Push Your Pin-up Art To The Limit (sometimes)
So I had an idea for a simple pin-up, a sexy mech pilot in burning cockpit, yelling as she crashed her damaged and dying mech down on top of her enemies for one last, possibly-suicidal, full-weapons strike-
-and it turned into the most technically challenging thing I have ever attempted to draw, and I had so many FUCKING PROBLEMS with it-
-that I figured newer pin-up artists might learn a lot from my mistakes, because I sure did!
Trying to do this piece was uncomfortable at times, but pushing those boundaries expanded my skill set, so I guess the lesson here is, to get better as an artist, push the limits of your skill. Sometimes.
(Sometimes you just have to relax and draw something fun and easy.)
So today we’re going to cover:
How to draw pin-ups from a crazy tilted camera angle/perspective
How to draw detailed backgrounds and if you should even bother
How to digitally shade shiny red latex catsuits, and
Getting your goddamn FACES right, among other things.
All these problems had me eating my own fingers for a week, so I hope this article helps someone ELSE avoid them. Let’s go.
PROBLEM #1: THE FUCKING PERSPECTIVE
So I wanted my mech pilot to be diving DOWN on the page at her enemies, but not TOWARDS the viewer. One possible solution would have been to frame the picture like this:
Two years ago, that’s how I would have drawn it- straight on from the side, because that was the easiest way for me, as a new pin-up artist to do a sexy outline of a woman- in silhouette.
I mean, look at that back calf and ankle. Perfection.
But over the last year, I’ve been trying to push myself to do more 3/4ths perspective, because that makes the woman look more round and 3D and just more alive than the easier 2D silhouettes. (We saw this in my last blog post, with the skinny dipper.) So my next attempt at a blocking sketch looked like this:
You can see a lot of the elements in the final piece already in this second sketch here-
The three guns firing on the left
The seat belts hooks tearing away from the back bulkhead under stress
The cracked glass, the ‘EJECT’ warnings,
And I’ve already titled it (“Alpha Strike”), which is always a good sign that a pin-up idea will survive into final finished digital form.
But the problem was still the fucking perspective, this 3/4ths view is coming too much AT the reader! You know you aren’t the enemy mech that she’s trying to kill, which kills the immersion. So I needed to turn the entire WORLD a little more to the left, and that’s when my problems started.
This took fucking DAYS to get right.
I started putting little ‘perspective boxes’ in the corners of all my sample sketches, to try and visualize how the world was turning behind the page:
But it wasn’t really working.
Nothing was working, even though I must had redrawn her TEN times by this point. You know from previous blogs that I’m a big fan of redrawing your initial idea completely, from scratch, to really understand how the shapes work. But this was getting ridic.
But the thing that finally solved my problem (and hopefully yours!)-
-the thing that finally got me OUT of perspective quicksand and endless redraw cycles, was-
-putting my perspective box as a CAGE around her instead!
Now I could SEE how her shoulders and knees and feet placement should tilt for any change I made in the world’s rotation, and this worked double plus good when I did it DIGITALLY:
I actually drew that orange digital cage FIRST, even before I did her first blue digital sketch, or the final black outlines. Because only AFTER drawing that orange cage could I tell how her knees and shoulders should line up and where they should point, where her feet would contact the floor, where the seat belt holders would connect to the wall, etc., no matter HOW I turned the world.
That cage was the key, and I recommend ALL pinup artists who want to push their camera angles to the next level should use it.
This isn’t a new idea- hell, this isn’t even MY idea- I had learned it once already, from a great book by Marcos Mateu-Mestre called “Framed Perspective 2” (I couldn’t find vol 1, lol), and then totally forgot about it for a year, until I had to painfully re-invent the wheel from scratch again for this piece:
If had to put them into video game levels you could climb for self-improvement, I would say it goes like this:
And what’s level 4? I don’t know, maybe multiple people with multiple different vanishing points, I haven’t gotten there yet. (But Mateu-Mestre has, so go get his first book, if you want to go further!)
But don’t be like me. Keep a record of all the art things you’ve learned, so you can pull them out when needed. Like in OneNote or a big horcrux or something. Wait, are horcruxes for taking notes or just to store parts of your sou-
The Next Fucking Problem: The Background
So if you look back at my previous posts, you’ll see I love having my pin-ups on a white background, just so that nothing tries to compete with the girl in the middle.
I love my white space.
But this idea took a lot of background details to make it work, and what I didn’t realize was:
Especially that front fucking frame. Ohhh, that frame- (Does it read that it’s a cutaway frame? I’ve never tried that before.)
But yeah, I got into this business to draw naked ladies, not a million little buttons no one is looking at. But if I DON’T spend many hours of my life putting those little buttons back there, that empty space is REALLY noticable, like here:
Feels like something is missing right? Right in the smack middle of the piece where your eye goes. So yeah, I had to spend the hours. My main tip here would be:
COPY AND PASTE.
It took me embarrassingly long to start just copying and pasting rows of buttons back behind her because who gives a shit. Like, two episodes of Seinfeld long.
I suppose I could have also left it completely blank, and then stretched some stock footage photo of someone else’s sci-fi console over that white space in post. But that always feels like a slippery slope, because if we start using stretched external photo textures, we might as well just start AI Photoshopping things together and skip the drawing of it entirely. Let me know in the comments if you are okay doing that or not. Maybe that’s the next level I need to stretch my art to.
I don’t know, man (or female man, if applicable), I just want to draw sexy ladies, not a million little buttons. So to help you get through this annoying step, I would say:
Yes, it’s worth it.
Yes, it’s going to suck.
Use Copy and Paste once you get the first row of buttons done, then copy both of two pastes to make four, then copy all four pastes to make eight, and you’ll get it done at an exponential rate.
The Perspective Cage really helps here too, because most non-pinup girl things in the background are usually human-made things made of mostly parallel lines. Don’t let your rows of buttons go off at a weird angle.
On a related random tangent, have any of you guys ever heard of Romain Hugault? He’s a pin-up artist who does mainly 1950s girls with military planes, and he must hit this problem a lot, because the F-14s he loviningly hand draws behind his girls are made up of literally a million annoying parallel lines he has to get right. He’s a technical master, and I first found his work here on Instragram: https://www.instagram.com/p/C9M7L3zNk4F/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
And yes, while writing this section, I did feel bad about how little I had drawn on her command console, so I went back AGAIN and spent ANOTHER hour adding background details until I got to this:
That looks and feels a lot better. It sucked, but I guess, if I wanted to enjoy this artwork on my wall for the next 5 years, it was worth the extra effort.
Now lets get back to the fun with:
“Problem“ 3: How to make a shiny red latex catsuit work
So mostly I draw my pin-ups naked, because it’s more fun.
And clothes are hard.
All those wrinkles and folds are as annoying to draw as a million little background buttons!
And you can’t copy and paste folds!
And all those clothes obscure the fun naked body parts you worked so hard to learn!
Skintight latex catsuits don’t have this problem, which is why I’ll be using them in all of my art going forward. Also, they have precedence as a required uniform for any serious giant-mecha pilots (see: Asuka Langley in the riveting documentary Evangelion).
But how do you digitally shade that ‘wet shiny’ look that latex suits have? Surprisingly, it’s not that different from shiny human skin:
And here’s what I did for the latex catsuit:
They are very similar rules: apply white highlight wherever the cylinder is pointing at your light source, and a dark more saturated shading color wherever it’s curved away.
I looked at a LOT of reference pictures of girls in latex catsuits to research this look, but none of them are safe to post on this blog. My main advice is put EXTRA white highlight on the latex versus skin, because for some mysterious unknown reason, it’s a lot shinier than human skin.
I think the catsuit came out pretty well.
And finally, there is just one last challenge to tackle:
Problem 4: Getting The FUCKING FACE Right
So a pin-up lives and dies on the facial expression of the girl. Angry, scared, surprised, turned on, even a single eyebrow might completely change the tone of your entire drawing. (I did a whole blog post about this.)
And the spectrum I’ve specifically been watching with my faces is the “Realistic” vs. “Cartoony”:
Other people call this spectrum different names, this is just how I think about it. And both styles have their place, depending on the emotion you’re trying to convey in your pin-up. Cartoony styles make things more light-hearted and fun, even if the scene depicted is otherwise serious. It’s like the artist is telling the audience “It’s okay to enjoy the hot girl, she’s not in any serious danger.”
So all of my digital sketches of this mecha pilot had her face falling on the more Realistic side of this spectrum:
But it just wasn’t working.
I went through the ENTIRE digital process, as you can see, doing the final inks, the shading, shading her latex catsuit just so, shading the chair behind her, ALMOST reaching the end-
-and even though my eyes were closer to the AI barbarian girl reference I was using on the top left-
-something just didn’t feel right.
The pin-up was too serious.
So-
-and I want to stress, how UNUSUAL this is for me, to edit something as important as HER FACE in THE VERY FINAL STAGES of making a digital artwork-
-but the number one rule is that the artist has to be happy with the work. And I wasn’t happy. So, my heart pounding, I erased some of her carefully drawn face in my final piece and did it again:
And I don’t really know what my deeper message is here-
-I guess, if you really want to take your artwork to the next level-
-don’t be afraid to completely erase the most important part of your entire piece and redo it from scratch, even though every fiber in your being is screaming at you to leave it alone and you’ll never make it as good as the first time again. It worked for Da Vinci on the Mona Lisa.
Just make a digital backup of your previous state first. (Da Vinci was lazy, he never did that.)
I don’t know, I like the more cartoony style better, for this one. If you guy want me to do a whole post on the difference between J. Scott Campbell cartoony style and Frank Cho realistic style, I’ve been struggling with that for years, just let me know by writing your comment on the back of a $20 bill and throwing it into an active volcano. It will reach me.
Wrap-up
So, to recap, to push your art to the next level this year:
Consider using a Perspective CAGE around your model while sketching, to get the tougher camera angles right
Think about spending more time detailing out your BACKGROUNDS even though you’d really rather spend the time drawing the naked women instead of buttons and lines
Experiment with DIFFERENT MATERIALS and TEXTURES for her to wear, such as shiny red latex catsuits, and
Don’t be afraid to EDIT YOUR FACE, even in the LATE stages of your drawing, to get the mood EXACTLY how you want it!
Here’s how she finally turned out, after all of that:
It doesn’t have an obvious ‘joke’ like I’m used to doing with pinups, but I learned SO MUCH technical stuff doing it, things I will apply to future pin-ups, that it was worth it!
For example, I hope you can see the influences of the mecha pilot girl and her perspective cage in this piece I’m working on for NEXT month:
That’s all I’ve got this month, an artist’s motivational version of ‘Alpha Strike’ is available on the shop tab of this blog, and let me know at thelazypencil69@gmail.com, if you have any suggestions for a future pin-up tutorial!
Peace out.