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.