About the Pin-ups #1: Pinup #1

In this series of articles I tell the individual stories of the numerous Bianca and the Satanic Witches Pinups - mainly of my favourites, or in some other way important ones.

This is about the very first Bianca and the Satanic Witches -pinup I ever did.

I decided to do one "cover" type image for every issue of Bianca and the Satanic Witches mainly to help me keep the publishing schedule. Now of course that mentioned schedule has gone royally awry anyway for multiple reasons, and it's not embarrassing to admit that this series of articles has been born of that same necessity.

The pinup was an quick way to create content, but I also have always liked the individual image to sum up a longer story. Also it gave me a way to try different methods and ways of making images since these pieces, although vaguely related, are still separate from the story itself.

Sometimes that experimenting pays of and sometimes it doesn't. The very first one is not one of my best images although it still has some elements I like about it.

I don't quite remember what the inspiration behind this was, but I tried to convey that Bianca is kinda stamping herself on the life of all these other characters, turning their worlds askew. That's why she's on top of everything else and doesn't have hard lines on her, even though everyone else is colourless (in other words, blending into the background) and bound on their small, comic book like panels.

The background is a quick water colour thing done on wet paper. I later desaturated it greatly on photoshop.

The lineart is done much the same way as in the comic itself, except that in here I wanted to add some background texture to the images. Doing that "cosmic" type swirl behind Valerie one dot at a time took some time, if I recall correctly.

Bianca I did on charcoal on a green paper. The idea was to use the green like green screen is used in movies and separate her easily from her background from that. This is where my folly lies: the charcoal wasn't nearly strong enough not to contain green, which is why Bianca in the finished piece is rather see-through. Which was not my purpose at all. I'm sure with time I could'we have tried something different, but I was just getting into the groove of things and didn't want to slow down.

Then I also added some line art to her, just to differentiate between different body parts and what not. Thank goodness for this, because otherwise she would'we probably disappeared into a vague mess for nobody to even recognize. Notice the X:s in the images I use to connect the images to each other.

There is also some background mess I just drew with a thick marker and photoshopped between the panels the other characters are. Just to give the picture some texture.



I'm not very proud of the first pinup, but it opened up the possibilities of trying new stuff. I immediately got ideas on new ones I should do. And more of those in the next article of this series.