Wo W orkshops
66
October 2007
In depth Pin-up art
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
OLD STYLE PIN-UP ART… THE NEW WAY See the creation process of a modernised pin-up artwork from the start and get the know-how to do it yourself, with the help of Henning Ludvigsen ainting pin-ups can be a whole lot of fun, no matter whether you go for the old-school vintage cheesecake kind of look or if you want to add a modernised twist to them. You don’t have to be a pin- up artist to create pin-up art, but to achieve the special look and feel, you’ll need to spend some time researching the old pin-
P
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. It’s 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
1
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 character’s long legs.
Back-story and rules
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, t he 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.
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.
2
Sketches
3
References
Based on the client’s 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.
Even though pin-ups don’t have realistic anatomy, it’s 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 doesn’t hurt. For this piece, I discovered that it’s almost impossible for a real person to hold this pose. So the reference doesn’t have to be perfect, just something for guidance.
October 2007
67
Workshops
4
Base sketch
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.
Hide your filters
5
Get in shape
Having a block background, I turn on Lock Transparent Pixels in the Layers window. This way I can’t 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.
68
October 2007
Using automated filters can be your worst enemy. The trick is to use them subtly so that the viewers don’t notice them. Blend the layer with the filter effects by playing around with layer blending modes and opacity. Textured brushes will cover up the effect, and the effect itself will add further texture to your work. The best advice is naturally to do everything by hand, and you’ll find you appreciate your work more that way.
6
Colour me
7
Colour me again
Let’s 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 weren’t as dark as they should have been, because it looks flat. This is why it’s important to check both your greyscale and colour values.
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 it’s 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.
In depth Pin-up art 8
Background
Backgrounds are not incredibly important for the pin-up genre, but if you do include one make sure it doesn’t take attention away from the girl. It’s important to introduce the background before the final decision of the overall colour scheme so that the character can mesh better with the environment. I kept the brush strokes very rough just to hint at the jagged rock formations. I also added some crates and barrels to populate the canvas.
S tr a i g h t l in e s
S hi f t W hi le usi ng an y pai nt in g t ool , hol d Shi ft t o aut omat ic a l ly d ra w a st ra i ght l in e bet w een t wo poi nt s.
Face and hair 9 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.
up 10 Make I find make up hard, so I keep it on a separate layer so that I can easily do changes to her face without having to send her back to the make up room. Add a layer with the blending mode set to Hard Light and softly apply the make up: a rosy glow in her cheeks and chin, some eye shadow, and finally mascara, applied on another normal layer.
11
Refine the silhouette
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. Photoshop’s Liquify tool is great for major tweaks.
October 2007
69
Workshops Final tweaks 14 The last thing that should be done 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.
me 12 Camouflage Since our character is located with the infantry stationed on Mars, her camouflage needs to match her surroundings. Af ter refining her clothes, I started painting the camouflage on two new layers; one for her outfit set to Hard Light blending mode and 50 per cent Opacity, and another one for the rocket launcher set to Overlay blending mode, and 80 per cent Opacity.
70
October 2007
a sweat going 13 Get For our soldier girl to look hard working, she’ll require additional work on her skin. Sweaty skin is tricky, but one way of achieving the look is by painting the highlights of wet skin on a layer set to Overlay. Use the Brush tool with a Textured Noise brush, white with the Eraser tool and no dark colours. Sweaty skin looks noisy because of pores and when pearls of sweat attach to body hair.
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.
Apply soft glow 15 Apply a soft glow effect by collapsing all the layers into a new layer. Make sure this layer is on top and run it though Filter>Gaussian Blur. Then set the Layer Blending mode to Linear Dodge and Opacity between 20 and 40 per cent.
Grain and noise 16 As digital artworks often result in very clean colours and values, I prefer applying a vague layer of noise on top of my paintings. Add a new layer on top with the RGB-values 128, 128, 128 and run the Add Noise filter, set to 400 per cent, Gaussian. Run the Spatter filter a couple of times, and then run Blur More. Set the blending mode to Overlay and adjust the Opacity slider down to around three to ten per cent.
