Murrays & Aykroyds

I did these Little Portrait sets of Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd for a recent commission.  I don’t usually do Little Portraits as commissions as a rule but Murray and Aykroyd are two of my comedy heroes so I couldn’t resist. The response to them has been really good so I may revise the sets and add a few more to each to sell them as prints.

ADDITIONAL: The Dan Aykroyd set was re-posted on the official Blues Brothers Instagram feed, ran by John Belushi's widow Judy and Dan Aykroyd himself.  So, either one of my comedy heroes has seen and liked my work, or the wife of another has.  Either way, I'm stoked.

Further Rotoscoping Practice

One of my students couldn't complete their sequence in our collaborative rotoscoping animation, so I had to step in and complete it on their behalf.  This sequence occurs immediately before my previous sequence.  This one is a little more polished than the last one and a little more interesting in terms of what is going on.  It's laborious as techniques go, but if I were to work from specially-filmed footage I know how to make it more efficient.

Blackadder The Third Play

I allowed the Grantham Dramatic Society to use my Blackadder illustrations for their recent production of Curtis & Elton's Blackadder The Third.  I enjoyed doing these for Mustard magazine way back when and so it was nice to see them get another airing.

Rotoscoping Practice

In order to teach the practicalities of large scale animation productions, my Level 1 class have been doing a collaborative rotoscoping mini-project, where they've been animating a 2-second snippet from a longer scene from Return Of The Jedi.  When they're done I'll edit all the snippets back together to make a short animated film.  It's a bit of gamble, as this level of student can be fairly unreliable, so I'm hoping it will encourage them to pull together as a team.

I joined in myself very late in game, so here's my rough-and-ready contribution - a fairly dull shot of Luke looking pensive, post-battle.  The process can be a bit laborious but I've already figured out ways to improve and streamline my working methods, and so have got to thinking about doing a little project of my own.

Prospectus

I did this comic strip as a commission for a university five years ago to be used as part of their prospectus but they ended up going in another direction with it (*cough* photography *cough*).  There was some talk of it getting revisited later, but this has never come to fruition.  It has a horrendous title, but I still quite like the strip.

Yippee-Ki-Yay, Motherfucker

A Die Hard little portrait set to celebrate it's 30th anniversary.  This has been a firm favourite since I was little - 1980s action movies being a staple part of my adolescent viewing diet - and, as far as I am concerned, John McTiernan is the undisputed king of the genre.