the Rocketeer pinup

Another pinup that I don’t think I’ve shared too much is the Rocketeer. I was asked to contribute a pinup to a Rocketeer week on for a website but it ended up not coming together. I still did the pinup though.

Anyway, this piece is a good indication of where my work sort of ended the year off in 2015: lots of love for black & white ink work, playing with textures and washes and halftone patters and overall generally enjoying drawing. We’ll see where it goes from here.

To get inspired for the pinup, I actually forced my wife to watch the Rocketeer with me – something I hadn’t seen since I was a kid. Surprisingly, it still holds up as a decently entertaining movie and I’m waiting for someone to reboot it (seeing as how that seems to be the thing to do). But it really did the trick and gave me lots of good ideas. I sketched out quite a few and was really focused on doing something Art Deco until I decided that zeppelins would definitely be the thing to include. Below you can see the work in progress: some rough doodles, my pencil drawing (where I’m still not sure where to stick the zeppelins), two zeppelin drawings that I actually did separately before fiddling with placement in Photoshop and then the ink work and then the final piece with everything added in and cleaned up.