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Panthera
This scene shows one of the new sculpts in the forthcoming line of 40mm resin Femme Militants from the newly formed John Blanche Miniatures. The idea was to contextualise the girl (known as Panthera) to give some idea of the world she inhabits. Having settled on a cyberpunk-red-light-district setting the first thing I did was to go down the road to Soho (London's seediest district) to do some visual research ("no, really officer, I'm on a research trip..."). I discovered that all the building in the area are coated with accretions of pipes, ducts, vents and cables. It seems customary to add things like this without ever removing the old versions. I set to work building the scenery using foam board, textured plasticard, wire and my bitz box (the lamp post uses a scale banister from a doll's house). I kept the painting dark and refrained from using too many highlights as they can destroy the illusion of scale. Those who are paying attention will notice the original Blanche artwork is the basis of a poster just behind Panthera. The lighting was a complex interactive setup using a mixture of strobe and continuous sources. The neon tubes were drawn in Illustrator using my Wacom tablet and composited in afterwards. This process was helped by the inclusion of pink and green incidental lighting in the original shots. I used my Nikon D100 hooked up to my PC so I could control it without touching anything, which is perhaps the most civilised way to take photographs. Retouching was in Photoshop using a million adjustment layers and layer masks. I think it's one of my best yet, though perhaps the back end of Panthera is a little over exposed (no pun intended). I was going to fill the set with smoke but had a technical hitch. Oh well... The mini was painted by the great Matt Parkes - so credit must go to him!
Posted: 11 May 2006
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