Are you guys ready for some lovin’? 😉 If not, check out some of these last minute Valentine’s Day cards, signs, printables, and crafts. So FUN aren’t they?!
These adorable Love Bug Valentine’s would be great for the little ones. Find the bugs at the Dollar Store and get the jar printable at Dandee.
Martha Stewart knows how to really rock the card making! I love these and they’d be especially easy with a dye cut machine.
This is a fabulous idea for a man bouquet! Heather over at How Does She? made an ingenious bouquet out of mens socks for her guy this V’day. So great. You could probably also do the same kind of thing with underwear or t-shirts or ties.
Bakerella made these darling and simple cupcakes for V’day. So sweet and easy even I might be able to pull off whipping these up!
Want a funny card/geeky/sci-fi card? Check this out from the Wallaroo on etsy. LOVE it.
Speaking of clay, you could always go back to my clay rose tutorial and make some adorable vintage inspired rose rinds, earrings, or even refrigerator magnets for the special ladies in your life.
I saw this on Pinterest (follow me on pinterest if you’d like) and thought it would be another great freezer paper (or applique) project! Spice it up a little bit tomorrow night! 😉 Or, if you’re NOT in the mood, create the other side to say “In Your Dreams”.
And of course, if you have a chance, doll yourself up and take some pin ups! Your sweety will LOVE them! 🙂
I hope you all have a FANTABULOUS VALENTINE’S DAY!!! See you back here in a few!
Hey guys! I was perusing my blog and thought I’d do a quickie post on my favorite posts of 2011. I know its a bit late in the year to do a post like this, but I was pretty much checked out for all of January so I’m starting my 2012 now. 🙂 So here they are, my favs from last year! Oh the memories…
2) I LOVE my shoncho! Easiest sewing project ever.
3) And another easy sewing project that turned out great is my little maxi dress. It doesn’t wrinkle and it hides my holiday weight. 😉
4) This wasn’t the easiest project but I love the final result. My wire deer head (Pinterest project). It now hangs proudly over Sawyer’s changing table.
5) The cabinet refinishing tutorial has been a huge success. Its a simple process that ANYONE can do to spruce up outdated or beat up cabinetry in their own home. Thanks to everyone for all the questions and comments!
6) The post about my son’s prematurity was a tough one to write but I was overwhelmed by the love and support from all of the readers. Preemie parents PRIDE!! 🙂
7) My posterboard light fixture is still hanging proudly in my kitchen and I get comments on it all the time. It hangs a little lopsided though and I keep telling myself that one day I’ll remake it and actually put the hole for the light bulb in the right place. Haha! Thats what happens when you’re trying things out for the first time! Its imperfect, but its mine!
8) This tutorial was fun and simple and I really like how it turned out. I need to do more of these line drawings and stick them up in my little art gallery hallway.
10) And finally, probably the most fun I had doing a tutorial was when a few girlfriends came over to help me out with my Pin Up girl photo shoot tut for Valentine’s Day. SO FUN and they did a GREAT JOB!
What a great 2011! I can’t wait to do all the things I have planned for 2012!! 🙂 Ya’ll come back now, ya hear!
Hey everyone! I’ve been getting a lot of questions and requests for more info on how to take and edit your own pin-up and vintage style photos so I decided to get it together and do another pin-up photoshoot with some friends and let you all get to see how its done! I made a video of the shoot so you can really see how I do all this in my own house. We had SO much fun and I am THRILLED with the results! Check out the video (its a bit long I know, but I wanted you to be able to really see how it all works so you can feel confident enough to try it yourself), and some of my previous pin up posts and invite some friends over and get crackin! Seriously guys, this is NOT hard and you CAN do it yourself. And your guys are going to LOVE it!
Thank you so much Sabrina (who by the way is the dark-haired brunette and the mother of THREE!), Vanessa, and Melissa for being my models! You guys did FABULOUSLY!
This photo shoot was a very PG shoot (due to the fact that I knew I’d be posting it online for all to see) but feel free to spice it up as much as you’d like for your special Valentine!
FYI: All the outfits and props were things from my own closet. A lot of the things in the pics are from thrift stores (its safe to say that at least 70% of my entire wardrobe consists of thrift store finds) and I highly recommend hitting up your local thrift stores before your shoot for some awesome vintage (or vintage-inspired) threads.
I really wanted to do a calendar tutorial just to show the range of outfits, props, and poses you can use so I will also now give you a list of my calendar themes month by month.
January: Think snow, ice, sledding, etc. You could also do a little cocktail dress and hat with a noise maker and confetti for a New Years theme. Sabrina dressed in fishnets, a black pleated skirt, a fur collar, a red hat, and teal cardigan, with a gold belt and red shoes. *TIP* Keep the clothes fun and colorful to make the pictures pop. We had her pretend to be chilly.
February: This ones easy! Think Valentine’s Day of course! You can do a cupid thing with wings and a bow and arrow, or just get real sexy in a little number, or go with our theme like Sabrina and cut out hearts from construction paper. We put Sabrina in my vintage red and white polka dot dress, black thigh highs (got them at Target), and peep toes, and took pics while she cut out hearts. I’m in LOVE!
March: You could do something more inkeeping with the holidays like a St. Patrick’s Day theme, but we wanted to get more “housewifey” stuff in there (because like myself Sabrina is a housewife) so we had her hanging laundry on a clothesline. She wore her mom’s old vintage skirt and my yellow thrift store cardigan with pearls of course. We also turned on a fan and pointed it at the clothes so they looked like they were blowing in the wind a bit.
April: Think rain! “April showers bring May flowers” right! You could also do an April Fools theme and have a little prankster thing going. We went the rain route because I happen to have an adorable polka dot umbrella and kahki trench coat. Melissa is an actress and it shows! She had the CUTEST facial expressions!
May: Think SPRING! We took Sabrina, stuck a vintage floral dress on her, put an oversized flower in her hair, and gave her a basket full of tulips. And look what loveliness happened… Also, I think flying a kite would look ADORABLE or chasing butterflies…there are so many ways you could work it.
June: Summer summer summer. There are TONS of things you could do with this! I knew I was using a bathing suit shot for August so I wanted to do something that had to do with travel. I happened to have an old red suitcase that I had to buy at Goodwill in Idaho to haul home a bunch of baby clothes last time I went to visit my family. It worked great for these next shots.
July: We went for a 4th of July “all american” theme. There are tons of things you could do with this theme, especially if you happen to have an American flag or an actual sparkler or something. I, sadly, did not, but we did good despite lacking those things.
August: This is where Vanessa donned my vintage inspired floral bathing suit and struck some real pin up poses for us. She looks AMAZING I must say.
September: Its beginning to feel like fall! And the kids are headed back to school! YAY! We went with a school teacher theme here and put Sabrina in a pencil skirt, belted cardigan, fishnets, and cat eye glasses (from the Dollar Store). I love love love how cute these turned out!
October: We actually FORGOT October. I know. LAME. But heres some ideas for you: Think pumpkin carving, halloween costumes, apple picking, or playing in leaves. Those will all be adorable.
November: Think COOKING and Thanksgiving. We went for another housewife look with my apron and kitchen and cleaning stuff. (I’ll have to post more pics of these soon) but for now… (I love Vanessa’s face in this…this is exactly how I feel about dusting.)
December: CHRISTMAS of course. Think presents, decorating a tree, baking cookies, making gingerbread houses, mistletoe, or just put on a hot red dress and a santa hat and call it good! Sabrina looks DIVINE in this one don’t you think!
And there you go! I have given you plenty of ideas and inspiration to go do your own! No excuses now! Go be cute and have fun.
P.S. I did all the editing of these photos on Picnik. Visit my old tutorials for some tips but I will also be getting new editing tutorials up soon!
I have been getting a lot of questions about my pin up photos so I thought I’d do a few tutorials on those that I hope will answer some questions and get you feeling confident to go do your own. For this tutorial I am going to walk you through how to take an unedited pin up photo and turn it into a vintage style pin up poster using a photo editing site called Picnik. If you’d like more tutorials on how to take and edit pin up photos, check out my past posts under “photography and editing“. My most recent pin up photos in my “More Pin Up Inspiration” post were actually edited with my new PS Elements 8 software (thanks Courtney and Jared!), but I will show you how to edit to pretty close the same quality without buying photoshop or other editing software. How great is that! If you like editing photos and creating awesome effects on your images I suggest you upgrade your Picnik account to “premium” and tons of fabulous extra features will be opened up for you. It is a good deal for all that it has to offer. I especially love the simplicity of Picnik. Even though I have photoshop now, I still use Picnik a lot because it is quick and easy. To do this tutorial you will need to upgrade to a premium Picnik account to have access to the “layering” feature.
Here we go.
1. Assuming you’ve already read my past pin up posts and taken some fabulous shots for yourself, open your saved photo in Picnik. Mine looks like this:
2. In your first screen (should be under the “Edit” tab) play with the “colors” button if you need to. I shot this under a kitchen light that made it a little warm so I am going to play with the saturation and temperature to try to get it a little cooler. Also, play with the “exposure” to blow out the white background a bit without loosing the detail in the subject. The “advanced” tab in “exposure” is great for fine tuning a bit.
3. There. Thats a bit better. Next go to the “Create” tab (you can first go to the “Touch Ups” tab if you want to whiten teeth and remove blemishes), and click on “Effects” to pull up the effects toolbar. Then you can play around a bit in there but I’m just going to go down to one of my favorites, “Ortonish” and open that up.
4. “Ortonish” adds sort of a dreamy/brightening effect. I don’t want it looking dreamy necessarily though so I’m going to play with this and slide the bloom down to 0% and the brightness to about 30%. Find what works for your photo.
5. Now its time to add your poster layer to the photo. First, you’ll need to find an old crumply paper texture to apply to your photo from either the web (there are tons of free ones out there, just google it), or you could just crumpled up and distress a piece of paper yourself and take a clear picture of it. If you upgrade to the “premium” setting on Picnik they also have textures on the toolbar you can apply. So run along now and find a texture layer you’d like to use…
6. Got it? Okay then, save it to your computer and then go to the little green tab at the bottom left hand side of your Picnik screen called “Photo Basket”. Click on it and then click on “Upload Photos” and upload your new texture photo. It will then appear in your little archives band at the bottom of the screen.
7. Click on your new texture photo and drag it on top of your photo. Resize it to cover the entire photo.
8. Then, using the “photo properties” box that should be popped up under “advanced blend modes” find “multiply”.
9. If you’d like you can find “Film Grain” on the effects toolbar and add some grain to vintage-i-fy your poster even more. I added light filmgrain at 40%. You can also find “Vignette” on the effects toolbar and add that if you’d like. I set the vignette size to 29 and the strength to 0%.
10. If you’d like to give it a “color washed” look you can find “Tint” on the effects toolbar and play with that a bit. I used a pink tint color set to “screen” under advanced modes and then faded it to 60%.
11. Then you can even wash it out further by going back to the top to the “Edit” tab and playing again with the exposure and contrast. I increased the exposure to 4 and decreased the contrast to -8.
And thats it! Pretty cool huh! You will become addicted to this kind of editing and soon you’ll find yourself hunting for textures everywhere! Hope it was helpful! Now go have some fun!
Here are a few more pin up style pics I took of some friends while I was visiting Idaho in September. To see a tutorial on how to take your own pin up pics go here. To see more of my photography (pin up and other) go here.
Vintage Pin Up Photo
Vintage Umbrella Pin Up Photo
Vintage Style Pin Up Photo
Pin Up Style Photo
Vintage Style Pin UP
We Can Do It Pin Up Vintage Poster
I am planning on doing a tutorial on using layers to get this kind of vintage poster look in Picnik.
Vintage Style Signed Pin Up
This is actually my GORGEOUS big sister. We did a whole book for her hubby’s Christmas present.
The ones below are actually of me when I was preggers with Sawyer. I wanted some maternity photos this time around since last time I had the baby before I got big enough to take any. My hubby took them with my direction. He did a pretty good job too!
Maternity Vintage Pin Up Photo
Maternity Vintage Pin Up Photo
Maternity Vintage Pin Up Style Photo
Now go read some of my pin up tutorials and do your own! 🙂
Since I’m trying to jump start this blog of mine (and since my hubby is out of town for the weekend) you can see I’m trying to post as many tutorials as I can this week. Once I fill up this blog a bit, I do plan on taking it down a notch to 3 posts per week on average. But for now, my hubby is gone, my son is napping, and I really want to finish up this pin-up segment I got going on so here is the rest of it.
This post will teach you how to turn your pin up pics (or any pics you’d like for that matter) into creative gift ideas and custom artwork.
First we’ll walk through how to create a custom “Ace of Hearts” pin up pic using www.picnik.com. You can either have this printed out and framed, or use the same technique to create an entire custom deck of pin up playing cards. Here goes:
Check out the last post about editing your pin up pics and signing in to picnik.
Using your previously edited pic, click on the “Create” tab at the top of the picnik page.
Find “Posterize” under the “Create” tab.
Use the slide bars to create the effect you’d like. For my playing card I set it to 7 for the “number of colors”, 62% “detail”, and 24% “fade”. I wanted to simplify my pic but still leave enough detail and strong red color to create an impact.
Next find “Film Grain”. If you’d like a less vintage look, leave this step out. But I like it and think its fitting for the pinup ace of hearts. I set it to 76% “light” film grain.
Now, go to the top of the screen and hit the “Text” tab.
Write your letter (in this case an ‘A’) in the text box. Then find the font you’d like to use for your text. I used “Georgia” for my card.
You can drag your letter to the top left hand corner and then change the color in the “Text Properties” box. I tried to match the red in my pic as much as I could.
When you’ve moved the ‘A’ into place, right click and hit “duplicate type” in the gray box. This will save you the time of recreating the same letter in the same color and size for the bottom right hand corner.
Drag your copied ‘A’ to the bottom right hand corner of your image.
Next, in the “Text Properties” box hit the little vertical “flip” arrow to flip your ‘A’ upside-down.
Reposition the ‘A’ in the corner.
Now, the text is done so go back to the top of the page and click on the “Sticker” tab.
Under the “Sticker” tab find “basic shapes”. Click on the red heart.
Drag and size the heart to be a little smaller than the ‘A’ in the upper left hand corner. (Look at a deck of cards if it helps).
Do the same thing with the heart as you did with the ‘A’, meaning duplicate it, drag it to the bottom right hand corner and flip it upside-down.
And there you have it! You’re pin up Ace of Hearts!
There are several things you can do with this project but here are some of my ideas:
Create a full playing deck for your lucky guy.
Blow it up and frame it for a game room or “man cave”.
Use it as a Valentine’s Day card front.
Well folks, if you thought that was fun , just wait! Now we’re going to take this same pic and turn it into Andy Warhol inspired artwork for your home! Heres how:
Using your original edited pic from the last blog post, go to “Posterize” under the “Create” tab on www.picnik.com.
This time slide the “number of colors” bar all the way down to 2 so that your image becomes very mod looking in black and white (or black and gray like mine did). In my image I took the “detail” all the way to 100% but you can play with what you think looks best for your image.
Next, find “Duo-Tone” and pick out the two colors you’d like to use for your first pic. I stuck with black for my image and did a teal for the background of my first image. (I did a series of 3 with 3 different background colors).
You’re going to want to save this image at this point.
After you save the image, click “Continue Editing”, and undo the last step (the first color “duo-tone”) so that you’re back to your black and white image.
Repeat step 3 and 4 choosing different background colors and saving your image in between the changes.
At this point you can either choose to print your images out separately to frame or (as in my case) you can use the “Collage” feature on picnik to group the three prints together before you print them out.
To use the “Collage” feature on Picnik return to the Home Page. At the top of the page you will see “Collage: Mix all your photos together.” Click on it.
The collage page will open and give you options of different collage layouts to choose from. I had 3 images I wanted to use so I chose the tri-side-by-side collage template.
Next, go to the bottom of the page and click “Get From Computer”. A slew of options will pop up.
Find the “History” option. This will pull up all the past images that you’ve edited and saved on Picnik. Your 3 Warhol-esque images should appear at the bottom of the screen.
Now all you need to do is drag your images into place in the order you’d like them to go and hit “Done”.
Thats it! Fabulous Warhol-esque pin up art to wow your friends and spice up your walls! Heres how mine turned out:
You can use the “Collage” feature on Picnik to do as many color backgrounds in the series as you’d like. This is also a great technique to create any kind of Warhol-esque artwork for your home decorating. I recently used this same technique to create custom wall art for my son’s bedroom. I simply found an image of a race-car off google images and used Picknick to “posterize” it and change the background color. Then I simply printed off each image in a series of 3 different background colors and ModPodged each print to its own pre-painted canvas. *SIDE NOTE* I get most of my artists canvases from BigLots for less than $10 per canvas. The ones I used for my son’s room were $3 each. This is what his car art looks like on his walls:
So there you have it! Get creative and see what you can do with this new info!!
Stay tuned for my next tutorial “How to Make a Vintage Inspired Feather Fascinator for CHEAP” !
In this tutorial I will show you how to edit your pin up photos that you took from the last tutorial (or any photos you want to edit) for free using www.picnik.com and a lot of creativity and playing around. Picnik is my favorite online photo editing site. It is pretty much all I use to edit my photos and I LOVE it! I have upgraded to the “premium” kit for $25 for a year subscription but everything I’ll be showing you how to do is done under their basic package which is completely FREE. But I warn you…YOU WILL BECOME ADDICTED to picnik and will soon want to purchase their premium package just to get more goodies. Here are some examples of photos I’ve taken and edited using Picnik:
You get the idea? There is just SO much you can do with picnik and basic photography skills its CRAZY FUN. But, before I go off on a tangent, lets get back to this tutorial. Today I will be showing you how to 1. Edit your pinup photos in an “Oh-So-GLAMOROUS” way, 2. Teach you how to use your newly edited photos to create some awesome gifts and custom artwork for yourself or your friends. Heres some examples of what you’ll learn:
Basic editing:Turning your pin-up pics into a custom card deck or game room wall art:
Turning your pin up pics into Warhol style artwork:
Pretty crazy huh! Heres the breakdown:
Cost: $0
Supplies: Your pin up pics from the last tutorial downloaded to your computer. Access to the internet (which I assume you have if you’re reading this blog). Photo paper, cardstock, or whatever you want to do to get your pics printed out for your viewing pleasure.
Are you ready? Lets do this!
BASIC EDITING FOR PIN-UP GLAMOR SHOTS:
Log on to www.picnik.com. You can sign in as “guest” or register for an account. I recommend registering for an account since it is FREE if you sign up for the basic package and picnik will save your photo history for you for easy access. Heres what you’ll see when you log-in:
Click on “Upload Photos” and choose the photo you would like to edit from your computer.
Your photo will upload on the screen for you under the “Edit” tab. In this tab you can play around for a bit rotating your image, resizing it, cropping it, sharpening it, etc. For this tutorial I’ll show you how to adjust the exposure to create a bright backdrop and pop you subject out in a “postery” way.
Click on “exposure” to pull up the slide bars. Play with the slide bars under exposure and contrast to get it to a place where you like it. For me, I like to click on the “advanced” tab within “exposure” to fine tune it a bit. Heres what I did in the “advanced” tab under “exposure”. I adjusted the “highlights” to 14, checked the “local contrast” box and brought the strength down to 20%. Really you just gotta play around until you get it to where you like it for your pic, but the overall concept is to brighten the white background so it looks less like hanging sheets on a wall and more like a clean white canvas on which your subject matter sits.
When you’ve done all the things you want to do on the under the “Edit” tab, click over to the “Create” tab.
Under the “Create” tab you’ll find tons of cool effects that you can apply to your photo like sepia toned, black and white, film grain, posterize, etc. We will be using several to build up our photos so get ready to follow along!
First I like to hit “Boost”. “Boost” amplifies the brightness and colors in your pics and it works well for pinup if you want to make the reds really red and the whites really bright. Play with the slide bar till you find the right amount of “boostage”. For my photo I set it at 9%.
Next go down the row to “Vignette”. I LOVE this effect for pin up photos since it creates a hazy frame around the subject. In “Vignette” you can choose colors, size, and strength of the effect. I set mine to black, 34 size, and 84% strength. Be careful not to fade out your subjects head or face or any other part you want showing clearly.
Next for my pic I hit “Lomo-ish” which is the same concept of “Vignette” but brightens the center of the photo as well as darkening the edges. This is up to you. I slid the “fade” bar to 89% and left “blur edges” at 50%.
Now go down to “Ortonish”. This is probably my favorite and most used effect. It is hard to explain so you’ll just have to play with it to see why I like it so much. For my pic I set the “bloom” to 0%, the “brightness” to 50%, and the “fade” to 20%.
Lastly I went down to “Cross Process” and faded it to 87%. This gives it just a bit of a yellow tinge and makes it more postery I think.
If you’d like you can play around with the “Touch Up” tab which has things like “teeth whitening” and “eye bright”. You can also play with the “Soften” button back under the “Create” tab and click on the little paintbrush to pull up the “advanced” slidebar. I like to use this to soften lines in the backdrop fabric which you can do by checking the “reverse effect” box and using the paintbrush tool to soften those lines into the background.
Thats pretty much it!! Voila!! What a fancy pic you have created! As a reminder heres how mine turned out.
Okay, so I’m sure just after that little tutorial you’re addicted so I’ll let you play a bit before we move on to the next couple art projects with our pin up pics. Plus, my two year old really needs lunch and a nap so I’ll have to come back later. Have fun picniking!
*Click here to see my new and improved DIY Pin-Up tutorial with video! 🙂
This is going to be the first “how to” I write so I want it to be good! My sis-in-law was kind enough to “expose” herself (in a rated PG kinda way) to you all in order to let me write this tutorial. So thanks Courtney!! You look GORGEOUS!
First I want to show off the pics I took to get you all excited to do your own! Keep in mind, I am by NO means a professional photographer, I have no training (aside from reading my camera’s manual and watching a few introductory photography tutorials online). I “shoot” (look at me trying to sound all photog-y) with an Olympus DSLR that my hubby got for around $350 since it was a refurbished camera. You don’t need to have a DSLR to take good pics. Really, it is more in the poses and of course the editing which we’ll get to later. Anyway, heres the damage we did during our little pin up session:
So FUN!!! If I weren’t fat and pregnant (baby boy #2 is due July 31st), I would’ve had her take some of me! We actually took several more with a bunch of different “costumes” but those are intended for her hubby’s anniversary gift and WILL NOT be appearing here or anywhere else on the internet. 🙂
Well, are you ready!? Lets take some photos!
Here is the breakdown:
Cost: $0 (we had everything we used for these photos already on hand so we just went to it)
Supplies For Backdrop:
White or light colored fabric. We used some white curtains I had and some white fabric I had in my craft room. You can use white sheets, or anything that will cover up a lot of wall and floor space.
A clip-on shop light or positionable lamp. I have two clip-on shop lights I got at Walmart for about $6 each that I use with energy saver bulbs in “daylight”. You can use any kind of light source, the goal is just to be able to point the light where you want it to be (usually on the model’s face) which is important for indoor shooting.
Thumb tacks or tape to tack up your backdrop to a wall.
Supplies For Costuming/Props: Heres where you can get really creative. What I did was simply google “pin up girl photography” where a ton of photos popped up with all kinds of themes and ideas for poses and props. But, just to save you that step, heres some stuff I like to use the most that you most likely have or can borrow or at least buy at the dollar or thrift store:
A Cute Bathing Suit. If you happen to have a vintage inspired suit already like I did thats great. *SIDE NOTE* I got my red retro suit off of www.spiegel.com on sale last year for $30. It was white when I bought it (it only came in black and white) and so I dyed it with RIT dye in red from Walmart. I’ve gotten comments every single time I’ve worn it and no one can tell it was a home dye job. Oh and if you like it, I just looked it up and they have it on clearance for $24.99 right now in white! (UM…JEALOUS. I think I’ll order one for my sis-in-law since she looked so SMASHING in mine). Back to it then. If you don’t have a “retro” suit, no worries, any suit will look great as long as it is basically a solid color (or has polka-dots or stripes…very pin up).
High Heels: This needs no expounding. Stilettos and peep-toes are great. Espadrilles work too.
Pencil Skirt and White Poplin Shirt: If you don’t happen to have a high waisted black pencil skirt, someone you know does. Or you can just do what I do and hit the local thrift store. I found mine (used in the pic above) for $4 at Goodwill. This outfit works great for the “sexy librarian/secretary” look.
Big Flower/Cocktail Hats/Feather Fascinators: Stay-tuned to learn how to make some awesome vintage inspired accessories. Or, steal a flower off of one of your homes arrangements and pin it in your hair.
Misc. Costuming Ideas: There are SO many! Here are some I like most: trench coats and umbrellas (for that “Singing in the Rain” vibe), feather boas, cat-eye glasses (I just found some yesterday at the dollar store), lots of drapey jewelry and pearls (raid the little girls dress-up section or your niece’s closet), an american flag towel or blanket (to wrap up in for the “patriotic pin up”), fishnet stockings, knee-highs, plaid skirts, anything else that looks retro or fun to use. And if you want to do something oober-sexy for that special guy, get bold and put on some cute lingerie!
A Bench/Table/Chair: For a lot of the pin up poses you’ll want to have your model sit on something. I used a little ottoman I had in my house and a white Ikea end table. Anything works, although simple seating is best since it doesn’t detract from the subject matter.
Misc. Prop Ideas: Beach bag, books, old telephone, hand held mirror, umbrella, you get the idea.
Questions? Would you like more ideas? Google it! There are SO many fun pin up sites out there that you can steal ideas from!
So, you got your backdrop pinned up, your lights clipped on (I use a ladder so I can clip the light up and down as needed and so I can take shots from above if I want), and all the costume stuff piled up and ready to go. Now what? Time to play DRESS UP!! I personally love to experiment with makeup and hair and have taught myself to do some pretty basic pin up styles. But, if you aren’t as confident in you makeover abilities check these two you-tube tutorials out to learn what you need to know quickly and easily.
Makeup: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syjnwqh9VD0 (I think its funny that the makeup artist talks about using this for Halloween when this is how I do my makeup on a regular basis! Ha!)
Once you got your face on and hair done up its time to start taking pics! I would recommend reading your user manual for your camera so you get familiar with shooting pics indoors. Like I said, you DO NOT need to be a pro. You’ll be able to learn and adjust as you go. Next, turn on some fun music and get going! Its hard to get started at first, especially if your model is shy so the best thing to do is find some poses you want to try and have them either printed out to have on hand or up on the computer screen where you can instruct your model or just show her what you want her to do. Pretty soon you’ll both loosen up and the original ideas will start flowing. I actually really wanted to get a “Pose Book” to use in such cases but quickly found that professional photography pose books cost more than what I wanted to spend (which was $0) so I scowered the internet for poses and created my own book from the images I found. Again, since I’ve already done the work for you (lucky you) here are some poses to get you started:
And thats it!! Easy breezy and SO MUCH FUN! Your friends and family are going to think you’re a genius and master photographer! But, I do have to say, that in order to REALLY get your photos looking pin up and professional some editing is required. I do almost ALL of my photo editing on www.picnik.com which I have found to be super easy and fun to use and offers a huge variety of editing tools to get your pics looking AWESOME. I have bought the “premium” package ($25 for a years subscription) which offers some additional tools but the basic package is great and costs NADA and will do the job for your pin up pics. Now, go take your pics, upload them to your computer, don’t freak out if they’re not perfect, and log on to this blog again for my next tutorial “How to Edit Your Pin Up Pics For Free Using Picnik”. Heres a preview.
So you can see how important editing is (especially if you’re an amateur like me) in achieving that real pin up poster look.
Hope you enjoyed my first tutorial and are excited to go take some pics of your own!! I will be posting again soon step by step editing instructions, as well as great art and gift ideas you can make with your new pin up pics! Thanks for reading! Have fun!
P.S. If you like this tutorial click here for more of my pin up pics to be inspired by, here for that editing tutorial mentioned above, and here for some vintage pin up poster editing fun.
See|Cate|Create 