that came with a program called Painter Classic. I really enjoyed experimenting with it. I did a couple of jobs digitally in the past, but it wasn't until I joined Watermark that I have fully converted to digital. I do everything on the computer, from the initial rough sketches to final art. I think if you are doing illustration for a living you absolutely have to do it digitally. It's just so much easier. You can always take a screen grab of what you're doing and flick it over to a client via an email to see if you are on the right track and even if the client wants you to make changes to it after you finished it, you can still do them. It makes your art very editable. The amount of work and time it saves is huge. For example when I get a layout for a book that I need to illustrate it's almost always emailed to me as a pdf. I just open it up in Painter or Photoshop and "paint" straight over the top of the PDF layout. Once I get a client approval on the roughs I paint straight over the top of those . No need to redraw much, I keep it all in the same file.”
“I can take on more work doing things digitally and therefore make more money or spend more time away from my desk. It helps me manage the workflow too. All the systems that we have set up for running our business are digital, it's all there on the screen. The benefits of Digital illustration are just too good to ever go back to analog.”
Step-by-Step
The following is a brief overview of how Anton goes about creating one of his images.
“There are pretty much 3 basic stages, though they vary slightly from style to style.
1) Compositional sketch. This just shows how I am going to lay out my illustration, what is going to go where, who is going to have what expression, etc. Sometimes it can even be so rough that I will write things instead of even drawing them eg. If the illustration will have a mob of angry grandmothers in the background, instead of drawing each one I will do stick figure-like shapes and write 'angry grandmothers' with an arrow pointing to them.
2) Pencil drawing. This is a detailed drawing where now the grandmothers look like grandmothers and not stick figures. With other styles I will often add rough colour at this stage and just clean it up once it's been approved to make a final art.
3) Colour art. This is where I colour the thing in and add the finishing touches to make it look finished.
I get client approval at each of the stages, just to prevent any potential changes.”
Inspiration
Anton’s desire to find his own style is a great catalyst when it comes to staying inspired. “I will draw for hours experimenting with new digital mediums, etc. I am quite harsh when it comes to judging my own work, not to say that I am unhappy with what I create, I am quite happy with it most of the time, but it's just that I always feel that I can do a bit better. I get very inspired by the work of other artists, there's so much incredible talent out there. After looking through the illustrator's catalogs (you can find those in libraries) or through art and culture mags like Juxtapoz there's always something there that will make me close the book and open my sketch book. When I say I draw everything digitally it's true, but I still have a sketchbook too. When I was younger, I wasn't really exposed to what was going on in the world of illustration, but was exposed to plenty of well known fine artists such as Dali and Andrew Wyeth, Norman Rockwell, or the oldies like Boticelli, etc. I still hold those in very high regard. Other illustrators that I look up to now are people like Mark Ryden, Peter DeSeve, Shag, Tim Biskup, Garry Kelly, all of whom are alive and working today, there are plenty more.”
Single most important piece of professional advice:
“Practice makes Perfect.”
Check out Anton's page at watermarkltd.com, where you can see more of his fantastic work -
Anton's Watermark Portfolio
Be sure to keep an eye out for A Book of Pacific Lullabies, at your local bookstore -
Amazon.com - A Book of Pacific Lullabies
Plus I've got this crazy idea of going overseas, making contacts all around the world, moving back to NZ, moving to some place like Northland where the living is cheap and working for overseas clients for overseas money 
The dream...
