About the Pinups #17: Pinup #38

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 eight pinup in the series.

This is actually a rather simple one, but one I like a lot. In this issue Anya is taken into police custody - a series of events we see is still going on in the story. So I wanted a shot of those old style police light things you can sometimes see at the walls of small, quaint police stations. And then it would have the reflection of Anya in cuffs as if she was imprisoned inside the blue globe. So it's kinda like a point of view shot where we don't see Anya other than as this reflection so that the image can have kind of a double meaning.

I decided to make the scenery as a painting and then make the reflection as a colourized line drawing. First I just painted the background.

Then I drew the reflection. As you can see, I was already going for a bit of a fish eye -effect although I knew I would have to emphasize this more with photoshop later.

I also painted the colours for the reflection. I didn't bother to paint the reflection's background separately as there isn't much of it anyway. This is why I could not use the X:s to help putting the images together since every inch was covered in paint - although I still drew them on the line art without much thought.

Then I made the reflected image as I normally would any other picture in Bianca and the Satanic Witches. This is how it looked at that point.

Then all I had to do was unite the two. As I said, I made the reflection into a total sphere so it would fit inside the police light thingy. Then I just played with the opacity and different blending modes to create the final illusion. I also had to paint out the reflection from the white "police" -text because that would not be reflective.

In the end I quite like this image. It's simple but I think it looks cool. The only thing I don't like is the red splotch in the blue light - I was trying to create a hot spot for the globe, as if reflected from the sun. I don't know why I made it red which probably wasn't the smartest thing in the world. Plus it just ended looking like some sort of mess instead of a shine from a light source. But otherwise I do really like this pinup.