Why Do Topless Pin-Ups Look So GOOD In Blue Jeans?
I never went to art school. I’m dumb about a lot of art things. But I know when a pin-up works, when a girl POPS off the page and you feel a little happier, just for having seen her.
And recently I’ve been noticing one combination that really works well, that ALWAYS POPS off the page, and that’s topless girls in tight blue jeans. And I started asking myself: “Pourqoi?”
And what I learned will NOT shock you, since you’ve already seen the title image of this post: I THINK it’s because the base color used for blue jeans and the base colors used for golden, tanned Caucasian skin are almost directly OPPOSITE each other on the color wheel, making them ‘Complementary’ colors, or ones that make the other stand out and pop the most.
Huh. I’m just realizing I maybe should have hidden that answer from you until the end of this article, annoying-Youtuber style, in order to keep people reading for longer.
Fuck it, YOLO, it gave me a chance to draw a fun girl and learn something new, so let’s go through our normal pin-up process and see what ELSE we can learn while showing YOU how to make images like the above on your own (and then adding to it to make our fun final sticker!)
STEP 1: INSPIRATION
As you know, we always start with a fun hook. A good concept with bad art will take your pin-up much farther than a boring concept with great art. Remember our Motto: “If it’s not fun, why draw it?”
So to make the sticker for this post, I was wandering around my luxury Spanish villa muttering to myself: “Topless... Blue Jeans... Topless... Blue Jeans…” But nothing was coming to me. Just a topless girl sitting around in blue jeans might be okay for a color study, but without a hook, it’s not FUN.
And then I remembered Mardi Gras exists. And I knew what I had to do.
That hook I will keep secret from you, to have something to reveal at the end, but that’s enough inspiration to give me a fun concept. Let’s move on to-
STEP 2: ROUGH PENCIL SKETCHING
As you know from previous posts, I always sketch a concept more than once, to get the errors out while things are cheap. Here are my rough sketches for this one:
Why do I show you all these? First, to prove that I’m not AI, and that things done by hand still have value, because the very act of creating the thing by hand itself is fun, even if it doesn’t go anywhere.
But more importantly, I think young artists need to see more rough BAD sketches of experienced artists working concepts out, failing, correcting, and trying again. Because all the artists I watch on social media are experienced enough to have grown past the errors beginners often make, and all we see them doing is making perfect drawings the first time perfectly from empty blank pages. And when my sketches didn’t look like theirs right away, that used to demotivate me, when I was first starting out. So I think it’s good to show someone else making mistakes too, so that beginners like us don’t feel alone.
You can see in drawing #2 above, I didn’t even space things out correctly to leave enough room for her head at the top of the sheet!
(And who can forget about my horrible pin-head kneeling girl sketch from my last blog post, thinking about that STILL gives me the heebees.)
Besides the color theory, I also think the contrast between smooth skin and rough blue jeans is another reason this pairing works so well for pin-ups, and you can see me trying to ink that out, in sketch #1 above.
#2 is actually my favorite body, even without a head. Do you remember in my first blog post, when we talked about the “J.Scott Campbell to Frank Cho pin-up body spectrum”, way back when:
And remember how, if you only drew from real life references of models and movie stars, there was almost a GRAVOMETRIC PULL moving you towards the J. Scott side? Just because how real human bodies look when viewed from far away?
Well this time I REALLY TRIED to get to the Frank Cho ‘curvy’ side of the spectrum- thicker hips, thicker thighs, wrists that don’t look like they’re going to break, i.e., muscular, rubensque girls- that’s why I like sketch #2 above. Even if I forgot to leave space for her head. She’s got meat on her, and for pin-ups, meat means critical space for us to ‘tuck in’ the curves and make her more appealing. (More on that later.)
For #3 I actually blocked out the 4:3 ratio my canvas came in (suggest you have a template so you can do the same), to try to see how much of her I could fit on a page. That comes back as an issue later too.
You can see in my sketches I’ve got the hips down pretty well, but where I’m having problems is THE HANDS.
Last time we talked about making your girls sexy by making them ‘squish’, and you can see I’m having problems making the boobs squish around this handbra. You can always tell there’s a problem in your sketch if you’ve got many messy lines somewhere instead of one clean one. If you can’t choose one clean line, that’s an area to work on.
I tried a few more sketches to work just that problem out but still couldn’t get it:
I was doing those out at a Mexican restaurant while waiting for food, god knows what the waitress thought when she walked up behind me to drop off my burrito.
But anyway, I finally concluded that the problem was her spread-out fingers and decided to just draw her fingers closed in a tapering triangle to simplify things and move on. That’s much easier to draw.
It’s a hack, but sometimes you need to do art hacks like that, to get a piece moving again.
Let’s move on to-
STEP 3: DIGITAL LINE WORK
I took a picture of my sketchbook and put the headless wonder into Procreate, then used my pencil brush to rough out a blue sketch like we talked about in blog #1, and note the ‘tucking in’ of curves to generate sexy squish indents, like we talked about last time:
It’s such a small thing but I think it’s key: that “Tucking In” of her soft outer boob curve against her harder hand, and tucking in her soft hip curve against the harder jeans- little things like that go a LONG way towards making your pin-ups look ALIVE and SOFT and not robotic or stiff.
Here are some other places you might consider “Tucking” your next pin-up:
A girl’s boobs against the front of her bra
A girl’s back and shoulder blades against the BACK of her bra (surprisingly authentic and sexy!)
Thighs against tight stockings
Calves against tight boots (very subtle, be careful!)
Try those out on your next piece and let me know how it goes! To contact me, you can write your name on the inside of an orange and- you know how this goes, why am I explaining.
Notice I made that digital girl even WIDER than my already Frank Cho’d pencil sketch, that’s how committed I was to getting away from the J Scott Campbell side of the spectrum this time! If your pin-ups are feeling a little ‘flat’, try that on your next sketch too- go WIDER than you are comfortable with seeing from your references, which will give you the critical pixels and space to tuck in the areas above. It’s much easier to ‘tuck in’ a round thicker thigh than a straight bony one!
And of course a closed hand is easier to draw against the boobs than an open gripping hand. (I’m going to go back and draw that open hand squeezing boobs one day, though, just you wait…)
Finally, I want you to notice how I moved the position of her raised knee INWARDS, going from pencil to digital. Go up and look again- it’s only about the distance of half a knee, going from pencil to digital but it makes a difference! That was done to give her body more ‘twist’ to increase her sexiness (and because I finally looked at a reference!).
We talked last time about Alvaro Munoz’s great “Learn To Draw Women” book, which is critical for all pin-up artists. Munoz mentions twist a little, but I REALLY learned this concept from the much more advanced Steve Huston’s “Figure Drawing For Artists”:
You should get Munoz’s book if you want to draw pin-ups. But you should get Huston’s book if you want to make ART. It’s the best book I’ve ever seen on capturing the human essence, he’s a real master and the book is very easy to use. Could use more boobs though.
FYI, I don’t make any money if you buy these books (I only make money if you buy my stickers) but I mention them so you can find the diamonds in the chaff. I wasted a lot of money on a lot of OTHER drawing books I’ll never mention here, hopefully I can save you that cash.
Anyway, Huston is the first one that taught me about ‘Contrapposto’, and its finding these ‘Huston lines’ in a pose that made me bring her knee further in, to get more twist:
Pin up girls are all about ‘S’ shapes, and it’s that S curve in her raised leg that goes OUT with her butt/thigh/trocanter then IN to the raised knee and then OUT with her calf before coming back IN with the cute tilt of her foot that I wanted to capture this time.
Same with her standing leg, that’s a perfect S curve if I’ve ever seen one- you’ll see that in a lot of runway models strutting down the catwalk, if they’re a little bit thicc!
I see TONS of posts on r/learnart asking “What’s wrong with my figure?” or “Why isn’t this working?” and if the answer isn’t proportions, it’s usually not finding the right sexy S curves of the gesture. This is the #1 thing I practice, when I have my morning coffee and drawing time, and recommend it for you. And it’s pretty fun exercise too!
Let’s talk about one more LITTLE curve I just discovered for the first time, making this piece: her toes.
Normally I would draw toes as slanted straight lines, it’s the direction of the slant that usually matters, but for some reason, this time, I drew them ‘tucked in’ at each end, like they were little sausages:
The ankles are a little wonky, but you can’t be good at everything. But do you see how those little cleavages at the tops of the toes make them look more rounded and cute?
This is the last time I’ll mention tucking in, but I hope you can see how, with pin-ups specifically, it’s the little curves which help make things look ‘womanly’.
That’s enough line work, let’s move on to:
Flats and Coloring and Shading and The Whole POINT Of This Post
Remember from my second blog post that you will feel the WORST about your piece in the valley between finalizing your lines and finally starting your shading:
The green graph above shows your probable enthusiasm- always push through the valley of your bare line work looking bloby and undefined and your flat colors looking flat to get to your shading step, which is the most fun!
Ironically, you’ll probably spend the most time on your shading step too, but it’s worth it- shading is what makes your pin-up look 3D!
You already know about me choosing blue and orange because they’re complimentary colors but let’s look at some more details of how you might do your shading for topless blue jeans models specifically:
I put that in because when I was just starting in digital, I legit stopped for a day just to try and figure out “What COLOR do I even USE for SKIN?” Hopefully this helps you save that day, as does my muscle shading tutorial last time.
Is this helping? Let me know if this is helping.
So now we’re done right? We’ve got our cool colored blue jeans contrasting very nicely with her warm-toned skin, we’ve shaded her muscles nicely and we’re all done?
Aww fuck, I forgot to give her fingernails.
Okay, BESIDES THAT, we’re totally done, right? Let’s just compare our perfect finished piece to a simple reference picture to make sure we’ve got the coloring right and:
Do you see how much more BLUE and ALIVE the reference photo is?
This is what I call “being in the bubble”. We’ve been staring at our own piece so long that our brain has calibrated to that and we’ve convinced ourselves that our colors are correct. But when we look at a REAL reference photo we can see we’ve got a LONG way to go. Our girl looks PALE in comparison, doesn’t she?
So I went back and applied the jean base flats and shading AGAIN and here’s version 2:
All I did is use a more saturated and darker blue, that’s it.
Aww fuck, she still doesn’t have fingernails.
Okay but BESIDES THAT, you can see how much CONTRASTY-IER the second version is, right? Which was the whole point, and that’s the type of color correcting you have to do on blue jeans pin-ups before you publish.
I promise I completely finish these works before I start writing these blog posts, but then I find so many dumb little mistakes while I’m writing about it that I have to go back and do half the work over again. So it’s not just you. Other artists have mess-ups they have to go back and fix too. You just don’t see them on Instragram.
Okay, let’s finish this thing.
FINISHING THIS THING
We started this article with a premise: Complementary colors make each other pop, therefore topless Causcasian pin-ups in blue jeans look great. But there are other skin tones too.
Therefore, by our logic, shouldn’t the following combinations ALSO work well:
Pale big tiddy Goth girls with… black jeans?
Sexy African girls with… very light blue jeans?
You’ll have to let me know, since I certainly don’t have the time or energy to shade and render all those combinations okay obviously your eyes have already skipped to the next picture so you already know I already did:
You’ll have to forgive me, I shaded those other two variations very fast while watching episodes of CSI (they killed someone with a frozen meat bullet!), but I think the central premise holds.
We’re looking for Complementary Contrasts of skin tone and jeans tone to make both POP- and someone with an art degree will have to tell us in the comments what color I should have chosen for each skin tone and why. You can also email me anytime at thelazypencil69.gmail.com. Because the first 68 were taken.
Also, you know I like upping the saturation of colors after everything else is done and let’s throw the hook on and we’re done:
Yes I know I suck at drawing beads. It just doesn’t come up very often.
But I think the caption makes it fun. There’s definitely a ‘Before’ and ‘After’ now in the picture, and her expression and blush make more sense, and you can imagine the conflicting feelings of the husband holding the camera! (And now that sticker is up on my store (or will be soon!) for people to buy, if you wish, thanks!)
FYI, the colors of her beads- green and purple- are ALSO complementary colors that make each other pop, which is probably why they chose them for Mardi Gras colors!
And it’s fitting to end this article about color theory with a bit of color fakery, so in case you don’t believe me how much of a difference upping the color saturation of a pin-up helps as a final step, and why if you start doing it you’ll never go back, here is our ‘final’ version side-by-side with the color saturated version I used for the sticker:
Some art major will have to tell me why that looks so much better and why I can’t just paint in those colors to start with, but I blame being in the bubble.
I hope all this helped, and if there are any other pin-up related how-tos you’ve always wanted discussed but were too afraid to ask, let me know and maybe I can try them! Now go make something fun and sexy!
Pencil out.