About the Pinups #11: Pinup #23

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 third pinup in the series.

With this one I wanted to try something quite different. Episode #23 is very much about the "ordinary" lives of our characters being surrounded from external threats and unforeseen events. So I had this idea of the relative normalcy being represented by suitable, "normal" objects seen through a mirror and then that mirror being approached by menacing figures - as if monsters coming from "the other side".

Firstly I painted the mirror in a normal way. This would be the background in the piece.

Then I took a photograph of my kitchen. Yes, it is very dirty - I'm so sorry about that. But since the hotel our main characters occupy is also supposed to be decrepit and unkempt it actually works out well.

I used stuff I just happened to have lying around: a dress that kinda looks like something Bianca might maybe wear, a studded belt, some alcoholic beverages. A telephone is there just because it was the most "normal", ordinary thing I could think of.

On top of everything there is a snake. It's a plastic joke shop one I just happened to have. I used it to represent the magic our characters use - after all, as Satanic Witches even that is very much ordinary and normal to them. I put it on the middle and on top of everything to show it's central role but I'm happy it's still quite small so it doesn't control everything too much.

I wanted to add the colouring for the photograph myself so I toyed with it a bit. First I tried turning it into a black and white vector image but that doesn't quite work - the lighting is way too random to make the objects out properly. So I discarded this.

Then I made the image into a black and white print version where all the shades of grey are made out of black dots. This was easy to colour so I printed it out.

I once again painted the whole image at once on a already wet paper so the shades mix with each other and look nicely messy. Except the snake which I wanted to emphasise since it is quite small and could be lost on the image otherwise. So I waited for the paper to dry and added the green for the snake later.

I then put the pointillist black and white image to the original painting and added the colours. I left some of the mirror's shade visible from under the colouring so that it still seems like it belongs to the same image. You can somewhat see the white reflections on the mirror's surface on the final image.

Then I made the demon shapes that appear to be going towards the mirror. I drew them all on black, scanned them and vectorized them.

I put them on Photoshop and used them as alpha channel shapes on gradient layers so that they all start from bright red and go towards black at the bottom. This worked quite well in my opinion.

The resulting image is one of my all time favourites: a melding of three completely different techniques. I'm not so sure the symbolism in the picture opens up to a general observer but I dare to think it looks quite cool nevertheless.