His first computer steps are a long time ago. He started playing around with pixels on the good old Commodore 64 and Dragon 32 back in the late 80's and early 90's. Things were very limited back then, so things didn't really kick off until he got his first Amiga where he also played around with music. 
Still, after submitting both music and graphics to a demo competition in 1993 (The Rendevouz in Kristiansand, Norway), where his mod. file didn't even make it to the public shortlist, but his art work ended on third place. So he focused all of his work on graphics after that as he felt that this was great fun and very rewarding. With time he used a lot of different tools to create his art work. For example on the Commodore 64 he used Koala Paint, on the Amiga Deluxe Paint, and ever since he started working in the advertisement industry in 1993 he used Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. 

Today he is using the Windows OS exclusively, and Photoshop CS4 and a Wacom Intuos 3 tablet. For 3D art he is using 3D Studio Max, and also MudBox from time to time. By creating his pictures he tend to start out in grey scale. This is because he prefer starting out working with shape, contrast and values before even having to think about colours. Once he has a decent grey-scale base up, he add colours and tweak the piece until he is satisfied. He love realism, 
and has always been fascinated by light and shadows, so he tend to use this quite prominent in his work which you can find in our gallery.

Where do you get your motives from ? Do you draw sketches ore something like that ? we ask.

"As I have a passion for realism, I do look at, and shoot a lot of reference photos. These are pictures of anything that will help me understand how things works in real life. Everything is painted from scratch, but I use these reference photos (or real life studies) to look at whilst painting. I do everything digitally; from the basic sketch to final rendering." he answer.

For his personal pieces, he just get ideas after watching TV-series or movies he enjoy, or when he feel inspired from every day happenings. For his commissioned pieces or projects he is working on he naturally try to meet his clients visions, still trying to add as much of hsi style as possible into the work. Bridgeclaw learned his skills at a traditional art school, but since he left art school in 1993 he honestly haven't lifted a pencil or a paint-brush. It's all been digital since then; and all self taught. He do however experiment with different techniques to work with digitally as he evolve as an artist.

Do you miss the old times pixeling graphics the old way ? we asked him.

"Yes and no. This all depends on what kind of art I would like to create. I do appreciate all the work put into the work back in the days when there were not many other options of creating art. Nowadays I still do pixel art, but then it's for different purposes and the tools are better."

He prefer and enjoy realistic art, but really anything that somehow catches his attention. It's easier to say what he don't like rather than what he like.
At work he do most of his art in 3D (3D Studio Max), as they working with a 3D engine. Still, this also requires 2D textures, and 2D graphical elements. He enjoy both genres of art and wouldn't really put one above the other. Still, he do find himself mostly doing 2D art when he is at home, probably because he is doing a lot of 3D art during daytime.

Bridgeclaw has been isnpired by a few artists that he really enjoyed earlier, but over the years he seem to enjoy genres of art more than actual artists. Honestly he don't has much of an overview on the demo-scene today, but from the good old days he used to like the art of Fairfax.

Ever since early Commodore 64, he loved watching the good old demos from that era, so the demo scene caught his attention from when he was quite young. When hr got the offer of joining IRIS back in the early 90's, he had stoked to finally managed to make it into the scene. Good old days.
He is not very active at the moment, unfortunately. Still, Brainstorm tends to use some of his art every now and then. 

Brigdeclaw wished he had more spare time; which is basically the main reason why he is not able to do anything specific. He also know that he is not an old dog, and that things will never be like the good old golden days of the demo scene. Things have changes; computer hardware, limits, and people.

But nevertheless he is still in contact withs some demosceners. "I can thank the demo scene for getting into the computer game development industry, as I'm working with one of my old IRIS and GODS scene guys. I'm also still in touch with other old demo scene friends online from time to time."

In the past they have released an MMORPG called Darkfall earlier last year (2009). He has been involved with this project for over 10 years, so it's been a long hard fight to finally see it launched. During his spare time, he do work for plenty of other companies: Board and card games for Fantasy Flight Games, clothing designs for Spiral Direct, Burton Snowboards, writing articles for fantasy and sci-fi art magazine Imagine FX (Future Publishing), Eidos Interactive and more.

About what plans he has for the future? "I'm taking things very easy as it's very hard to make any specific plans at the moment having to deal with three countries." I am currently living in Greece together with my Swiss girlfriend, and if I'm lucky I hope to be able to move back to Norway sometime in near future and still be able to work on what I love doing; computer games, and geeky-themes illustrations and art.

Working with computer games means that having experience with the demo scene comes in quite handy. He is as the Art Director of Aventurine, specializing in mmorpg technology, and then doing lots of extra work during his spare time. He is a total workaholic and spend his days working from 10 in the morning, until 3-4 am in the night. So we are happy that he found some time for this little article.

If you're looking for more of his art, or online art tutorials, please check out his site at: www.henningludvigsen.com

Article by s7ing/Alcatraz