About the Pinups #12: Pinups #24-28

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 twenty fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and eight pinup in the series.

Bianca and the Satanic Witches issues #24-28 were all about a flashback to Stuart's past - how he grew up, what he is all about and, of course, how he met our eponymous character.

Since these share a common theme and create a smaller sub section within our larger story, I thought it might be a good idea to make the pinups match somehow so that they create a whole as well.

These issues usually start (or end in) the present time and then diverge into the past. So I thought of dividing the images into two parts as well: Stuart, the story teller and then an image about the story he is telling.

Once again I returned to one of my most important concepts: contrasts. I wanted to make the flash backs with vibrant colours so I decided to do the Stuart side of the image only in black and white line art.

I also decided to draw them in very small size so that they look little crappy and hazy. This is not only to contrast the detailed nature of the memories but also to play with the concept of memory normally being hazy and unreliable. Now I wanted to almost say that to Stuart his memories, his past is what he knows and understands whereas his present time is in a dangerous mist.

Then the actual flash back images. I wanted to colour them with nice, traditional comic bookey colours since the actual flash backs in the comic have a certain, simplified colour theme or scale to them to separate them from the present day stuff. In these images I wanted to show Stuart's past in all of it's colours.

For the first time I drew the line art into the same paper I watercoloured. This is because I didn't want to combine too many elements within these; I wanted these images to be pretty much ready when I scanned them in. This also made them quicker to do but it also splotched the inks in some images.

I used water colours for the backgrounds but coloured the characters with colour pencils. I even did the black areas with it instead of inks which gives a nicely washed out quality to the pictures. Kinda like a memory you try to return to your head after a long time of not thinking about it.

Then I combined the two elements. I enlarged the Stuart -images (after vectorizing them, of course) to encompass the whole surface of the pinup and then composed the flash back image on top of that. I cut them into an oval shape and gave them a nice, solid, glowing colour shadow to mix the two up a little bit more.

I like the uniformity of the images. I just wish I had thought more crazy poses to put Stuart in - he looks rather similar in Pinups #24 and #25. But there might be even more flash backs in the future of Bianca and the Satanic Witches so maybe I even return to this format on the Pinups then. Let's see!