Every Pin-Up Should Have A Hint Of Danger
So you want to draw hot guys/girls. And you want your artwork to be visceral, to grab the viewer right in their cajones/cajonas. So how do you DO that?
Too many ‘modern’ pinups are just some variation of “Hot Girl Stands Around”. Or, if they are REALLY daring, “Hot Girl from [insert pop culture show/video game/comic] stands around”.
Yawn.
Boring.
To be fair, a lot of old pin-ups were like this too. Pin-ups in the 1930s-1960s were often (mainly) paid for by advertisers, so you’d get endless variations on something like this:
Now don’t get me wrong- Alberto Vargas is a LEGEND in the pin-up game, and his technical work was incredible- his proportions and poses, his shading and expressions, all done EXCELLENTLY and in PAINT of all things.
But the image above… are you going to remember it ten minutes later?
Pin-ups need to have a STORY. A BEFORE and AFTER.
The reader needs to be able to tell what was happening just BEFORE the picture was taken, and what is likely to happen one second AFTER the shutter clicks, all at a glance.
A lot of older pinups did it better, when they looked something like this:
NOW we’ve got the start of a story, right?
It’s still not totally defined, but a girl gets hired as maid, and presumably the… husband of the house comes home and catches her like this? Or if you want to be progressive, maybe the wife.
But at least there’s a HINT of danger- of naughtiness- of something implied happening before and after the camera clicked. That’s what I think separates the really memorable pin-ups from all the boring “Hot Girl Stands Around”-eses.
So how can you get that same hint of danger in YOUR work? Let’s go through the process.
Step 0: Initial Sketching/Fishing For Ideas
I try to draw something every morning before work.
I’ve got some good coffee, Youtube in the background, and I’m either doing some two minute gestures, or a reference study, or learning one new bit of anatomy a week. Maybe you’re doing the same. But none of these casual morning sketches are usually worthy of me spending a whole week to make them into a full digital pin-up:
Although that last one on the right with her skirt getting blown up might be something. That’s got a hint of danger like what the Vargas maid image above had. Might turn that into something later.
But one day, I was sitting in my car waiting for something to happen and I just happened to sketch this:
And right away I was hooked.
I don’t know who this girl is or why she’s being hunted, but the look on her face and those very scary Slenderman-esque shapes stalking her, you instantly feel like it’s one of those old pulp magazine covers, right? So I knew I was going to explore this more.
Once you have that spark of intrigue in a sketch, here’s one formula I use to make that spark into a bonfire:
Formula: “Main character was expecting X to happen… but then Y happened instead!”
You can use that in your work too! Using that formula on the girl being hunted by Slendermen above, I would say something like… “She EXPECTED a fun night of skinny dipping/streaking, but she DIDN’T EXPECT to get caught!”
Now that’s an idea that can make a pin-up. Hint of danger.
If I use that formula on the girl farther above with her skirt getting blown up, I just had to add a friend and some props:
So they EXPECTED a fun sexy day at the races, but they DIDN’T EXPECT so much wind!
And one girl has figured out how to get her skirt cutely blown up in a seductive Marlyn Monroe way, and the other is just getting tossed. A little humor. You can feel that this idea doesn’t have as much punch/danger as the skinny-dipping girl, which is why I haven’t made it into a full piece yet.
That and also I had a horrible time drawing those F1 cars at that angle:
Not every idea is a winner. Let’s do one more example, since this is key to making your work stick in people’s minds.
I’m posting this around October, so I’m seeing a lot of ‘spooky’ themed pinups on Reddit. Let’s take a typical idea and keep increasing the level of danger/irony and you determine which one is best.
Level 1: You draw a hot, black-haired, Elvira-type vampire girl just standing around.
Meh. Let’s kick it up a notch.
Level 2: A hot black-haired Elvira-type vampire girl is trying to BITE a buxom blonde All-American cheerleader type girl.
Okay, better, but still not great. Let’s increase the danger/irony even more!
Level 3: A whole CHEERLEADING SQUAD of hot black-haired Elvira-type vampire girls are about to bite a RIVAL squad of blonde All-American human cheerleader types, fangs exposed, but the blonde cheerleaders have pulled out thick wooden CROSSES and garlic spray bottles from their pom-poms, making the vampire girls go “YUK!”
Now that’s more fun, right? The Vampires expected something, the human girls flipped the script, you can have a Betty vs. Veronica, “Bring It On” type cheerleader battle thing happening, with irony, a little danger, a story, a before and after, that’s a good pin-up!
I might have vampires on the brain because I just recently bought an art book called “The Dynamite Art of Lucio Parrillo” to be inspired from, but it didn’t work out because there was TOO much danger and blood:
That’s why I titled this blog post “a HINT of danger”, because I think adding too much tips you away from a fun, light, pin-up into more erotic horror or splatterporn. Your mileage may vary, but I prefer to keep things light.
Let’s get back to our skinny dipping girl.
And if you’ve ever got a pin-up idea YOU want help fleshing out, hit me up on reddit, or thelazypencil69@gmail.com, although no one ever emails me there, so you might have better luck biting on a penny and shouting your question down an old well to get to me.
Now that you’ve got your seed of an idea, let’s move on to the next step:
Step 1: Throw away your inital sketch and do it all over again
“NOOO!” I can hear you screaming- “I’ll NNEVERR get the MAGIC of that first sketch BACK if I start on a fresh page!”
And I feel you.
I used to feel the same way.
But you don’t really know why a sketch works (or doesn’t) unless you throw it away and try to make it again from first principles. Once you’ve got a first sketch that hooks you, my suggestion is to draw that same idea on a blank page again two or three more times, making small changes to play around with angles or proportions and see what works. Don’t get too ‘My Precious’ with your first sketch.
It’s highly unlikely that you hit on the exact perfect angle and composition and pose the first time you drew it, out of all possible variations.
Go do it again.
Here’s what happened when I did:
The second sketch has a much better pose than the first (she looks more scared and is hugging the wall harder). But her stomach looked too round, even though that’s what my reference girl was doing. (That stomach is going to cause me a lot of issues going forward, BTW.)
But the THIRD sketch has a much better face and hair and curves and stomach- remember from our Betty Page tutorial that it was Betty’s ‘sucked in’ stomach that made her look a lot better than a lot of girls in her day, that contrast between tiny waist and wide chest and hips is what I tried to recreate in the third image!
You would not BELIEVE how many times I went back and forth in my digital sketch, giving her a rounded stomach (like all my reference photos of real women had, pressed up against walls), or giving her a sucked in stomach, like a J. Scott Campbell girl or Betty Page would have.
Even though I LOVED the energy and curves that the third pose captured, it just didn’t look right when I did it digitally. Something just didn’t work.
So I redid the whole sketch from scratch AGAIN, and this time added the THIRD dimension:
I probably made a mistake. There’s such good flow and ENERGY in the third sketch, that probably would have made a better sticker. But it just wasn’t working digitally. And just turning her a little made all the difference. I don’t normally use vanishing points and perspective in my pin-ups, but I wanted her to look thicker than the 2D version, more 3D, so I had to in this case. Try vanishing points in your next work!
Here’s how the vanishing points looked in this piece:
Like I said, I never normally use vanishing points in my work, but this time they really helped line up her knees with each other and her nips with each other. Did you all know in Procreate you can turn on canvas ‘drawing guides’ to see all these lines automatically?
I had bought a book on Procreate secrets which had that tip. Notice how her nipples are perfectly lined up with the horizon line, and how her knees follow perspective lines MUCH better than my paper sketch which didn’t have the guides?
So I guess two lessons here:
1. I always started out drawing all my pin-ups in profile because bodies were easier to draw that way, but consider adding a third dimension to make your bodies take up more volume and look rounder, and
2. If you ARE doing vanishing points and perspective lines, use the guide lines in your drawing program to line up those nipples and knees!
After you’ve got a good re-done sketch with danger and perspective, there’s only one step left:
Step 2: Draw the rest of the fucking owl
I won’t go over this in too much detail because I’ve already done previous blog posts about it, but after that I inked and digitally colored and shaded her:
I always like my pin-up girls shaded and the rest of the image black and white, so I really liked this image above. But it’s not dark enough to capture the ‘danger’ needed for this piece, so we have to continue on. Le sigh.
All the other shading is exactly as you’d expect, but I’d like to point out a few more tricks used, to save new pin-up artists some time:
Notice I also changed where the second flashlight was pointing, to now point DIRECTLY at her discarded clothes. Now we KNOW she’s been caught! Danger!
So that’s how I got to the final piece, and in the caption below, it was the “(again)” that made me chuckle enough to see it through. That caption came though all the way from my first in-car sketch!
Alright, I hope this helped if you need to figure out why your pin-ups aren’t ‘grabbing’ people, because there are a lot of things you could add- more tits, more humor, more detail- but hopefully you see that, but just adding a hint of danger, you can make any pin-up more fun!
Keep drawing!