About the Pinups #19: Pinup #41

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 forty first pinup in the series.

In Bianca and the Satanic Witches episode #41 we revealed that Bianca has been brainwashed to do the series' antagonists bidding so the whole thing, in my mind, was about the battle for her identity. I wanted to create a picture that would at a quick glance look pleasant, even pretty, but would also showcase this dueling nature now struggling within her.

So I decided to do a simple portrait of Bianca - I never tire of painting or drawing her! And I had not had a lot of opportunities lately. This picture would be divided into two halves: one being the "real" her done with one style and the other half - the one with the weird eye symbolizing this evil influence in her life - done with another.

First I just drew her image with pencils to start with. I decided to do the right side, the "normal" side with water colours since to me that always looks more pleasant - softer and more subtle. This is how it ended up:

Notice that I did not just do the half but continued the image well into the other side - this is because I did not yet know how much I wanted the sides to mix into each other. I wanted to have the opportunity to play with fades and mixes to my pleasure later.

The other half I made with inks and then coloured with water colours like I usually do the comic pages as well. That works because my line art is often rather stark and unforgiving, so it works much better on the mechanized, mindless side. This is how they looked:

Then I had to think how to make the middle point where these two Biancas somehow meet each other. I could always just fade them into each other... but somehow that didn't seem good enough. That would not convey the inner struggle and the animosity between her programming and her real personality.

So one thing that came to mind was to make a kind of tear, as if these two images of her were two different works of art haphazardly ripped from somewhere and thrown together; only accidentally forming a cohesive picture. But how to do this?

I'm not sure if there are easier ways but I decided on this: I took pieces of green construction paper and literally cut the tear shape into them. I then used tissue paper to glue the "ripped" paper effect into their sides - the final thing that would remain in the image. Then I glued those into some kind of background that was just about the funny texture I had happened to find and some decorative tape as well.

This is how that looked scanned:

Of course, it would not have needed that much green in it since I would just have cut it into photoshop but I guess it was easier to deal with when it was roughly A4 -shaped. I then used the channels in Photoshop to remove all the green so that the only thing remaining are the tissue paper tears and the background with realistic shadows and everything. I spliced that into the image and played with the colours a tad. And that's how the image was made.

I really like pinup #41. It is one of my favourites and, in my opinion, one of the best Bianca -images I have ever done. She just looks so nice yet there is some kind of malicious undercurrent in the whole thing... I really think I pulled off what I set of to do in this one. Yay!

I hope you liked it as well. It also shows that sometimes something good can truly come from experiencing stuff you haven't really tried before.