Artist Interview: Anton Petrov

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

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.

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