About the Pinups #18: Pinup #40

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 fortieth pinup in the series.

This one I had a clear image what I wanted it to look like. I had made vectorized pinups or pinups with vectorized backgrounds before - namely pinups #17 and #29. They never looked too great - there is just something in the coloured shapes I never manage to make look too lively. I wanted to figure out a way to have that same amount of sharpness but with some kind of textures.

I decided to do this with photoshop instead of a vector program - this might have been a slight mistake since now it was quite difficult to keep the shapes symmetrical and the perspective in order. If I tried this again, that's what I would do differently: unite the best of both worlds.

I did not know this yet, however, when I started experimenting. Firstly I sketched the background crudely with pencils and scanned that.

Then I needed a bunch of textures. I have a small library of them, build throughout the years but I wanted something new. So I took close up photographs of old comic book pages so one could only see the rasterizations of the colours and some lines here and there.

I used these to shape the room view on top of the sketch I had scanned. I designated one texture image to one side of the room and turned them all black and white. Then I just drew them according to my pencils to create the background.

Then I coloured them with hues. I wanted the overall feel to be rather monochromatic - mainly sickly green to emphasize the uneasy feeling I wanted to convey - so the main point is still on the textures themselves but I added some details and such where necessary. The floor grid pattern I made with a vector program.

The main character in the image, Valerie, I drew and painted as usual.

Then I drew the ghostly demon shapes. I wanted them to look weird and kind of twisted so I both sketched and inked them with my left hand instead of the right. This created a nicely primitivistic look.

Then I put all of these together. I added some shadows onto the background and drew one for Valerie as well. Also some white shines to the glass surfaces. I played with the alpha channels of the demon shapes making them semi transparent, fading out at the bottom.

I'm happy with the end result although the kind of blurriness of photoshop I don't necessarily appreciate. If you zoom into the image you can see the perspective isn't quite right and that's why I probably should have done the overall shapes with a vector program and fill them in with photoshop. But oh well.

That's one reason I enjoy doing these pinups: they give me a chance to experiment with different ways of doing things. Sometimes those experiments fail but sometimes they also succeed. This could have been a little better but I do think the overall effect is quite striking.