This is about the forty fourth pinup in the series.
I already knew that when I bought all that strange stuff for the last pinup - for issue #43 that I talked about in the last article in this series - that I would be using them for all sorts of different ways later on. Because I'm cheap and I like to experiment with whatever I get my hands on.
So one idea I had immediately was about the dark, semitransparent film that I used as a reflective surface when layered together in #43. It kind of reminded me of how they used to do rasterized colouring and shadowing back in the day in mainstream, american comic books. I'we heard they had halls and halls of old biddies sitting in rows shaping raster film with box cutters to colour separate the final pages for the printing machine.
So I thought what if I used this dark film, which seemed to have a funny, kind of scratchy effect, as a basis for the colourisation. I would draw and ink the image as usual but then fill all the bits with colour in them with this stuff and just add the actual hues later on with photoshop.
I imagined I could put two, maybe even three layers of the stuff on top of each other so I would get different levels of darkness. Thankfully I made some testing, however and this dissuaded me from using more than one layer of the film.
That's what my test looked like right out of a scanner. I tried both original and photocopied inks to see how that effected the visibility of the lines behind the film. Also I didn't want to put the stuff onto the original line drawing in case something went horribly wrong and I needed to start all over again.
This is me playing with the levels of the image. Of course I would desire the black lines be completely black and the white bits to remain white so the film became really dark. As you can see, anything more than one layer of the film just appeared black. So I basically had only one mid shade to play with.
This is me trying out the colouring. At least that worked out like I imagined it would. I was happy with this knowledge and it was time to start doing the actual, final image.
This is how the line art looked like before any additional stuff. It looks like any other, basic drawing of mine.
Then I started putting the film onto it. The trouble was there wasn't all that much colour needed in this picture. Mainly the background and some elements in the characters - unfortunately I had chosen to do this on an issue with two very monochromatic characters in it! If I would have thought about this I could have at the least chosen a different angle and a different kind of an image. I made Anya's gun golden - which it isn't in the actual comic - just to add some hues to the page.
I also decided to add a little flare to the background by breaking my no-more-than-one-layer -rule. It didn't really matter if that bit looked completely black, it was just texture. And surprisingly it didn't - it created a really nice effect onto the background. I especially like how the light of the scanner hits the cut edge of film.
I like how the colours look - I just hope there was more of them on the final image. I also had no reasonable way of attaching the film to the page. I guess back in the old comics days the raster films they used had some kind of adhesive surface but this didn't - of course, since it was never meant to be used this way! So I ended just sticky taping the films onto the page which you can clearly see in the final picture (as well as my finger prints):
The image has a certain quality to it and it does look quite different from all my other Bianca and the Satanic Witches pinups. I just hope I had worked out some more of the kinks but I was really busy at the time - not for the first or the last time. In my opinion the pinup looks quite good little further away but maybe doesn't quite hold up to closer inspection.
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