About the Pinups #6: Pinup #10

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 tenth pinup in the series.

This one was very important to me, because issue #10 was the first one to introduce our two new characters, Sliver and Hershell. I wanted to do something very police-like (because they are police partners), that would also tell about their characters.

First I drew both of them in silhouettes. In Sliver's image you can see that she is ready for action. Also her eyes are visible as weird slits that look rather malevolent. In Hershell's one I wanted to have him holding an ice cream cone - something not quite as serious and roaring to go as Sliver's.

Then I also drew this kind of swirling effect plate. I used blue card board - the colour wasn't important, just something that both the white ink and black magic marker could easily be extracted from. I just happened to have this blue piece of card board lying around - that's also why it is so irregularly shaped.

I scanned these elements and vectorized them. At this stage I took out their backgrounds leaving only the images themselves - this is how I could then put the shapes that they create into a layer mask in Photoshop. Meaning, the images themselves are only models for the computer to understand which parts of other layers are visible.

I also chainged the colours of the swirling middle ground while vectorizing it.

Then I needed background. I have a large library of textures of my own making. This is actually an photograph of an candle that's been twisted up with an kaleidoscope -like filter.

I then positioned all of these elements on top of each other - and also split the layers of Hershell and Sliver so that they are both above and behind of the swirling middle ground element. I used bluish tones to tint the background, and yellowish gradient for the characters. That was meant to imply the brass of their police badges. I also toyed with the opacity of the swirl.

This is how this image was created. I am really happy with it - I think it looks interesting, some how. I'm not quite sure if the whole "police" thing comes across, but on the other hand I didn't want to spell it out for people. It does have something alike those sleek procedural shows you always see on the telly, doesn't it?