About the Pinups #10: Pinup #22

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 twenty second pinup in the series.

This was kinda fun one. The issue #22 was about a horrible shoot out where Vernon Merrier gets basically blown to bits. This made me think of Frank Miller and many of his Sin City- or 300 -style images that were all about splashing, graphically depicted blood on top of a very simple silhouette shapes.

I started with taking a photograph for a starting point. I wanted the silhouette to work properly and be understandable amidst all the blood splotches so I decided to go for a photo model to get what I wanted. You can see my old living room in the background of the photo - as well as the very same computer I'm writing this in this very moment.

I was watching a certain YouTube podcast at the time, and you can somewhat see it in the monitor.

From the photo I drew the silhouette using a vector program. This is the end result. For once in my art all the proportions are in order!

I also made a simpler outline version - because it's cheaper to print! I used it to paint the bullet lines and exit wounds on the silhouette.

Here you can see the exploding blood. It's just black water colour. The weird pieces of the silhouette apparent are so that I can more easily put the scanned image together with the vectorized silhouette on PhotoShop.

Similarly I made the background. It is also just black colouring splashed all around with two brushes. You can believe I had black water colour all around the place after this one.

I then used both of these black and white paintings as alpha channel models to create the final image. I experimented a lot with the different shades and how big should the character silhouette be so that it was understandable from the background that is also black underneath all the lighter red blood. I think I stroke a nice balance in the end.

The only thing I'm not entirely happy with are the bullet lines - the yellow strokes done with thin brush. Somehow they don't look like they belong to the image but I felt I need to somehow make clear the silhouette (or Vernon Merrier) is shot with a gun. I just hope I would have imagined some other way of showing this.

All in all I still like this pinup: it's a real blood bath. And despite the photographic model used it still looks organic and graphical. I might even go as far as to call it striking.