Friday, November 30, 2018

How the Enfield Girl got me in trouble with my wife

The Enfield Girl has always been a favorite of mine,
perhaps for obvious reasons.
I've always called her "the Enfield Girl."

Her appearance as the artwork in an advertisement for a cafe racer kit available for the Royal Enfield Bullet was a favorite of mine. Others liked it too. At one point it was even available as a poster.

This was early in the 21st Century, before Royal Enfield brought out its factory built cafe racer, the Continental GT, in 2014. The racer kit filled a need back then. It certainly looked the part, and to my eye the Enfield Girl wasn't bad looking either.

Intrigued, I did some research and tracked down her original creator, a now deceased artist renown for his paintings of pin-up girls.

This pin-up girl wasn't originally posed on a Royal Enfield, or even on a motorcycle. That alteration was made for Royal Enfield by a young man at an advertising agency.

The transition from pin-up to motorcycle ad was skillful. Perhaps that was what put an idea into my head.

I was already amusing myself using PhotoShop to alter great motorcycling photos, putting my own face into the pictures. This was meant as a joke, but it also allowed me to imagine what it might have been like to be those riders, back in the glory days of motorcycling.

S-o-o-o-o... why not put my wife's head on the Enfield Girl's body?

Talk about inviting a negative reaction! The best I hoped for was a good laugh.

It was tricky. For one thing, the Enfield Girl is showing a lot of skin, and matching the skin tone was a chore.

Another problem was that, as part of the challenge to myself, I had insisted on always using the very same photo of myself for every shot I altered.

Whenever I had included my wife in a photo (as a sidecar passenger for instance) I had used the exact same photo of her head.

This was difficult, but it served to increase the "groan factor" when I used the results for home-made holiday cards for family members.

For the Enfield Girl project this was a real problem: the completely random photo I was using of my wife was not in sharp focus. Usually this was an advantage, as the old photos I was trying to match were often fuzzy.

But in this case the original Enfield Girl and her robust figure were in sharp focus. I had to blur her and the Royal Enfield cafe racer slightly to match.

The results were not entirely satisfactory and so I won't reproduce them here.

I'd better not.

Suffice it to say that the reaction I got on presentation of the finished product were close to what I expected.

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous12/01/2018

    Good thing you weren't taken as much with Nortons, my wife never appreciated my collection of Norton girl adverts !

    ReplyDelete
  2. The marvel of human gene mapping has found that women lack the "sense of humor" gene for anything associated with motorcycles and hot rods and any other woman that would be seen associated with them.

    ReplyDelete

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