"The face is the real personality of my pin-up girls."

Gil Elvgren, c. 1963BIOI was born August 1977 in Arizona. During my childhood I always loved to draw. Drawing and painting was my escape from the mundane, as well as an outlet for my anger, frustrations and fears. I was horribly frightened of monsters as a child, so I would draw them in order to come to grips with my fear of them. As a result I would always be drawing these incredibly violent and gory images. I'm sure most of my teachers in school probably thought I was going to grow up to be an axe murderer from the things I would draw.

Well, that love for drawing never really faded as I got older. I learned more about technique as the years went on, I started painting using tools such as an airbrush, acrylics and watercolors. I started learning how to work in other mediums such as pastels and color pencils, as well as ink. I also got into drawing other things, mostly comics. I found everything I was interested in as a youth, in comics. Monsters, super heroes, beautiful woman, space ships, fantasy, sci-fi, etc., etc.. So I mainly focused on comic art for the next seven to eight years. I thought that I had found my 'thing' as far as my art work was concerned. I was going to be a comic book artist.

As stated above, I was using traditional methods to create my work. Paints, pencils, ink, paper and board, etc.. Then it happened. I was looking through one of my favorite comic titles and I was marveling at the coloring work of Liquid!. I was saying to myself, "How do they do that?". Then I found out that they were using a computer to color all of those books I loved so much. Well, that did it for me. I decided that I had to get a computer in order to compete in the industry these days, but I still had no idea what kind of software they were using or how they went about creating it. After lots of study and asking around, I found out what type of computer would best suit my needs and what type of software I would need to get. I had never even owned a computer before and I was almost completely computer illiterate, but I knew what I wanted to do and I wasn't going to let anything get in my way. I took a while just for me to learn the basics of operating a computer, then came Photoshop.

When I first purchased my copy of Photoshop and my Wacom tablet, I was baffled. I had no idea what I was doing or where to start. After searching the internet, reading a few tutorials and through 'trial and error'. I was finally starting to get the hang of using Photoshop to color my comic art. I thought that's all I would use Photoshop for, to color in my inked line art. After a while I started getting a lot better at coloring my comic art and I was getting a much better grasp on how to use Photoshop and it's tools. Then as an experiment one day, I decided I was going to try to create a piece with a comic style, but I wanted to paint it as realistically as possible. So I painted a piece of an 'exotic dancer' with a very realistic painting style but with a strong black out line to emphasize the comic feel of the piece. I was so happy with that piece, that I decided to try painting a couple more 'realistic' pieces of pin-up girls. The whole time while I was working on this new photo-realistic style of painting I was using photos either from the internet or various magazines as reference. Once I started getting better at painting pin-ups, I realized that I needed to shoot my own reference photos in order to make my work as original as possible.

It was then that I decided I was going to take on the daunting task of trying to find my own models and taking my own reference photos to paint from. I already had one model, my beautiful fianc Amy, but I needed others in order to add some variety to my work. I eventually found a couple really pretty models that were willing to give me a shot, but then another problem arose. I didn't know the first thing about photography. My knowledge of photography did eventually start to grow after tons of wasted money and film. Now I'm working with models ranging from cover girls to the girl next door and loving every minute of it.

The range of my work also spans outside of the pin-up genre into fantasy, sci-fi and more. Things outside the world of photo reference and reality, things that live only in the recesses of my mind. Creatures, people, places that only show themselves in my wildest dreams and darkest nightmares. What can I say? I guess I still love drawing monsters, just like when I was a kid.

I've been working as a professional freelance illustrator and pin-up artist since January of 2001.

Malachi D. Maloney