Pinheads All The Way Down...

Pinhead - Pinhead - Pinhead Mash-Up

As part of the Halloween series of drawings, I intended to include Schlitzie the Pinhead from Tod Browning's movie, "Freaks", but just ran out of time.  I mentioned this to Todd, a chum of mine from work, and since he is a big fan of the movie he INSISTED that I had to do it!  He even suggested that I should do a mash-up of Pinhead from "Freaks" and Pinhead from "Hellraiser".  I decided to one-up that mash-up by also including Zippy the Pinhead from the "Zippy" comic strip by Bill Griffith, which is one of my favorite comic strips for its pop-surrealism.  (Zippy the Pinhead was also inspired by Schlitzie the Pinhead from the movie "Freaks", so it all comes full circle :-).

So, as Bill Griffith would say, "A tip o' the pen to Todd G."  Blame him (mostly) for this.

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STEP ONE: Here are the pencils.  I did a real quick sketch from a screen cap of the movie.

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STEP TWO: I did the inks using a No. 4 brush and India ink.  The head proportions in the pencils seemed a little... normalized, so I "fixed" that in the inks.  I intended to add the nails/pins for the Hellraiser Pinhead in Photoshop, as it seemed like there was too much to go wrong at that stage, and I wanted to be able to correct/remove them if worse came to worse and I goofed it all up.

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STEP THREE: After scanning it in, I added the pins to the face.  I also realized that the collar for Schlitzie didn't quite read like Zippy the Pinhead from the comic strip as I originally intended.  I added Zippy's trademark collar into the picture, as well as the polka-dot muumuu.  I did sort of intentionally leave the line-weight the same for the collar and muumuu, so it would more closely resemble the comic strip.  But, I just wasn't sure about that decision...

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STEP FOUR: I decided I didn't like the line weight being too much the same on the muumuu after all--the different art styles just clashed too much--and did what most artists would do in that situation: Blacked it all out.  I also thought it would add to the dramatic lighting.  :-)  I then colored the whole thing on a new MULTIPLY Layer and called it DONE!

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Pen and ink on 8-1/2" x 11" card stock and digital coloring in Photoshop.

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