Workshops

66

October 2007

UNI22.tut_pinup 66

9/8/07 6:27:25 pm

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

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 dont have to be a pin-up artist to create pin-up art, but to achieve the special look and feel, youll need to spend some time researching the old pin-

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.

Back-story and rules

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

October 2007

67

UNI22.tut_pinup 67

9/8/07 6:27:36 pm

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

Hide your filters

Using automated filters can be your worst enemy. The trick is to use them subtly so that the viewers dont 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 youll find you appreciate your work more that way.

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

68

October 2007

UNI22.tut_pinup 68

9/8/07 6:27:42 pm

In depth Pin-up art

Backgrounds are not incredibly important for the pin-up genre, but if you do include one make sure it doesnt take a ke attention away from the girl. Its 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.

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.

Face and hair

10 Make up hard, so I keep it on I find make up

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.

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.

11

Refine the silhouette

October 2007

69

UNI22.tut_pinup 69

9/8/07 6:27:50 pm

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.

15 Apply soft glow 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.

16 Grain and noise result in As digital artworks often

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.

12 Camouflageisme with Since our character located

the infantry stationed on Mars, her camouflage needs to match her surroundings. After 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.

sweat going 13 Get asoldier girl to look hard For our

working, shell 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.

70

October 2007

UNI22.tut_pinup 70

9/8/07 6:27:58 pm