I just started on working on the sequal for my early pinup calendar "Mistreatment of Bunnies 2006". The part II is called "Hard Times for Hamsters 2008", so it's basically the same idea again. 12 chubby pinups with animal cruelty! Here's the first pinup. I thinks it's for June, I'm not sure yet.



As the previous calendar, this one is also a "omakustanne". But for doing this one I got a stipend from the Finnish Society of Illustrators, "Kuvittajat ry", thanks very much!

So I don't have a publisher (yet, please feel free to give me a email if you are interested in publishing this!) and I'm doing this almost just for fun. For "Mistreatment of Bunnies" I printed a limited edition of 200, about half of it I sold to get the printing costs back, and the other half I used as a giveaway present for clients or as a part of my portfolio. I also send copies to different publishers, mainly to U.S. but "Mistreatment" was never officially published. A big westcoast art publisher called Last Gasp was at first very interested in publishing my calendar in the States, but then they suddenly lost their interest. I don't know what happened but I think I'll send them this new calendar too and see what they think of it.

This time I'm also printing 200 copies and I  should finish this by the beginning of October if I'm going to sell any of these. So I hope I can do this in time.

Here's a little about making the painting. (Or a picture. As you'll see it hasn't got anything to do with paint.) OK, one of my best buys in Japan is this!


I also bought a little bit more complicated (and more expensive) male version.


I actually did not know that you can buy these kind of modeling dolls from the art store. In Finland you only have these crappy wooden dolls with basic geometric shapes. For me these are amazing! As I've said before I have difficulties with making right poses and I need to have something 3D for making the composition. And these guys do the job for me just right!

So I started doing a sketch. First a quick scratch.


Then a more detailed one.


I scanned the sketch and continued it with Photoshop. I usually make the final skecth in Photoshop, it is easier for me. I was not happy with the way the face started to look like. It seems that without a photo reference I can draw only a one type of face even if I try to do something different.


So I had to borrow the face from an old vintage stock photo I found.


Then I got the sketch almost right and started to work with the colors.

First I did the skintone.


Then the clothes.


A thought I'll try to do the pictures for the calendar with a not-so-realistic style. I use more comic like shadowing, the foldes of the clothes don't have to be just rigth and the lights on the skin can be a little bit stylised. I like very much classic 50's style pinups and hotrod pinups. They are not so over-realistic and that's why they look so awesome. I don't like the painting to really look like it's been painted from a photo. Pinups of Sorayama or Luis Royo are not my cup of tea. I like Coop!

After I got the posture right I sketched the background.


I didn't like the round tennis court. It looked dull and heavy.


So I made the background a little bit different as you can see if you look at the final picture on top of this post. Now its about finished. I'm going to do all the other 11 pinups and then then make some final corrections to all of the pictures.

PS. Another superior item I bought from Japan:


I normally use Rotring 0.25 for making the outlines, but after I found this I haven't used Rotring since. I'm no sure what is the name of the pen, I think it's School-G and it says also "Tachikawa". I bought this from an manga store from Tachikawa so could this be their own pen? I don't know. But this pen is magnificent. If pressed lightly the line is even thinner than Rotring's, but if pressed harder the line gets thicker. This pen also slides on paper 10 x better than Rotring ('cause you'll have to use Rotring in a certain position, you can use this anyway you like). Yes, I like!