Hey guys! As I’m sure you’ve seen, some of the Archer ladies recently made it into Sports Illustrated! I mentioned I did a tiny part of the Pam that was printed but I also did a whole spread that became an bonus!

So here’s some process work just to give you guys a little behind the scenes about how something like this gets made.

We start with thumbnails! There were four of us and each of us was given a pose to work with–obviously I was given Pam showing off that great butt and her back tattoo. So I did a few sketches to try and decide what pose we wanted to go with since this was more about Pam’s body than her bikini, the pose really had to sell it. We went with #2 with some edits–Lana’s pose has the finger in the mouth so we didn’t want to have two ladies doing something similar.

Now for this, I went ahead and made a little gif to save some space and so you can see how it layers up! The original idea was to have the body-paint bikini so I focused on making sure her nude body looked good. Did everything in the steps of laying down the line-work first, followed by the base colour–her arms were on separate layers just to make the drawing of her shape easier. Then added on our usual shadowing to match the style of the show. While I was working, I kept one of her body files open to make sure it matched up but since this is fancier, got to give her some extra love and some highlights!

Now her head and tattoos I used the existing elements we have from the show and adjusted it to fit the photoshop drawing, to make sure it was on model. Also to save everyone from my terrible handwriting. Trust me, you don’t want me writing out that tattoo. I used the Mesh Warp tool in Illustrator and pasted it into photoshop as a Smart Object so I could still edit it.

Here’s some bikini bottoms we didn’t use–again the original idea was the painted on bikini but we ended up not loving how these looked.

Now here is my final drawing! Since we were no longer doing a painted on bikini, we changed up how the bottoms interacted with her body and added a tie around her neck to imply she was wearing a monokini–like in her other pin-up. I’m sure you noticed I also changed the size of her head. Sometimes it takes finishing a piece of artwork to notice some anatomy issues you’ve been staring at the whole time.

And now the final with all the final touches! The background was painted in by Kim Feigenbaum. All the finishing touches–lightening effects, that beachy glow, adding the text and logos and such–were done by our compositor Mark Paterson. The fancy text that was made to match the Sports Illustrated model information was also by Chi Duong, the artist behind the Lana pin-up!

Well that’s all I got for Pam! This was a really fun project to be apart of and an interested break away from my usual work day. We had a week dedicated to knocking these guys out and it’s been great to see all the reactions to our hard work <3