About the Pinups #15: Pinups 13 & 33

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 thirteenth and the thirty third pinup in the series.

I don't usually like to highlight what I consider failures, but now I'm going to make an exception. There is a particular, visual trick I have tried twice already with not so great results.

I have always been interested in how the colours are formed. In printed colours the different layers of each sub colour need to be separated for the printer: you can split any colour image into three or four greyscale images that each represents one colour. One black and white image is, for example, red (or magenta). And more white the bits in the picture, more red is then going to be printed there. When you put all these together you get one full colour image.

I tried playing with this. I got the idea from one of my artistic heroes, Richard Corben who I believe has once told that when he made his seminal work Den: Neverwhere he made, atleast some of the brilliant colours in that work, by directly painting them to diferent colour layers. So you would make three or four, depending on the technique you are using, grey scale pictures and combining them create one full image.

I went straight ahead and tried dublicating this. Instead of greyscales, though, I decided to use straight black and white line art which I don't think was the smartest of moves - atleast twice. So I penciled this image of Lorena kneeling on a pentagram and then tried to ink separately all the different colour bits. They looked something like this:

Yellow.

Black.

Magenta.

Cyan.

This time I had not studied Photoshop well enough to know better so I ended just putting all of these images on top of each other and simply playing with the layer mixes until I got something that atleast a little bit created something of an effect.

You can see that there is still quite a bit of white on this pinup #13. This was a deliberate artistic move but a very bad one: now all the yellow just disappears somewhere. Also, because I used the layer mixes instead of the actual colour channels the mixing colours - the little there is of them - look like absolute shit. Just look at Lorena's wrist supports.

So in the end I was never happy with this. It looked like a hurried black and white line drawing with just some colour details spliced in willy nilly - even though in actuality it was one of the pinups I actually spent the longest time trying to make. But I was still interested in this basic idea so I always knew that I would want to try this again and do it better.

Fast forward a bit and we arrive to pinup #33. I wanted this image to be very strange, almost surreal and somehow vibrant. I thought this might be the best possible chance to retry this technique.

So I made sure to use as much different colours as possible. I spent a long, long time trying to imagine how the colours would turn out. This was very different for me - and also my downfall, as you can clearly see in the final result.

There are the separated colour channels of this one:

Black.

Red.

Blue.

Green.

The problem this time arised when I decided to go for RGB instead of CMYK. What this means is that RGB picture is created from red, green and blue when CMYK comes from cyan, magenda, yellow and black. So in actuality I should not have made any black lines at all since the blacks in this image are supposed to be created when all three channels combine - but I didn't trust myself enough. I wanted to make sure the black outlines looked good no matter what. And that fucked up everything.

That meant I could not use the combination effect for it's fullest since then the image might have had more black than intended. Also since I had very hard time trying to think what colours mix into what in RGB world - that, after all, works completely differently than the more familiar CMYK world - I made some huge colour mistakes.

The blue forest I think one could maybe get away with, the image being about a night after all, but the green hair of Lorena and the green skin of Valerie look god awful. The green moon is also the result of this nonsense as is the wrong shade of purple on the antagonist's hand - as any reader of Bianca surely knows, it's supposed to be blue.

So, even though the image retained it's weird and almost psychedelic quality I was aiming for and does look a little bit better than #13, this was not at how it was supposed to look like at all. In the end it just appears shitty and, well, wrong.

I'm still somehow in love with this idea and maybe I give it even a third shot - although they do say that doing something multiple times whilst awaiting for different results is the sign of madness... but who can say.