Burnished Isle

The new Bill Murray documentary “The Bill Murray Stories: Life Lessons Learned From a Mythical Man” on Netflix is worth a view, if for no other reason, it gives us some perspective. It’s all about not taking yourself too seriously, something that we lose sight of from time to time. Murray on the other hand appears to view life as one giant improv, which it is if you really break it down. You can choose to “yes and” life or you can “no, but” it and find yourself swimming upstream during a hurricane. He transforms the day-to-day of random people’s lives into something quite a bit more. I’ve loved Bill Murray since the mid seventies, so much so I have a tendency to simply call him BM (okay, maybe not). When Stripes came to HBO, I remember recording the movie by sticking my cassette player up to the television. The reason I did this is that I heard about Stripes from older kids in the neighborhood who would act out parts and deliver dialogue leaving all of us who couldn’t see Rated R

It's been a fairly productive day of creating this illustration. There's been some grouping and erasing, but for the most part I am pleased overall with the picture. It's still not finished though. I think I need some tightening and additions made to it. A great deal of it was working on the background of the porch, and I enjoyed that. I like the rustic feel of the man in contrast with the fairly modern look of the porch itself. Most of the time, I kept the colors fairly consistent with the reference photo. Liberties were taken around the  window sill, the structure of the porch itself. I will be adding in modern items as I continue. I am thinking earbuds for the farmer, and the image on the front of the newspaper he is reading will have some strange paradoxes. I also like how he does look entirely too big for the chair itself.

One of my resolutions this year is to be more diligent in my sharing of art. I may stop in some places, do it more in others, and see where it gets me. This is me in the middle of doing my latest illustration of a farmer from the Depression Era on a porch. The Porch is a modern reference photo and the farmer is vintage. I want to add some surreal aspects to the illustration, but I will be careful where I add them. Hope you like it!