Pinup art is drawings of girls. We're going to make one of Miley Cyrus, based on her latest video clip for the song wrecking ball.
I'm going to use Manga studio for the outlines, and then use Corel Painter to color it. But you can use other programs, or even pen and paper!
First off, find a photo of Miley Cyrus on a wrecking ball (unless of course you are good friends with her and can ask her to pose in her underwear sitting
on her wrecking ball).
Draw a circle for the wrecking ball using the circle tool.
Now, on a new layer, draw a line of action (shown in red). This is a simple line which shows the flow of the pose.
If you don't draw this your person will look stiff and boring!
Next, draw the head. Start off with a sphere (a), then draw a line through the centre both horizontally and vertically (b), then draw some line where the
jaw is (c).
We are drawing using an approach called
'constructive drawing'. This makes it easier to get the parts all the right size. Right doesn't need to be 100 % accurate. Most pin up drawings exaggerate
the size of the legs to make the girl appear more attractive. The horizontal line should be about where the eyes appear. The vertical line should help you
place the nose.
Now draw the ribcage (green) and the pelvis (blue). Make sure from the top of the head to the bottom of the body is 3.5 heads long.
Draw the arms and legs using cylinders. The thigh should be 2 heads long, and the lower leg 2.5 heads long. Miley's legs aren't this long! We made her more attractive by making her legs longer.
On a new layer draw the outline of Miley. You can see how the spheres and cylinders help to know where to place the outlines.
Remember to add clothes! (sometimes Miley forgets to wear them ...)
To finish the outline stage, draw the chain and shoes. I then saved the picture as a .psd file and loaded it in Corel Painter.
Color the background 'off white' to make the drawing look old. I'm going to color this in the style of George Petty's pin ups. George often only painter the girl with shading and left other items in the
illustration (such as the wrecking ball in this illustration) as flat color. It looks great (and saves time too :P ). Color all of the areas using the paint bucket tool.
Now click on the outline layer. Click on the layer option which says 'preserve transparency'. Using a brush, color the outlines. I added a smiley face to the wrecking ball because I got bored.
Who is jealous of that wrecking ball?
Go back to the layer under the outlines. Using the airbrush tool, add shading. Where the light can't reach you put a slightly darker tone (shadow). Then you blend the edges of the shadow (this is called half tone). Lastly add highlights using a lighter tone.
Oh no we have a problem! It doesn't look like Miley and it looks ugly too. I'm upset just like Miley in her video clip.
Make a new layer on top of the outlines. Now paint on top and
try to get it to look more like Miley, or at least more beutiful. It
doesn't matter if it doesn't look much like her since she is the only
person who sits on top of wrecking balls in their underwear.
I showed a blown up version of the face to the left so you can see how I painted it more clearly. Don't draw everything you see - if you draw all the wrinkles and lines it will look old and ugly. Just stick to the basics.
I hope you learnt something from this tutorial. Drawing pin ups is very
hard! Try getting books such as 'The figure for all it's worth' by Andrew Loomis. That covers drawing people in much more detail. Study the pin ups by masters such as George Perry. Have fun!
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