About the Pinups #3: Pinup #5

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 fifth pinup in the series.

This was the first time I tried combining paintings with colour pencils. I find that this technique gives my rather vague paintings a much more detailed look and it doesn't look out of place. Unfortunately, I obviously would never have the time to do this on the normal backgrounds of comic pages, but in a pinup here and there I have done this several times since.

I really like this rendition of Bianca, especially her hair and clothing - the only trouble is, her nose became all wonky. It almost looks like a pig snout, which was not my intention. I don't know what went wrong with the nostrils, but I could literally do nothing to save them.

Well, except to start again, I suppose, but I didn't want to do that. It's one of those things where you either decide to move on or stay as a perfectionist and never get anything accomplished.

The background was a thing of itself. I wanted it to be interesting, but not a decipherable view. So I went with a more impressionistic route, which I am sometimes prone to do.

However, just the blue paint wash seemed somehow boring and done to death in the actual comic, so I started adding thing on top of it. I happened to have this tape with red and white stripes, so I put that there, as well as the golden one. I was a bit worried about the gold tape with very shiny surface, because I didn't know how well it would look scanned. Luckily it translated just fine.

Then I glued these wooden sticks to it, that I also happened to have. They are just bought from a hobby store for some purpose. I think I was supposed to build a model castle for some old project once upon a time.

I like the background more with these weird addictions: it gives the piece a more mixed media feel. It also kinda separates the background from the main painting. I think, in retrospect, I almost could have blurred the background a little to give an impression of depth of field. But oh well. Photoshop's Drop Shadow -effect also helped with that.