2DARTIST MAGAZINE | How to illustrate femme-fatales
Pyeongjun Park takes us through the creation of his femme-fatale anti-hero... In this illustration, I focus on expressing the character’s personality and unique qualities. Morsus is a hero who uses poisoned darts and needles to make the opponent blind or paralyzed. Instead of a filthy, muscular hero with a creepy mood, I thought it would be fresh to present a rather traditional femmefatal, anti-hero model: slim, flirty, poisonous, and irresistibly beautiful. In terms of technique, I put an emphasis on playing with the compositional facets to create a dynamic scene, and building details on clothes, such as texture and folds. I like half-realistic, half-cartoony expressions. I start with traditional painting methods to establish a basis and move on to special effects with Photoshop tools. I hope you have fun following my progress. Let’s move on to the actual steps.
01
Thumbnail sketch: I try to find a way to embody a dangerous and toxic feeling in the character. To make the mood even stronger, I design her to be a teenage girl; careless and ignorant of the outer-world, and thus even more hazardous, with punk-style touches to her outfit. The leather rider-jacket and short pants do their job in creating a defiant teen hero. I make three thumbnails to test out the possibilities and choose the one most fitting.
02
Color and concept: After the thumbnails, I move on to designating colors. As the leather jacket and pants are colored with a dark tone, the skin and hair color will be comparatively light. To really emphasize the contrast, I give her an albino look with white hair and red eyes. Taking the colors from a dartboard, I use green, red, and white on the leather jacket as an accent.
03
Rough painting: After designating the colors, I start painting right on top of the thumbnail. There is no defined rule for when to start building up the details. With this one, I start filling up the mass with colors and then move on to setting the direction of lights. This is the part I consider the most important. As soon as the intrinsic colors are decided, I go on to elaborate the different rates of light and shades to make the object more solid and threedimensional. In this step, the shading doesn’t have to be too meticulous. 52 | 2DARTISTMAG.COM