About the Pinups #14: Pinup #31

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 thirty first pinup in the series.

Episode #31 was very much about Sliver and Hershell having a revelation on what might be going on with the village of Shipwreck-Upon-Tweed. It was all about them learning how to maybe get into the way of our main characters, as a faithful reader has seen in the recent episodes.

I wanted the pinup to somehow convey this broadening of the main, and this is what lead me to the rather psychedelic band posters of the 1960's. You know, of those bands that were all about opening their minds. This is a strange comparison since at least Sliver would undoubtedly hate everything the sixties were (or are presented to be) about but it also seemed to work in some weird way.

I also wanted to have a some sort of a police procedural look to it for obvious reasons so I decided upon a rather traditional "two cops" pose, with Gary looking a bit puzzled. This is also why I ended up going with mainly blues in the colour department.

First I sketched the pose. I don't usually scan these since I don't really need them but since I was about to ink the piece with a bit more un-line-artey way I decided to do so just that I got a reference where the actual silhouette of the pair is supposed to be.

Then I inked the piece. As you can see I went for more "realistic" way of black shadows instead of line art. It has been years since I have inked anything this way so it was bit of a struggle.

Then I took the original pencil outline to a vector program and redrew the outlines with it. That allowed me to create these sort of outer shapes that follow the shapes of the pair quite easily. The square thing on top of the heads is quite useless but just seemed so synonymous with this style that I could not help it. In the aforementioned band posters it would have the name of the band or a venue in it; since I don't want any extraneous text on these pinups I just put my autograph in there.

I also made these margins with vectors. That sure was easy.

Then I just mixed and matched them all in photoshop, changing the colours until I was happy. This is easy to do when you just put the different pixel images into alpha channels of solid colour layers.

In the end I am semi happy with this one. I think it does require yet something else, some new element. But then I think it would have broken the simplicity of some of those psychedelic posters it is based on. At the least it was a worth while experiment.