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Henning Ludvigsen
COUNTRY: Greece CLIENTS: , Fantasy Flight Games, Max Protection, Spiral Direct Henning is a Norwegian digital artist with a traditional art education and more than 20 years experience from the ad agency industry and five years as a computer game developer. He is currently art director at a computer game development company in Greece. www.henningludvigsen. com
DVD Assets
The files you need are in the folder called Henning Ludvigsen in the Workshops section. Download a demo of Photoshop from www. adobe.com/downloads
up masters such as Alberto Vargas, Gil Elvgren, Billy de Vorss, Joyce Ballantyne, Zoe Mozert, Edward Runci, Earl Moran and Haddon Sundblom to mention a few. Its a good idea to try to keep things simple in this type of illustration, especially when it comes to the folds on clothing or human skin. Even though a hand looks realistic with the finest of
details, it might not work for the pin-up genre. Smooth things out, and aim for straightforward approaches. Play around with anatomy. Pin-up girls are generally likely to have much longer legs and thinner limbs than are realistic and you can really accentuate their curves quite far in order to make them even more full bodied.
The legs are the stars of any pin-up piece, so they must have great prominence in your artwork.
Eventually, I decide that a standing pose is the best way to showcase my characters long legs.
The term pin-up was created in the early 1940s and originates from images with erotic content that you could rip out of magazines and newspapers or from calendars that you could pin up on the wall. I believe the reason that this genre of art still appeals to so many people is because it has elements of being sarcastic, naive and timeless. You can still create modern pin-up art based on the old guidelines. There are three things to remember about pin-up art. First, the stars of the piece are the legs; they should be long, slender and smooth, have grace and a sexy silhouette and posture. Second is the innocent expression, mostly depicted either smiling showing perfect white teeth, or looking surprised, which is often linked to slapstick kind of comedy situations. Finally, details such as cloth folds or wrinkles in skin can make the painting too complex and realistic and might take away from the pin-up appearance.
Based on the clients description, I make some sketches. The theme was to be a classic GI Jane kind of character, with a sassy camouflaged uniform with red, Martian-type colours and a scarified terrain for the background. After a few experiments in sitting poses, the client suggested standing to show her legs.
Sketches
Even though pin-ups dont have realistic anatomy, its still important to look at reference photos. If you have a helpful friend, set up a quick photoshoot so that you have something handy to look at while painting. Only real reference photos can aid you as to how light and shadows works, and how skin and fabric folds. Also, having access to a good reference library doesnt hurt. For this piece, I discovered that its almost impossible for a real person to hold this pose. So the reference doesnt have to be perfect, just something for guidance.
References
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Workshops
I started in medium resolution to free up resources for making the sketching process as fast as possible. Starting too big can dampen creativity. To get the body shape, I used the grid technique to copy some references to get her anatomy in the right proportion before I transformed the sketch into a more extreme posture.
Base sketch
Lets apply some base colours! I make a temporary mock-up palette to colour pick from, and apply this to the character with my brush set to Colour mode. This will tint the greyscale base version of the painting. Now I can easily see that my values werent as dark as they should have been, because it looks flat. This is why its important to check both your greyscale and colour values.
Colour me
Having a block background, I turn on Lock Transparent Pixels in the Layers window. This way I cant paint outside the existing pixels in this layer. I prefer doing shape before colour and start in grey tones. Using a hard edged brush, I go over the character with rough strokes.
Get in shape
Before rendering, I scaled the painting up to a larger format. A normal hard edged brush will get you far, and it embeds your characteristics in each brush stroke more than soft brushes. Change the Brush tool back to Normal mode and start rendering the character over and over again. This can be tedious, but its what makes the painting. The more effort you make, the more you and your viewers will enjoy your art. I introduced vague colour variations throughout the piece to prevent monochromatic colours.
Colour me again
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Background
Shift While usin g any pain ting tool, hold Shift to automatic ally draw a straight lin e betwee n two poin ts.
Straight lines
The face and hair make this girl pretty. I spent time on her face as there are no shortcuts here. Look at old pin-up paintings for inspiration. First, the hair was shaped with a hard edged brush, then refined with a Dotted hair-brush, then single strands of hair were added. Start with a dark base and work towards brighter values, layer by layer of hair.
One of very few purposes I can think of for the Smudge tool is for refining the outlines of my characters. Using a semi soft brush with strength set to fairly high works nicely, and makes the silhouette appear semi soft. Make sure to edit the silhouette so that it shows interesting lines and curves. Photoshops Liquify tool is great for major tweaks.
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Workshops
tweaks 14 Final thing that should be done The last
Mess it up!
Digital art can easily look too smooth and artificial. After finishing a painting, why not create a layer on top of all the others where you use a textured randomisation brush? This creates interesting inaccuracies and gives the impression that your painting contains more details than it actually does. Play around with the brush creation options and find a setting that suits you. Brushes like this usually work great, particularly for highlights.
is going over the entire piece, zoomed in and armed with a smaller brush to fix minor glitches and errors. I also added more backlight bouncing off the silhouette of the character to connect her more to the background.
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