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Way back in the good old 30s, 40s & 50s, before real science had begun to catch up with pulp fiction, there was a penchant among sci-fi magazines for mad scientists to experiment on scantily-clad ladies in glass vessels. I've seen quite a few on FaceBook pages lately, so I thought I'd have a go at making a realistic-looking one of my own, mostly in Affinity Photo.As far as possible I've used my own photos, but the unfortunate female is from Pixabay, the Mad Scientist is Doc Brown from Back to the Future with William Herschel's head (photo: Julia Margaret Cameron), the glass thingy is from off the internet; the tubing is some Affinity Designer image brushes I made for the purpose. The whole thing was largely inspired by Richard Hamilton's Pop Art collage Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?. It grew organically, which means I had a half-formed plan in my head and mostly added stuff willy-nilly and moved it around till I was happy. Oh, and I had to paint everything electric-shock blue. I made this A2 size, which is a bit bigger than it needed to be really: the while thing is nearly 300MB, even after I'd flattened quite a few of the layers and groups. This is Hamilton's iconic work, which kicked off the Pop Art movement in 1956. In those days, cut and paste meant a pair of scissors and a bottle of Gloy!

This was my first attempt in Affinity Designer. I'm not very good with the pen tool yet, as I feel like I have more control with the pen tool in Illustrator. But I love being able to switch back and forth between personas!