About the Pinups #9: Pinup #17

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 seventeenth pinup in the series.

With this I wanted to do something, once again, quite different: vectors. I have used vectoring in my work a lot with the finishing touches, but at this time I was experimenting more and more with making whole images with this technique.

I still wasn't comfortable with drawing the characters this way so I just did the background. First I sketched the thing with pencils, as usual, and scanned this to my computer.

I then put that on my vector program and started adding surfaces. Notice how I have played with gradients and different effects - this was all playing around as I very much didn't quite yet know what I was doing. Especially the globe in the center left of the image looks really shitty and I wish I had used a real image of a globe map as a reference.

The reflections of the windows of the cupboard are vectored photographs of my then house. I dropped their colour depth and played with the colours to make them look like they were only reflected on the glass surface. I'm not so sure how well this worked out.

The characters I drew all individually as usual, and inked by hand. Here are the originals:

And also my signature that also ended up in other images that year:

I coloured the figures with photoshop that I also used to compile the whole thing. I don't really like colouring with photoshop, but this time I felt that paint or colour pencil colours would not mix with the shiny vector surfaces.

I also added shadows that created nice softness to the otherwise very crisp and sharp picture.

In the end I think this image was a step into an interesting direction - some things should have been done better, but that's the point with experimenting, I think.