About the Pin-ups #2: Pinup #3

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 third pinup in the series.

This idea had intrigued me for a while: as much as I detest the crappy, old raster colouring of American comic books from past decades, they also had their own place in the vast culture of the whole comic book thing. Yes, they really used old grannies to separate colours with exacto knifes for more than half a century.

Often times they looked really bad - especially in the late eighties and early nineties when the art style itself was getting more and more detailed and ornate, which was all lost in the rasters of the cheap printing process - but something in it also pulled me towards itself.

So I decided to do one pinup with such colours... although, obviously, now done using Photoshop. I did quite a bit of research on what the shades exactly are supposed to be and did my best to emulate the old style.

First, of course, I needed to actually draw the picture. I did what I often do in pinups which have a lot of people in them, and I want each character to look good: I draw them all separately and then shrinked them down on top of a background. The background was also drown on one, separate paper.

Notice how I used the composition of the different characters to hide their naughty bits. This was ofcourse because I always intended the pinups to be a bit more "PG" than the actual comic book so I could share it in social media and what not. It sucks since I find nudity and sexuality nothing but beautiful, but I don't want to get kicked out of facebook, so what can I do?

Then I made these big slaps of dots with Illustrator (a vector program). This was my first hurdle since I never quite knew, or was able to find out, how big or small the individual dots in the rasterized colouring should be. I think, in the end, they became too big which is why they look so crappy in the very smallest of areas. Although, this was the case with real raster colours too, so who knows.

I put these on top of the image and made one for each main colour. Then I blended them together. The next difficulty was to decide what to make the blending mode - a.e, how exactly do the layers show on top of each other. In the real world, to my understanding, the colours were in some kind of plastic film, almost like used in overhead projectors.

I usually like to leave caucasians' skins paper white - it has always been my style, since I like pale, gothicy things and I also think it makes those who do have darker skin tones pop out more - but since I was trying to emulate the old timey colouring I needed to give this up. Otherwise there would have been too much white and the image would have become dull, and it also would not have looked like it would have if it really was done with raster colours.

I'm not very happy with the final result. The colours look kinda... meh. I don't know. I think I should have first coloured the image normally (so that I could get the colours themselves to look good and be in the right places) and then try to somehow alter it to look like rasterized artwork. Maybe I should try to do this again some time and maybe I could do it better.

I do like the individual characters and the line work in general, though. I think it's a neat image of the girls in a graveyard. Very halloweeny!