Johanna Part 2

In my last blog post I talked about Johanna who came to my studio to get pictures done in her Pinocchio cosplay, and while we did those we also did some of her as Belle. Well, we already talked about the Belle project and how great it turned out so now we will look at the outcome of the Pinocchio project.

Johanna as Pinocchio

I love when a unique concept comes my way and forces me to think on the fly and craft something well ahead of the final image. With a project such as this I really like to create an image that tells a story about the character but not necessarily true to the original story. This is the fun part of; a) being an artist, because I have artistic license, and b) working with cosplayers who always seem to be open to whatever my twisted sense of creativity seems to conjure up.

Right away I had an image in my brain of Pinocchio in Geppetto's workshop chatting it up with Jiminy Cricket. So I started with some poses of Johanna pretending to be sitting on a flat surface where she was looking down and talking.

The final image turned out to be just what I was looking for, Pinocchio chatting with Jiminy with some of the other characters in the scene as well.

Geppetto's Workshop

Another idea that I had was that of when Pinocchio went out and was drinking and smoking cigars and I thought that would be a cool direction to go for an image. Luckily Johanna agreed and we took some images of her as what I called "Bad Pinocchio".

In this image I had a vision of Pinocchio lounging smoking a cigar and drinking with his pal Jiminy Cricket. I also thought that it would be cool to have Monstro the whale stuffed and hanging in the background. This was going to be kind of bad ass Pinocchio.

Bad Pinocchio

The final image turned out just how I had hoped with Bad Pinocchio and Jiminy lounging about in "The Stuffed Whale" tavern.

These kinds of projects are a lot of fun and really takes a character and puts them into a scene that tells a unique story that goes beyond just a studio picture against a blank background. I also think that these types of story telling images are totally one of a kind and that they provide a much deeper experience than a more traditional portrait.