Saturday, December 14, 2013

Pin-up model drawing


After my old friend Loukas the monk, let's go on to something quite different. Let's talk about pin-ups. I love pin-up art and have a lot of books of it as well as model photography but I've never done a successful pin-up picture yet. This drawing was copied from one in a collection of famous photographer Bunny Yeager's model photos. It is not an official pin-up but just a study from a photograph. When I have done art class life drawing, this is the kind of "realistic" model art I would do. But pin-ups are not "realistic." They're more like cute caricatures. Now let's talk about boobs. I've seen and drawn a lot of breasts but they don't have that saucy roundness and cleavage and attitude. It took me a while to reach the "duh" moment when I realized that pin-up and fantasy character boobs are shaped and pushed up by tight bikinis or corsets. They are not "nude" breasts which are more artsy and can also be in pin-up art but without the costuming. I have not had the opportunity to depict the all-important cleavage and pushed-up roundness which is the characteristic of fantasy boobage. I tried to draw it from Yeager's model here but I only had a sketching pen to work with. Now this isn't the best of drawings and her face isn't "pretty" (neither was the model's face conventionally pretty) but at least I'm making an attempt.

Pin-up girl is ink on sketchbook page, about 3" x 5", December 13, 2013. Some revision work in Photoshop. 

1 comment:

sally said...

Wouldn't you have more success if you drew your own pin-ups, instead of trying to copy "successful" ones from other artists? They've already been done, after all.