Andy Murray caricature 2011

As part of my current tennis caricature series, here's Wimbledon home favourite Andy Murray.



The colouring here, in much the same way as the Nadal caricature previously, is very different from my 'normal' caricature painting style - which is all part of my ongoing experimentation.

Nadal was painted in quite a colourful style, vaguely inspired by the illustrations of Edwin Georgi.

Murray on the other hand, I tried to paint in a monotone style patriotically inspired by the blue and white colours of the Scottish saltire. Unfortunately this caricature has simply ended-up looking dull, as if a plain blue tone has been placed over a greyscale image... Perhaps I will re-paint it later with a bolder blue and white style that uses less midtones to see how that looks - that would certainly be more like my original intentions.

Wimbledon caricatures

I've been working on a number of projects recently, but until they are ready to unveil here are some caricature experiments inspired by recent tennis tournaments (Roland Garros, Queens, Wimbledon).

Jo-Wilfried Tsonga.

Rafael Nadal.

Roger Federer.

Despite having a little tablet pen for about a year now, I've only just got around to properly installing it on my computer and personalising the settings. It doesn't work quite as perfectly as I'd like, but it's nice to experiment with every now and then...

These caricatures started off as quick, loose, pencil sketches that I had planned to paint with watercolours (as I normally do). However I admired the 'unfinished' quality of the first few drawings, so I decided to scan them and try painting digitally to see how they turn out - and I'll return to traditionally finish the original drawings at a later point.

Experimental Promo

On Monday I was filming live-action footage for a short promo about an upcoming collaboration between myself and Edinburgh-based sound engineer Chris Bathgate.

We previously worked together on my 2009 graduation film, Pigment of Imagination, and this second project is the result of several ideas that we have since developed.

Embedded below is the 80-second Experimental Promo made from Monday's footage:



The above video should serve as a bold taster for the kind of work that we are currently developing: It is very abstract (which I'm intrigued with), however the upcoming collaboration will be a bit tamer with some kind of narrative background.

The plan now is to devise a bizarre script and shoot/edit the film before Chris creates a new song specifically for the film.

Music video: "Counting Sheep"

On Sunday afternoon I was filming a quirky music video with Glasgow-based band Randolph's Leap, who have just released their new double A-side single "Counting Sheep / Deep Blue Sea" on Olive Grove Records.

I spent 2 hours filming the band (using both live-action and stopmotion-style photography) while Glasgow University Trampoline Club performed in the background: The result was a vast compilation of amusing footage, ready for editing.

After roughly 10 hours sifting through the footage and editing it all together, the video was complete. Today my finished video for "Counting Sheep" was released on both YouTube and Vimeo; and the news posted around the internet, leading to over 150 views within the first 12 hours of getting promoted.

So without further ado, here it is folks, enjoy!