Since this is an advanced Photoshop tutorial, I won’t cover all the mundane details. All the steps were done on different layers.

Begin with your swatches:

These might change later on, but its useful to have an idea of what colors you’ll be using.

Create a stick figure of your poster girl.

Now make a solid figure version of your person. I used a 100% hardness brush of different widths to make this. This might take a while to get all the shapes smooth.

The hair is not extremely detailed. I used all my shades to create an array of lines and swirls with a 1px brush tool in her hair. I smoothed out all the colors with the smudge tool. With blonder hair, it is more important to make a couple curls stand out.

The face is very simple. Most eyes are just black lines, because of the way vintage poster girls smile. If her look is surprised or anything other than smiling, her eyes are still very darkened, and if there is any white of the eye, it is not white, it is more of a cream color or your lightest skin tone. The nose is usually just two dots and the bridge. I will add a bridge during toning, but if it is more pronounced, add it here. The mouth comes in lots of shapes and sizes. The one I have is one of the easier ones, it can all be done with a 1px brush. Pursed lips or plump lips are a little bit harder. Just create the lip shape, and then add 1 or 2 colors that highlight it. Make the eyebrows thin and one shade lighter than the hair.

Add toning to the face by brushing it with your highlight and shadow color from swatches. You can see now a nose bridge emerging from the top of the left eyebrow. Add some 50% opacity brush shadow to the eyes to give them a smoky smooth dark color.

Get used to brushing highlights and shadows and then smudging the layer, it is the basic procedure you will take for the rest of this tutorial. You can see I kind of switched over to a lighter skin tone. I don’t have to change the base color for the rest of the body, I will just change it as I tone it.

Add lines of highlight all along the body and then smudge it. Do the same with shadows. There is also a second method to toning the body: Brush the body with highlights with a 3 or 4 pixel brush. Now you Gaussian Blur this layer. Then you can do the same for shadows.

I like to do the smudging by hand as it gives it a more vintage look.

Do the same for the clothes.

Make a simple shadow.

Add shoes if you haven’t yet.

Apply minimal toning.

Add accessories, props, or anything else you want in the finished product.

Tone them and you’re done!

Keywords: Adobe Photoshop, header, pinup girl, pin-up, paint, painting, airbrush, from scratch, retro fasion.