Painting a Pin Up | 03 |Light Values

painting a pin up girl shading

Painting a Pin up Girl: Continue to Add Shading

Ready to learn more about painting a pin up girl?

Start off by adding some highlights to the eyes, and then continue to add in additional shading on the figure where it would naturally occur.

Some of the shaded areas are clearly defined by having shadow drawn on them from the initial drawing, but in other areas you will need to use your understanding of the human body to apply the shadows.

Color the Line Work

This image really shows clearly the effect that painting over the line work has. Look at her right arm (on the left hand side of the image) and see how black those lines are.

painting pinup girls tonal variation

Then compare those lines to the other arm and see how they are now blending quite nicely into the painted skin.

This effect is achieved because of the work that you did to separate your line work from the background in the first lesson in this series on painting a pin up girl.

paint a pin up sailor girl coloring hair

Coloring the Hair

To color the hair you will use the same technique as for the skin by starting with a medium value color first, and then going in and adding highlight and eventually shadow.

When you are going in and adding highlights to the hair remember that often less is more. You don’t need to go overboard with the highlights to get a convincing effect.

Once you have finished adding in the highlights, you can then adjust the line work so that it matches the overall hair color.

Shading the Lips

Add a nice cherry red tone to the lips. Once again you will start with the mid tone, and then add highlight and shadow afterwards.

how to draw pin ups coloring lips

Because the lips are wet, the shine on them will have a large contrast. So for this painting a pin up girl tutorial, this means you can go quite bright with these highlights compared to the cherry red of the rest of the lips.

Knowing how the surface that you are painting reacts to direct light is very important for painting believable materials.

For an example of this you could go to a mirror and take a look at your face, and study how the highlights on your skin differ from your hair, eyes, lips and tongue.

If you look even closer you may find that certain areas of your face are naturally oilier than others and this will also affect how shiny your skin looks.

As an artist you should always be taking note of the world around you and these subtle differences in materials so that you can take this knowledge with you and apply it to your next work.paint a sailor pin-up girl

Remember to Save!

Here’s a look at how the Sailor Girl is looking at the end of this lesson. We’ll close this lesson on painting a pin up girl by reminding you to save your work.

It’s so important that we want to constantly remind you of it here!