Artist Commission: Custom Personalized Pin-Up Poster from Photo

Today I would like to tell you about my recent artist commission. A guy from the USA asked me to draw a personalized custom pin-up poster from a photo of his girl-friend to make her an original and unique gift. It was a rather interesting assignment which is worth a post in my artist’s blog.

Vintage Pin-Up Art as a Symbol of Female Charm

Pin-up drawings, paintings and illustrations were used in times when color photography and photo manipulation possibilities were extremely restricted. Pin-up drawings are good representatives of pop art, i.e. art which most people love or at least think it’s kinda cool. No wonder that pin-up style posters and calendars are extremely popular even in our days. Although the pop art is often considered to be the mainstream and something hackneyed, it seems to be not the case with the pin-up art, most likely because hand drawn pin-ups were succeeded by photography which was made with photo-devices. Nowadays photographs are often embellished by means of various software or computer generated effects and filters. Therefore vintage pin-ups are not just mere drawings of beautiful and sexy girls but the manifestation of the genuine, human created art. Whatever people say, but I my personal believe is that any camera will never be as creative as the artist’s brain. I know that today’s cameras, hardware and software can do wonders but what devise can compete in creativity with an artist’s hand operated by the human brain? That’s the reason why the hand-made art has always been the most valuable and appreciated.

People also love vintage things because they remind them of the days of their youth or childhood. And those who were not born in those retro pin-up days yet, think that époque was more romantic and agreeably naïve. Isn’t it cool to imagine how you would have lived in those days when TV-sets were rare and people had no computers to distract them from admiring real nature and experience real life? And especially live the life of glamorous fashion models, movie actors / actresses who were the first to start fashion trends and who never stop being admired through the decades till the current day. Every woman wants to be admired. And what is the better symbol of the woman’s beauty admiration than the pin-up art? Pin-up emphasizes female beauty and sexuality balancing between classical nude figure paintings and today’s undisguised demonstration of the female body. But there is something more classical in the1950’s pin-up art, something more innocent, more naïve and pure. It seems that the pin-up art of that époque did not merely concentrate on carnal exhibition of woman’s beauty, but it somehow reflected the vibrant “spirit” of a woman, her soul which DOES exists in her sensual body. The pin-up art created by an artist does not show a woman as an object of male’s desire but it points out the girl’s pride of being a female, pride of being the most attractive creature in the world. And when the guy wanted to give his girl-friend a personalized pin-up as a gift, I think, he wanted to say “Hey, I am attracted to you, but I respect you as a woman. I am not a predator and you are not my prey. You are someone I love and cherish.”

Personalized Pin-Up Gift for a Girl-Friend

But let’s get back to the less romantic and more technical issues of this pin-up drawing commission. In order to achieve similarity to the 50’s pin-up style I used color pencils. I am aware of today’s glamorous pin-ups having a terrific look due to sophisticated photo devices and advanced graphics editing software and hardware but they have no the old-fashioned pin-up art charm created by such famous pin-up artists as Alberto Vargas, Al Moore, George Petty, Gil Elvgren and others. I am far from being as good in pin-up drawing as those artists but for this commission I had no other choice but creating a hand-drawn pin-up poster without any interference with graphics editing software following the classical traditions of the best pin-up artists. I also drew a retro radio and old-fashioned but stylish sunglasses in order to produce a correspondent vintage atmosphere of 1950’s. The photograph, which was sent to me, had been taken specially for this pin-up poster and that’s why it corresponded to the pin-up girl look and feel. This fact made my work a little bit easier, although I asked for other portrait photos in order to create the portrait resemblance of the pin-up. I used hard Koh-i-Nor pencils as I drew on a large A3 paper sheet and the pin-up drawing had a lot of small details. As a result a high resolution JPEG file was delivered to the client. The resolution of 3543px × 4961px was pretty much enough to make custom pin-up calendars and posters. The client allowed me to show the low resolution copy of the pin-up poster. Here is how it looks.