About the Pinups #4: Pinup #8

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 eight pinup in the series.

This is a very peculiar one. I maybe tried to emulate a slightly older Marvel comics feel, maybe from the seventies or the eighties. It has that kind of slightly smudged and definitely cartoony feel, but I also hoped to achieve the certain eye popping action thing as well.

I started by drawing the different elements individually: Stuart, the monster and the background. Notice that I don't usually draw backgrounds, but in this style the whole painting thing wouldn't have worked.

Once I had drawn and inked the different pieces I took very small photocopies of them - I'm talking like a post stamp size - and then coloured them on different paper using a light table with thick felt tip pens. I didn't pay attention to what colours I was using, I only used the different shades to separate the "elements" of the colouring from each other.

Then I scanned these, and I vectorized the felt tip pen colours - this time changing the shades to what I ultimately wanted them to be.

Next I opened Photoshop and dropped all these in. The reason I did the whole down scaling colouring thing was because I didn't want the colours to be too "good" - I wanted them kinda looking like the old rasterized colour process that was always a bit weird and didn't exactly follow the ink lines. So, in a way, this is kind of a stylistic sequel to Pinup #3 (more about the making of that in here), only this time I didn't go reproducing the rasters themselves but, hopefully, the overall feel of older techniques.

Notice also how I added grey "shadow" behind Stuart to separate him from the darkness of the background.

Now it only had one problem: the main reason I use paint to colour the actual comic and do the backgrounds is because it has an automatic texture to it. I usually hate big areas of just one shade with no alteration (except if they are black or white). This was very apparent with this piece, so I added a little "smudge" layer on top of everything. It was just a bit of grey scale texture, set to rather small opacity. It also helped to give the image a kind of old and used feel which I actually do like quite a bit.

I like this image. I think it's one of the first really successful Bianca -pinups. I think it looks somehow dynamic. I'm not sure if I overdid the "mistakes" in the colouring, but then again I am often very perfectionistic, which is why it's fun to do things with paint and other less than precise methods. It helps to hide all the accidental mistakes as well!