Every Pin-Up Should Have A Touch Of Humor
I see a lot of posts on art reddit titled:
“How can I make my art more realistic?”
and
“How can I make this rendering more realistic?”
and
“Yo fam, I need more realism, am I cooked?”
But if you want to do pin-ups, I think most of those are asking the wrong question.
Adding more and more realism gets harder and harder the higher up the scale you go, and after a certain point, if you want more realism, you might as well just take a photograph. And if you need even more realism after that, just use AI.
Because the REAL skill that sets great pin-ups apart from the ones you forget seconds after cleaning up isn’t realism- it’s HUMOR.
A little STORY.
A cute little BEFORE and AFTER implied by the picture.
I’ve talked about adding story to your pin-ups in LOTS of previous blog posts, but I wanted to focus just on lessons learned (some the hard way) on adding memorable HUMOR to your pin-ups. Bring your tissues.
Tip 1: Humor happens through Situations. Situations are mainly Props and Backgounds.
If you’re doing daily art practice, you’re probably drawing a lot of pretty girls floating in space. Stuff like this:
If you’ve seen the Oscar-nominated(?) movie “The Substance”, you know the inspiration for this scene.
But it’s not a pin-up.
It’s at best, a figure study.
It came out cute, but there’s no story there.
But what if we added a quick little something:
What did we add? Just a quick, shittily drawn background with copy/pasted boys. But suddenly a wild joke appears. (This is an old Gary Larson Far Side joke, if you recognize it. If I had more time, I’d expand the idea to make it even closer to that comic.)
But notice I didn’t change the girl at all. Just the background. Which created a situation. Which made it funny.
Now imagine if I had the time to draw a huge container of baby oil next to her-
-like, a comically huge barrel of baby oil-
-a massive 55 gallon drum of baby oil with the words “LUBE LUBE LUBE LUBE” all over it or something-
Or maybe that barrel of lube and 10 others are being delivered on the back of a big flatbed truck to the boy’s school.
Now THAT’S a pin-up.
But again, we didn’t change anything about the girl. We’re just telling a story through her pose, her outfit, the props in her hands and the backgrounds around her. Of these, I find new artists tend to forget props and background the most. Their girls are empty-handed, floating in the phantom zone.
But props and backgrounds are key to setting up pin-up situations your readers will remember.
Tip 2: The Joke Should Work WITHOUT Any Words
Below is an idea I had, which I rendered all the way through, but never actually ended up liking:
Every man thinks he could fight off a bear if needed, and every man thinks he could do 5 minutes of great stand up in an emergency.
This was during my ‘thinking I could do stand-up’ phase, and I had imagined this little set about the riff: “Why does everyone tell you not to put metal inside a microwave? Have you ever looked INSIDE OF a microwave? What’s it MADE out of?!” Which I thought that was the funniest shit ever.
I’d probably get eaten by a bear.
But, I went ahead and put in all the work to pencil sketch and digital ink and fully render a piece based on that joke, but it never really ‘hit’ for me. I wasted all that time.
The girl is cute enough, I really like how those overalls came out against her skin (see my post on pin-up color theory!), she has props in her hands, there’s a definite before story (she took apart the microwave), I don’t know what the fuck that devil baby is doing there-
-but it all just didn’t work as a joke.
I think the problem here is that it doesn’t work without the text.
Picture it without words- it’s just a weird confusing scene, right:
A lot of ‘classic’ pin-ups are like this, the artist is on a rushed schedule, typically trying to get a calendar out for some piston supplier or something (a lot of ‘classic’ pin-ups were made just to sell something), and while the great artists of the past are excellent at drawing pretty girls (in oil paint!), there’s no time/thought given for the joke to stand without the text.
Consider this one, from the well-known Earl Moran:
In case you can’t read it, the text reads: “Lazy Mary, will you get up and listen to my warning? If you would charm men at night, you’ll exercise each morning.”
A lot of old pin-ups, if you actually read the joke, makes modern people make this face: 😐
That’s the face I’m making right now.
😐.
But most MODERN artists are much better at not making the woman the butt of the joke, and I think the BEST artist doing this right now is Frank Cho. His situations usually carry the joke of the pin-up without any need for words. Consider this one, from Cho’s great “Pencil and Ink” book I recently bought:
Here’s another one from Cho’s same book:
You can see he’s definitely got a theme he likes. But all of Cho’s stuff usually works without words. I highly recommend you buy his books and follow his instagram if you’re serious about becoming a good pin-up artist. (His Youtube channel you can take or leave.)
But on my microwave pin-up, the joke rested heavily on just the words, (which maybe weren’t that funny to begin with- ahh a bear!) so I spent two weeks of my life drawing it, but ended up being unhappy with the final result and basically throwing it away.
Learn from my mistake.
Contrast that with the title image of this post, which works with almost NO words.
I was just sketching at lunch on day, and decided to draw one of my black pens because it had a nice shine on it sitting on the McDonalds table-
-a really deep, rich black shine-
-and for some reason I put big muscular crossed arms on the pen-
-making me giggle-
-and I kept going, adding more pens and a background-
-and I started outright LAUGHING the SECOND I put a couch in front of those four guys, because I KNEW what I was going to do with this image:
And I hadn’t even drawn the GIRL yet!
It literally didn’t matter what girl I drew on this couch- I tried out a lot of poses- because the joke works with just a group of big muscular black pens standing eagerly behind a couch waiting on the girl. If you don’t get the joke… ask your mom, I guess.
But the situation is funny/scans/works without words, which is the key.
Next tip:
Tip 3: Great Pin-ups have multiple LAYERS of jokes
I’ve been reading a lot of comic books by the great Amanda Conner recently (‘Powergirl’, ‘Supergirl’, ‘Harley Quinn’, etc.) and one thing Conner does better than anyone is putting multiple LAYERS of jokes into her big panels. Like, she’ll have a joke in the background, a separate one in the middle ground, and a big one in the foreground. I’ve never seen anything like it.
I can’t find an example to scan at the moment, but picture Powergirl punching a villian into a hot dog stand in the foreground, the hot dog vendor falling to his knees and yelling “Nooooooo!” in the middle ground, and a bunch of hungry happy dogs racing towards the spilled food chaos in the background, making their dog walker tumble head over heels.
That’s why Conner was voted the #2 best female comic book artist of all time in 2010, which is hiliarious in its own right (the fact that someone would dare give out a #2 best female artist award, not the fact that she won it).
So in that vein, here’s a piece I finished just recently:
What I like about this is that there’s a joke in the background, like, it still sorta works if you cut the picture off right here:
(I’ve always wondered what was happing right OUTSIDE the frame of all those Sports Illustrated cover images we see.)
(And why did I draw all that smoke? Because I DEFINITELY did not want to draw any more limbs or bodies of the crowd! Now I know why old time cartoons did it.)
But then there’s also multiple jokes in the foreground (“Accountants like to feel pretty too.”). Almost every single line of dialog in the foreground is a punchline. Yes, those jokes require words, but between the accountant’s pose, and the background and multiple punchlines one after another, I think it works.
Obviously, I’m no Amanda Conner. But then again, she was only ranked #TWO best female comic artist in the world, sooooo….
Tip 4: A Funny Pin-up Still Has To Be… SEXY
Wrapping up, let’s look at some of the first sketches I drew for the girl on the couch:
Ya’ll know I LOVE re-sketching my first idea multiple times to get it right. But one of them stood out:
And so I spent a week inking and shading her in addition to all those pens and at the end… meh was what I felt at the end.
🫤, you could say:
One fault is that I’ve always regretted drawing clothes on pin-ups. Every time. They never look like I want, they break up the lines of a good clean body, and clothes just never ‘pop’ like a naked person does.
The other fault is that face. I mean, look at it:
Something about that face just didn’t work.
I don’t know, I did all my usual tricks with the eye shine, eye fold, etc., but it just didn’t work.
So, even though I had already sketched and inked and rendered EVERYTHING… I went back to the sketching board and redid the entire girl from scratch.
Because the final rule is… a funny pin-up still has to be sexy.
Here’s the final (hopefully funny) result, then we’ll wrap up:
I can’t wait to sell those stickers at a local farmer’s market.
Okay, to wrap everything up:
If you want to put your pin-ups in memorable situations, remember to add PROPS and BACKGROUNDS
If you want to learn how to make the joke happen WITHOUT WORDS, go study Frank Cho
If you want to learn how to make MORE THAN ONE JOKE AT ONCE, go study Amanda Conner
And finally, you’re not just doing funny. A pin-up has to be SEXY too.
Hope that helps, I don’t know what I’m going to do for next time, but until then, keep ‘em hard and keep ‘em laughing! Enjoy!