Rediscovering the Marx Brothers
« Humor is reason gone mad. » -Groucho Marx
Hello! It’s Lea again.
I hope you had a great week. If you don’t know me, nice to meet you! This is Sunday Spreads, my weekly illustration challenge.
This week, I wanted to pay a little homage to the Marx Brothers as some of their early movies are entering in Public Domain this year!
The Marx Brothers were a group of incredible comedy actors, with very complementary personalities, skills, and comedic language. If you’ve never heard of them, how lucky you are to be able to discover them. You are about to embark on the most joyous ride in early cinematic history. Many would recommend Duck Soup ( 1933) as a starter film. My personal favorite is A Night at the Opera ( 1935), and it’s probably one of the films I have seen the most in my life.
Anyway, here is the final piece for this week, and I’ll take you through the process below alongside some Marx Brothers fun facts.
Rough Doodle on paper
The idea for this week came rather quickly, I wanted to portray a sort of parade with the Marx Brothers in black and white + My sister and me in color. As if they had came out of the television to entertain us in the real world. The scribble/doodle turned out messy, but it’s very close to the final result, which encourages me to always go through paper first before jumping to digital.
2. Digital Rough Sketch
From that doodle, I went to Photoshop to refine the drawing and try to push the posings of each brother, while trying to capture their comedic essence. And maybe I could take a moment now to tell you about each brother.
First of all Groucho Marx, the man who probably inspired this : 🥸
Groucho is the ultimate talker, always ready with a joke or a sarcastic answer. He is probably the most recognisable brother with his thick mustache and eyebrows painted with grease paint. Note: Even if they are brothers in real life, the Marx brothers do not portray brothers in their films, just random strangers, pushed together by unforeseen circumstances to create as much chaos as possible. Although Chico and Harpo usually know each other from before, Groucho gets to know them and will help them in whatever quest the script has for them.
His comedic style and timing are priceless, usually at the expense of every other character in the scene, as they are usually there only to give an opportunity for Groucho to make fun of them ( or himself). Until he shares the screen with Chico who shares with Groucho a talent for sarcastic banter.
Chico is the swindler with a big heart, always ready to scam the rich and help the less fortunate.
Although Chico is very funny, he feels more to me like the link between the two comedic extremes of Groucho, very sarcastic and talkative to Harpo, the poetic speechless mime, master of slapstick comedy. But Chico is an incredible character, through his social skills ( he is the character who seem to be friends with everyone), through his Robin Hood characteristics, and he is also a fantastic piano player; a real master of his craft with a very distinctive style that you will have to discover by yourself. He is often joined musically by Harpo, perhaps the most lovable character of the troupe.
Harpo is a completely mute character, yet the loudest presence on screen. He is a master of Visual comedy, collecting thousands of random objects, from very loud car horns, to thousands of wigs, costumes, to food, and weapons, anything he can store in his gigantic pockets is good enough for a laugh. Although it’s very easy to guess what goes through Harpo’s head, we often have Chico’s help as the official translator for the audience and the other characters on film.
A typical Marx brother’s film is pretty fast paced ( for the time period). Gags and sketches, chases follow one after the other. But there is always a moment, where Harpo puts down whatever hilarious thing he was doing and goes towards a harp, in the corner of the room. The film takes a small pause, and Harpo plays so beautifully, portraying his name to perfection.
And finally we have Zeppo, or as my dad would say “ the only handsome Marx brother”. I don’t have much to say on Zeppo, as he was in few movies overall. Zeppo always looks a bit lost on screen, just there, looking at his brother chasing around like joyful cackling tornadoes. Maybe also in term of design, Zeppo lacks the sort of cartoon exaggerated appearance of his brothers, and tends to fade in with the side characters.
I read online that Zeppo was supposed to be a caricature of a typical romantic protagonist in 20s and 30s romcoms. This exercise has made me want to rewatch a lot of their films anyway, and I’m ready to have my mind changed on Zeppo. In the meantime, I ended up cutting Zeppo out of the illustration ( sorry Zep), and focusing on the iconic Trio instead.
3. Refined sketch
Coming back to the drawing, as I like to do line less illustration style, I don’t need a very clean linework, I just need a sketch precise enough to build my mass and volumes and details on top. I also tried to push the pose of each characters as this stage.
I really wanted to capture a typical Marx Brother’s walk which is with knees bent, very low to the ground and going very fast. Absolutely ridiculous.
Here is a little example of how I do cleanup linework, trying to keep it simple.
4. Shape and color blocking
At this stage, I am making color masks for every character, so that I can work with clipping masks later on.
5. Start painting details
This is the fun part, where I am going through each character individually and trying to add just the right amount of details, with a limited color range for each. ( I also tried this blue as a background, but ended up going with white instead )
6. Final touches
In the end, I just had to put all the characters together, minor tweaks with curves, adding noise, chromatic aberration, and the final text.
Thank you for reading this far! I hope I made you want to discover more of these gems of the silver screen. Let me know what you think, and don’t hesitate to reach out, I am always looking to connect with fellow artists & illustrators to share the joys and sorrows of creating pretty pictures from our heads.
Lea
