How to draw Bill Murray

The first Bill Mur­ray film I saw was Ghost­busters. I saw it on VHS. My Dad brought it back from one of his over­seas trips, so I nev­er got to see it at the cin­e­ma. It must’ve been about 1987. I would have been eight, my old­er broth­er would have been 10. I dis­tinct­ly remem­ber Bill Mur­ray being the fun­ny guy. He went on to become one of my favourite actors of all time.

Yet I nev­er remem­ber active­ly going out there and look­ing for oth­er Bill Mur­ray movies. That goes for any actor that I admire. Their roles will just come to me when they come to me. This way, I have man­aged to steer clear of the ones that peo­ple have said aren’t so good. I mean, I love him in all of the Wes Ander­son films. Yet, if I was to think of my least favourite Bill Mur­ray per­for­mance, I can’t say that any­thing instant­ly springs to mind. I haven’t seen Larg­er Than Life. Or Garfield. I have man­aged to avoid the aster­oids. The Bill Mur­ray asteroids.

In one of my favourite roles of his, you don’t even see him on screen. It’s the bad­ger from Fan­tas­tic Mr Fox. And I saw the Jun­gle Book, and he is fan­tas­tic as the voice of Baloo. He’s just got that per­sona. You don’t even have to see Bill Mur­ray. It’s just his voice and his style of com­e­dy that grabs you.

Draw­ing a por­trait of Bill Mur­ray is inter­est­ing. After show­ing my girl­friend one of my recent­ly fin­ished por­traits she was like, ​“Wow that real­ly looks like Bill Mur­ray!” I said to her, ​“Yeah, well it’s pret­ty hard to fuck up Bill Mur­ray”. His face is just so full of char­ac­ter. You can eas­i­ly mask off three quar­ters of his face and you just know it’s Bill Mur­ray. His eyes especially.

When I’m cre­at­ing a new por­trait it’s real­ly impor­tant that you con­nect with the sub­ject. I always start with the eyes. From there, you start to build up a like­ness. For me, the Steve Zis­sou role is a great ref­er­ence of this because of his wild facial expres­sions. In that one scene where he screams, ​“Este­ban was eat­en!” and he’s got those crazy eyes. I some­times like to think he was picked for that role just because of his great eyes.

From the point of view of the series fea­tured in this show, and the fact that the art­work con­sists of three tiers, I care­ful­ly chose the Bill Mur­ray char­ac­ters I love the most and then dis­sect­ed down each icon­ic expres­sion. Which sec­tion is going to be the strongest? In my view, the eyes need­ed to be Steve Zis­sou. And then the mid­dle sec­tion is Carl Spack­ler (Cad­dy Shack), obvi­ous­ly the most icon­ic part of his face in that film is his stu­pid lips. And then the bot­tom sec­tion of that art­work is the famous Ghost­busters uni­form with the big patch say­ing ​‘Venkman’.

Every new art­work starts with blue line sketch­es, and I just rough­ly cre­ate my com­po­si­tion and like­ness. This gives you a map to work from as you start ink­ing plus it’s easy to get rid of once you scan your draw­ing and bring it into Pho­to­Shop. You sim­ply adjust your black and white lev­els, and the blues just dis­ap­pear. You could say it’s an old tech­nique, quite com­mon with car­toon­ists, ani­ma­tors and graph­ic nov­el artists. They will draw every­thing in blue pen­cil and then go over it with ink and colour. If you look at old comics you can see a lot of the blue pen­cil marks still there. Plus for some rea­son, the blue pen­cil lead just makes you draw bet­ter. The soft­er lead makes the process more fluid.

When it comes to sketch­es I work fair­ly quick­ly. I’d say a cou­ple of hours for that stage know­ing I can improve things as I go. In the begin­ning more time is ded­i­cat­ed to research­ing and putting togeth­er an amal­ga­mat­ed mock up using found pho­tographs. So I might find some images of Bill Mur­ray where his ears aren’t quite nat­ur­al or as I’d want them, so i’ll cut his ears from one pho­to and put them onto anoth­er. I work a bit like a col­lage artist in that sense. I will use that as my ref­er­ence point to cre­ate my blue line sketch­es. Then we start get­ting into ink­ing, which is more labour inten­sive and challenging.

When I’m work­ing on a series like I have been for Role Mod­els, I’ve got 10 art­works on the go at one time. So I will start one, and instead of fin­ish­ing that and mov­ing on to the next one I’ll jump around. So if I get tired of draw­ing Bill Mur­ray for a bit, I’ll jump over to Tom Han­ks or Mike Myers just to keep things excit­ing. Also when I’m work­ing on one, I might dis­cov­er some­thing in the process that influ­ences the oth­ers so I’ll go back to them and make improve­ments. That’s an ​‘exquis­ite corpse’ way of work­ing in itself.

I have a habit of fuss­ing over things way too much, so with this show it’s been great because I’ve got a very spe­cif­ic dead­line, a tight dead­line that I’m work­ing towards. I’ve been work­ing on it for some time, but the show is fast approach­ing now and I’ve still got pieces to fin­ish. I’ve accept­ed that they are prob­a­bly nev­er going to be fin­ished how I want them to be, but that would prob­a­bly wouldn’t hap­pen even after anoth­er two years worth of fuss­ing over them. And that’s just not pro­duc­tive. I’ve done some test prints and they look real­ly great and I’m excit­ed to see them up on the wall as a col­lec­tion. But it’s def­i­nite­ly good to have a cut off point.

Role Mod­els opens at the Lam­ing­ton Dri­ve Gallery on 18 May and runs until 11 June, and then in Lon­don on 18 August. For more info head to tim​bas​mits​.com