Pin-Up with a 1956 Chevrolet Car

Today I want to show you another custom pin-up portrait created by me. This time the drawing features a vintage 1956 Chevrolet car along with a pin-up girl.

Custom 1956 Chevrolet Pin-Up

Custom artwork featuring a pin-up girl and a 1956 Chevrolet car

As you might have noticed pin-up girls often go with hot rods or classic cars on photographs and drawings. I believe there are at least two reasons why pin-up girls and retro cars seem to be inseparable.

First, pin-up artists, while creating a product of pop art mostly targeting men, are prone to combine two most exiting objects of men’s dreams – a hot girl and a great car. No doubt, this detonating mixture drives men crazy as there is nothing else which can elevate man’s self-esteem higher than conquering a woman's heart and owing a cool-looking automobile. Having both a woman and a car makes men feel good and happy.

Women and cars have always been men's most passionate desires

Cars became a popular subject of pin-up artworks due to the fact that classic pin-up pictures are, in fact, products made in the USA and later popularized all over the world by means of the dream factory called Hollywood. I believe in 1950s more people could afford a car in the USA than anywhere in the world. An affordable car of decent quality and appealing design became a symbol of the strong economy of the United States. Mass production of automobiles and comparatively high purchasing power of Americans made it easier for even average US citizens to buy a car. And that is why cars were added to the list of any self-respecting man’s desires along with attractive women. This resulted in introducing cars into the art of pin-up which the main purpose is to stimulate men’s most basic desires.

Secondly, there is nothing as good as a classic car from 1950-s to help preserve the atmosphere of the golden age of pin-up. The woman’s beauty has being a subject of many kinds of arts throughout the human history. So drawing a pretty woman alone is not always enough. However there are a few ways to impart the “feeling of the epoch” to a drawing or a painting. These ways include imitating famous pin-up painters’ style and adding some clothing and objects easily attributed to the targeted period of history. The appearance of cars has been ever-changing just like fashion and many car models are associated with the years of their production. Therefore vintage cars like a 1956 Chevrolet can be perfect objects for modern pin-up artworks if a pin-up artist or his/her customer wishes to leave a mark of those years when pin-up art was at the top of its popularity.

Work Progress Video

I offer you to check out the video below if you think it might be interested to watch how I draw my custom pin-up portraits. I hope you will enjoy the video and its background music which creates the atmosphere of 50s. By the way, among other art supplies I used Pentel brush pens again to create this artwork.

Watch this video on Youtube

Click here to see all my custom pin-ups on this blog
All my pin-up videos

Related posts:
Rat rod pin-up
Pin-up portrait featuring 3 cars
Custom pin-up artwork with a car
Portrait of a woman with a Chevrolet Bel Air

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Personalized Pin-Up Art with a Car

I am happy to announce that my personalized pin-up art keeps on growing in popularity. Within two last weeks I had several e-mails from people asking for information about my custom pin-up drawings. For the time being I observe that mostly women are interested in having personalized pin-up portraits made for them from their photographs as they are planning ahead to give original, unique and intimate gifts to their boyfriends and husbands on the occasion of future celebration of such special events as birthdays and wedding anniversaries. Well, no doubt, a hand-made traditionally-looking pin-up style portrait of the wife or the girlfriend is definitely an "out of the box" gift idea.

Not only did people ask for information about my personalized pin-up art, I had also got a couple of custom pin-up commissions. In this post I want to show you the result of one of these commissions.

The custom pin-up drawing shown below was created for a lady named Brittany. The woman was looking for a pinup related gift idea for her boyfriend when she stumbled upon my blog to see my custom pin-up pictures which she considered to be the perfect Valentines Day gift. I've got two pictures of her face and two full length pictures because, as Brittany explained, she was curvier than most pinups but she would like that to be seen in the drawing. She wanted her custom pin-up picture to be something with a car, because her boyfriend loved old cars. As a reference she had chosen a classic pin-up of a girl changing the tire of her automobile (you can see this picture here). Since she wanted her legs to be less covered with clothing in the final drawing than on the example she had showed me, I decided to draw her as a pin-up girl wearing a kind of a bathing suit. Below you can see the final pin-up artwork made for Brittany and the work progress video. As you can see I hone my custom pin-up drawing skills and techniques with every new commission. This time I used brush pens from Pentel along with regular lead and color pencils. But the most important is that Brittany absolutely loved her custom pin-up picture.

Custom pin-up art for Brittany

Custom pin-up art created by me from client's photos

Watch this video on Youtube

If you are after a personalized pin-up art created for you or your special ones I would be happy to help you in bringing your ideas to life. Just let me know.

Click here to see all my custom pin-ups on this blog
All my pin-up videos

Related posts:
Custom pin-up with three cars
Pin-up with a 1956 Chevrolet car
Rat rod pin-up
Custom Pin-Up for an Australian Woman
Custom pin-up picture for Cindy
Custom pin-up drawing for Susie

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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.

Click here to see all my custom pin-ups on this blog
All my pin-up videos

You can read more about my other custom personalized gifts in the following post:

Custom Pin-Up for an Australian Woman
Personalized pin-up art with a car
Custom pin-up poster
Custom pin-up for Susie
Custom Pin-Up for Cindy
Custom Pin-Up Gift for Christina
Custom personalized greeting cards with portraits
My fashion illustrations and sketches

Read more...