Hula/Hawaiin pin up

After doing some visual research into the themes, and looking at various hawaiian imagery I liked the visual aspect of a hula girl - more specifically, a hula pin up girl because I really like old pin up style illustrations.

It wouldn't have been very criminal damage if I just frew a straight forward pin up girl, so taking into account the 'quirky criminal damage twist' I chose to make her a zombie/tattooed hula pin up.

This was really something new for me because before, my illustrations have been quite basic in the content - they were all based on an existing image i.e. photograph or object. Therefore, to justify this as being my own work I couldn't find an image of a zombie hula pin up girl with tattoos because...it would be copying. So I did have to imagine some of it.

To get the proportions and position right, I just base my drawing on an old hawaiian pin up girl illustration (in retrospect, I wish I had used a generic pin up so that I didn't end up copying the hula skirt.) I then added...and substracted 'bits'.

When vectorising it, the main thing I didn't want to do was just use a standard 1pt stroke and then colour it in - so the outline is a shape in its self so that I could get different thicknesses around to add more depth and I just think it generally looks better (again, this is something new for me - in the past my illustrator have either been live traced or a 1 line stroke.)

Also, I haven't vectorised all the tattoos yet and she didn't have the criminal damage type on her leg on the original but after some development I thought this was a simple way of incorporating the brand name without needed anything else - however, if there is other type on the final composition I can simply remove the type and replace it with the other tattoo.

Same as the typefaces - none of these are set colourways, it was just a case of experimenting.
Up until this point...apart from the white eyes and the missing foot, it wasn't clear that she was supposed to be a zombie of some sort. With my wacom tablet I just added some shading a few bits of 'bloog' - I definately think this makes the image clearer.


The image does need more work (i.e. the grass skirt wasn't vectorised properly and it needs more gory detail on the face) - considering this is the first time I have illustrated something like this, I am really happy with it...which in itself is rare for me!