BLOG: Sexy Evil Women (Patreon)

You were into mean hot goth women as a kid, and you still are. Good. I have something for you.

I have worked with Nova and Mali on various anthology projects for a while. These projects have been some of the most foundational works in my career, and I’m so happy to be back with another project under their care. This time I’m working with them on my first ever Dames project! Floh and Nova have joined to provide editorial, curation, and design for Villainess, an art book celebrating evil women :) 

The visual hook beyond “evil lady sexy” is that each illustration is in black and white, with a singular hot neon ink spot treatment. Since I’ve been working in the print shop and working with other printers with weird inks and on weird machines, the neon ink enticed me. And then on top of that: the team wanted me to do a riso print for the crowdfund!

Concept

What do you think of when you hear the word “villainess”? Instantly, I think of sorceresses, 80s fantasy novels, a dress with a slit up to the hipbone, World of Warcraft, TTRPGs. Very formative, very telling. When formulating my submission idea to the team, these themes were what I included in the vague first draft concept pitch.

Naturally the subject would include werewolves, but what else? I’m currently exploring a throuple dynamic in Boyish Girlish right now (secretly, you’ll see soon) and I wanted to play around with that in this illustration.

The group of artists working on this project had a few conversations about what is “villainous” in the early stages of drawing, trying to pin down what the vibe is. We’re not talking about ontological good versus evil here. Ultimately, “villainy” is in the eye of the beholder, whether that’s someone seeking revenge, tearing down institutions, or just being sexy. Personally, I wanted to lean into the sexy, goth cartoon villain archetype and give her a big campy castle straight out of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. It’s as if you’re approaching her lair, but she’s got her pet werewolves on leashes at the entrance to thwart you!

Design

The villainess dress was inspired by impractical 80s skimpy fantasy dresses. The design for her outfit was the first time the importance of clothing design really clicked for me. I used to hate drawing clothes, and it would always be an after thought. Now I really understand and appreciate the character story you can tell through fashion!

The character story here is that she’s sexy.

I looked up some 80s fantasy outfits, mostly from book covers and TTRPG illustrations, and drew my inspiration from there for the different impractical elements of her costume. I had also been seeing these loose knotless braids on my Instagram feed a ton, with the gradient hair color, and I thought that looked lovely with her silhouette and the greyscale.

For the werewolves, the core of my wolf heart is rooted in Worgen from World of Warcraft. The design of their feet and big paw hands and thick mane ruff on the back of the neck are all a WoW homage. Naturally when drawing werewolves, I like to include the boobs. Sometimes I give them lots of boobs, but for this piece the more boobs I added, the sillier it became. It’s a delicate balance, trying to keep the werewolves sexy and threatening and campy but not too goofy.

BONUS: I talked about it in a previous blog post about the In Their Clutches zine, but this was another project where I woke up and someone is telling me to go to my computer and erase the nipples on the werewolves so that the Kickstarter won’t get flagged as mature. Wonderful life. Fuck Visa and Mastercard for real tho.

INK INK INK

Warning: this section reads back to me as fairly convoluted. Only the most galaxy brained print perverts would get something out of reading it.

When deciding where to put the neon ink, I knew I would want the neon to be the sky, cut in half by forks of lightning. One of the design challenges for this project is that the purple ink would be laid on top of the illustration, with no gradient or variation in tones/opacity. Just solid ink. I had to consider the negative space for the lightning, how it would play off the clouds and the fur and cast just a slight rim light on the figures without overtaking the illustration completely…

While ALSO considering the risograph version and file set up!

The challenge of making a riso print that matches this project aesthetic… well, riso is pastel, and these inks in the book are neon. And I was making one singular illustration to straddle both worlds. Sure, there’s the fluro range of riso inks, but 1- not every shop has every color and 2- I wanted the print to represent the range of neons in the book, not just the risograph tones.

My solution: neon paper!

At the print shop, I use the Astrobright papers a lot. I always use the red for my business cards, which I print at my local riso shop. They’re just so vibrant and gorgeous, and I love the look of black ink on them. This way I could represent an array of neon colors in the finished project with just one illustration, one set of stencils for the riso, and only using two types of ink. Cost effective legend Ren Strapp, that’s what they call me.

I figured while the book illustration focused on where I could put neon ink on top of black ink and white paper, I wanted the risograph print to focus on where I could put white and black inks on top of neon paper. The neon of the sky would become negative space for the Astrobright paper, and the negative space left for the clouds/lightning would become white ink in the riso version.

If I were to do this project again, I would have brainstormed more ways to include the purple in the book version of the composition, but when I consider the riso version, I think it worked out perfectly.

I haven’t printed these yet, so who knows what the final product will look like. But I’m excited to see it unfold. The charm of print is making something imperfect, human, physical and real, pulling it out of the digital space and making it exist in real life with us. Some people like print because it’s an exact duplication over and over, but I don’t see print that way. And that’s certainly not why I love risograph so much. I can’t wait to experiment!!

There’s still a few days left on the pre-order campaign as of writing and publishing this blog post. These prints won’t be around in this iteration again! Don’t wait!

I'm working on posting these blog posts to Patreon first before it goes up on my website :)