Just An Old Fashioned Muppet Song
Today is Paul Williams’ birthday. If you don’t know who he is, you’re missing out. Musician, composer, actor…Paul Williams has had a dazzling and diverse career in show business for over five decades. But for me, the most impressive achievement he ever racked up was working with The Muppets.
Happy Birthday Paul Williams! He looks a little different now, but he’s still cranking out music.
Williams, along with Kenny Ascher, wrote the timeless classic, Rainbow Connection, and all the other amazing songs from the first Muppet Movie. Williams also penned all the tunes from the holiday classic Emmet Otter’s Jugband Christmas. If you’ve ever found yourself humming Barbecue at the holidays, you can thank Paul Williams. Years later, the Henson company picked him to create the songs for yet another Muppet holiday classic, The Muppet Christmas Carol.
The initial sketch for this piece was done digitally in Clip Studio Paint.
Considering how important Williams is to the Muppets, Michelle and I decided to honor that collaboration (and his birthday) with an illustration of Williams jamming on-stage with some of our favorite Muppet musicians.
Always planning for eventualities that rarely occur, I put each Muppet on their own layer.
That means that he’ll be performing not only with the Frogtown Hollow Jubilee Jugband from Emmet Otter’s Jugband Christmas, but also the powerhouse rock band The Electric Mayhem who shook the rafters in The Muppet Movie.
Colors were done in AffinityPhoto2, my new favorite digital art program.
He’ll also be joined by Rowlf on piano and, of course, Kermit the frog on banjo. But a performance this massive couldn’t be confined to just the paper it’s printed on. So Michelle and I decided to craft a sufficiently Muppety frame to showcase this band.
Michelle and I sanded and painted a bunch of wooden ornaments to evoke the Muppet theatre.
We wanted the frame to evoke the proscenium arch of the old Muppet Theatre. A throwback to vaudeville days, the Muppet stage was framed in rich, dark red wood with ornate gold accents. So Michelle and I set about finding all of the parts and pieces necessary to complete that visual.
It took us a while to find a plaster seashell ornament to stand in for the Muppet stage footlights.
That meant finding and painting a wooden frame and accents, right down to the seashell footlights. The overall effect when looking at the image is that you’re viewing a Muppet performance on a stage, in a classic, old-style theatre with, of course, Paul Williams front and center.
To see us put both the illustration and frame together — and to hear us gab about Paul Williams’ many artistic accomplishments for six solid minutes — you can watch the video below.