How To Make Your Pin-ups Gooder
This isn’t a post about how to make your first ever pin-up. For super new artists, I’ve already covered THAT in my very first blog post here: https://www.thelazypencil.com/blog-1/how-to-draw-your-first-pin-up
This post is for folks who have been drawing pin-ups for a while, but want to take them to the NEXT LEVEL.
Because I think I just recently did that, purely by accident, and want to share some lessons learned, so you to can do it too, but on purpose. So you can get there faster than I did.
Let’s-a-go.
TIP 1 FOR IMPROVING YOUR PIN-UPS: BE AN ARCHITECT
It’s embarrassing to be in a coffee shop drawing tits and boobies, so when I’m out in public, I’m usually practicing non-nude skills, like boxes and perspective, and one day I was in a Starbucks and a guy peeks over my shoulder and asks, “Hey, are you an architect or something?”
Because I was drawing this:
And I didn’t want to tell him, “No, I’m going to put a naked lady on it”, that’s an insane conversation to have with a stranger, so I just said:
“Yes. I am, in fact, an architect.”
And then we had an actual conversation about flippin’ architecture for a few minutes and he went away happy.
But I learned a few lessons from this:
Don’t draw naked people in public because someone might look over your shoulder and comment because who the hell does that-
Always be ready to talk about architecture for at least five minutes in case someone does do that, and-
If you’re trying to put a pin-up girl in a scene and make her CONNECTED to her environment in a BELIEVABLE way, you sorta ARE an architect, in a way, of a made-up physical space that needs to look and behave real.
Because look at what I was doing above. I knew I wanted to put a naked lady in a passenger seat. And I was trying to figure out, what was the ‘right’ angle for that seat to shrink away into the horizon, to make it look ‘correct’. (You can see I even did a GODDAMN INVERSE TANGENT to try and figure out the angle above, for fuck’s sake.)
So lesson 4 might be that there’s no right ‘numerical’ angle for perspective- (never resort to high school geometry)- but if you put on your architect’s hat you realize that even the background has to be consistent in terms of vanishing points, perspective, size, and make sense as a physical 3D space. You can’t just have girls floating in vacuum.
Because here was my FIRST attempt at drawing this piece:
And now ask yourself: where THE FUCK is the viewer in this case? Morphing through the ceiling of the car like a goddamned ghost? Peeking in through the sunroof like a pervy seagull?
It’s a fun little pose, and I may do a variant for another work, but the architecture of the angle, compared to how actual cars work, is all wrong.
And our brains would have rejected it.
So that’s why I took actual stock images of passenger seats and made the stickers above to put on a page in my sketch book, and why I was in that coffee shop trying to figure out how to draw it as if THE DRIVER of the car was looking over and down at her, when that random stranger asked me what I was drawing and what I thought about architecture.
Because the next three times I redrew this piece- I DREW THE BACKGROUND CAR SEAT FIRST. Just like a horny architect would do:
We talked about ‘The Perspective Cage’ in my last post, and how to use it to grab the world and tilt it and your model around in a believable way, and you can see a little of that Perspective cage around her feet and legs here. At least her knees lined up this time. (But you really should read my last post if you’re having trouble tilting your camera view in pin-ups!)
But the point here is being an architect let me design the car decently enough for your brain to believe it, and then the girl could mold on top of her environment, also in a believable way. A lot of bad pin-ups do it the opposite way.
I did, for years.
Girls just standing around, in the Phantom Zone. Or worse, clipping through their environment or not interacting with it in a realistic way.
But I’m slowly starting to learn, that you might have to become an architect and make your SCENE first, whether it’s a palm tree on the beach she’s leaning on, or a big fluffy king-sized bed she’s half-laying on, for your model to interact with her surroundings in a non-jarring way.
I had a lot of trouble getting her straight legs to lay at a pleasing angle, until I drew the passenger seat and dashboard relationship FIRST, and then the girl and her legs just had to conform to THAT. Which brings us to our next tip, which you’ve heard me say many times:
TIP 2: REDRAW YOUR FIRST SKETCH MANY TIMES
I wish there was a way around this. But there’s almost no chance your first inspired sketch idea is the ‘perfect’ one. You need to experiment with moving pieces around, making things fatter or thinner, changing poses, to find the real ‘best’ idea. Just look at how I improved over the iterations:
I know you’re in love with your first sketch. I am too. Redo it anyway.
And WHILE you’re redoing it, remember:
TIP 3: YOU’RE ALLOWED TO USE MULTIPLE REFERENCES AT THE SAME TIME.
Every Youtube teacher says “Use References”.
But what they DON’T tell you, and what I strugged with for a year, is the real tip:
“Use MULTIPLE references at the SAME time, each showing a DIFFERENT aspect of your goal.”
The below image is from past my sketching stage, but here’s one example from this work:
It’s perfectly okay to use one reference for a model’s face, one for her tits, a different one for her bottom and legs, and another for her clothes/lighting/make-up/props/etc.
Just like our esteemed Dr. Frankenstein’s Monster’s Creator, we are stitching together something beautiful and alive from nothing but dead and discarded parts. Or something, I really just skimmed that book in English class.
But the point is, don’t be ashamed to go searching for the perfect reference for just your model’s FEET, if feet are one aspect of what you’re trying to capture in the work you’re doing. I wish I had used multiple references more, earlier in my art journey. I used to try and find the ‘perfect’ model for my entire piece, when that doesn’t exist, if you’re creating something actually new and original.
One last thing I learned from using multiple references in this case was:
TIP ARE YOU EVEN COUNTING THE NUMBER ANYMORE:
EXPERIMENT WITH RIM LIGHTING!
I had never really done this before, I had heard Youtubers talk about it but never knew how to apply it until I saw it clear as day in one of my many references for this piece:
I had always HEARD about rim lighting but had never TRIED it in any of my works-
-maybe you’re like me-
-but I had it here in one of my very close reference poses as clear as day, so I backed up my work, backed it up again in a different place, made a copy, saved that, and then crossed my fingers and brought out the white. Here’s my process:
I came from the cartoon-y school of pin-up design, so I first ink all my outer edges as black, like a comic book would (they did it to help clarity of reading, on cheaper printing papers and lower printing resolutions):
And after I fill and shade that boundary (as described in my second blog post), it looks like this:
Now look how THICK and OFFPUTTING that dark black line is, on something that supposed to be smooth and soft, like a pretty model’s legs.
It just SLAPS you in the FACE.
This is probably the boundary line between “Cartoony” and “Painterly” pin-up styles. Painters don’t use that thick black line, cartoonists do.
I’ve struggled with this for the longest time, on whether I should get rid of that line and do more painterly pin-ups like the old masters. They definitely look softer and more rounded, but every single time I try (on work that’s not good enough to show you), the end result looks… too ‘muddy’ to me. There’s not enough sharp clear distinctions between things that are in front, and things that are behind, especially around faces. Maybe I’ve read too many comic books.
Try it yourself and see- digitally do a piece with black lines, shade and tint everything, then make a copy and over-write just your boundary lines with your base skin color. Maybe you’ll like the Painterly look better, but it always looked too fuzzy for me. You never know until you try.
But Rim Lighting lets you get the best of both worlds.
Here, I made another layer over my Inks layer, and used the Clipping Mask to make sure whatever I put on the new layer would ONLY show if it overlapped with an Ink pixel below. (Procreate calls it Clipping Mask, idk what other programs call it. Probably something dumb.) And then I hit that new layer with white, but only on CERTAIN parts.
Here’s the first result:
Now the bottom edge of her right leg is sharp and defined (black, because it’s in shadow), but the top edge of her leg is white and seems to blend into the environment (white, because the hot sun is shining directly on it).
But that’s not the whole Rim Lighting effect. You’ve done the edges, now take your weak shading airbrush and add EVEN MORE white on those top, sun-facing faces, using your references as a guide. Hopefully you’ll end up with something like this (all dark backgrounds added back in, so you can better see the white):
I REALLY like that effect.
She seems to SHINE in the sun, which is exactly the effect and mood I was going for. I’ve never really used Rim Lighting before, but I don’t know why I was holding back. Maybe you’re like me.
But being brave enough to overwrite your black with white (or whatever light color you have) looks awesome in certain cases, and I’m really proud how it came out. I even did a little with her hair. Try it in your next work!
On a completely random rant, let’s talk about that fucking map in her hands. I spent SO LONG drawing and re-drawing the map- you sitting out there, reading this on the toilet, you THINK you know what a map looks like and how to draw it, but I’d like to see you try. Go ahead, try.
Not the outside of the map, that was the easy part- but the colors on the INSIDE of the map, the lakes and towns and roads, etc. Take your colors and try to recreate a map in under 15 minutes that DOESN’T look like a CHILD drew it. It’s in an uncanny valley- draw too little detail and it will look childish and crayony, but try to do it decent and drawing enough detail on a stupid prop like a map takes WAY LONGER than it has any right to.
I hate that fucking map.
Anyway, here’s the final piece, it’s probably the best thing I’ve done so far, it feels awesome to keep improving month to month, but you can only do that if you’re willing to experiment and fail from time to time, and hopefully this article helped!
Here’s the final piece (oh, also I blurred the road sign passing by to give the appearance of motion, let me know if you want a tutorial on that, it’s real simple):
I had to redraw that floor mat under her feet so many times, just to give room for her theoretical legs to be, if she put them down, that I’m probably in the architect’s guild by now. But the space around her now makes sense. Be an architect.
And remember, if you keep practicing, you’re going to keep getting better- look, I wasn’t even using PERSPECTIVE or drawing BACKGROUNDS a year ago:
Next time, we’ll talk about ways to add that all-important ingredient of HUMOR to your pin-ups, here’s a preview of that, hope you enjoyed this one:
