How this sexy Halloween Pin-up was made - By Christopher King, Freelance Illustrator

FRANKENSTEIN PIN-UP -

This piece was started purely out of self-indulgence, wanting to create something that encompassed most of my own graphic influences from rock poster art, horror movies, vintage comic books and pin-ups.

Combining all of these I came up with the sexy Frankenstein pin-up concept with the mad Doctor lurking in the corner, bent on creating himself some cheeky eye candy to liven up his dark, dingy dungeon.

Once I had a clear direction of where I wanted to take this illustration I started to gather reference material for the main characters, pulling some screen shots of the horror classic ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ from the web and also looking through some books on poster art, in particular the weighty ‘Art of Modern Rock. I Also looked at the classic pin-up illustrations of Gil Elvgren which gave me ideas for facial expressions and posture. With all of this reference in front of me I started to sketch out some rough ideas including compositional variations and details such as clothes, background elements etc. At the end this process I had a solid starter image from which I based my first, tight pencil drawing that will provide the basis for everything to come.

I’d chosen to brake up this illustration up into 4 separate layers that are pencilled and inked on their own sheets of paper. These are; the pin-up figure, the background, the Doctor and the left over bits. I’ve started doing this more and more as I want to be able to move things around once I bring them all into Adobe Illustrator for colouring.

The pencil stage is where I spend most of my time. This is where it all has to look right before I go to inks it and I'll usually leave it alone for a couple of days after this stage, coming back to it with fresh eyes to see what I think. I’ve come to learn the importance of doing this as I’ll see straight away if there’s something wrong with it, which there almost always is.

Once I return to it after a little break and all is good I start to ink it up. This is possibly my favourite part of the process as all the lines are down and it’s now all about your flair and technique with ink, brush and pen. In this instance most of the inking was done in pen using Faber-Castell markers and also a Zig twin marker which has a brush tip on one end and flat tip on the other. The brush came out for little details that would benefit from a more organic line. It’s worth pointing out that I added a slightly thicker keyline around the main figure just to help it pop in front of everything else. All of the remaining elements are then finished and scanned in as grayscale, 300 dpi tiff files to be cleaned up and converted into vector format.

Colouring in Adobe illustrator can sometimes be the most laborious element of an illustration for me as it is essentially moving around a bunch of points on a screen, but once you’re in and it’s working, it is immensely satisfying too. This is where it all starts to come life and you can have fun trying out different colours and moving elements around.

I had the basic colour scheme of green and purple in my mind since the beginning so I kept developing on that until I was happy. I also added other elements such as highlights that I might not have drawn in by hand. I keep working at it, gather all the elements together and mess around with it until end up at a point where I feel that it doesn’t need anything more and consider it finished. Yay!

Now I'll add the text elements so it becomes a proper rock poster design. Staying with the self-indulgent theme I thought I might as well create version featuring some of my favourite grunge bands, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden and Mother Love Bone. Wow, they’re all playing on my birthday too! I had a few of these printed as huge A0 posters and gave them to my fellow grunge loving friends, they looked awesome!

I also put together a version for the band ‘Electric Frankenstein’ which I sent to their management and gained the response of ‘This is great!’ and the possibility of future promotional work for some of their new bands.

As an afterthought I drew alternate versions of the character which look really cool too! I might have to use those one day.