Animal Frenzy - Process of Creating an Animal - Part 3 Body Base

Now that we have the base shape for the head, it's time to start working on the rest of the body.

Right before we do, we need to Rename the Layer we just drew the base of the head on. It's really important to get into the habbit of renaming your Layers. It will help you later on when you have lots of shapes and are trying to remember where you put them all.


Click the Images to see the Full Picture!



To Rename a Layer, simply Double Click on the layer you wish to rename in the layers window. This opens up the Layer Options window. The two most important bits in this new window are the Name and Colour. Changing the Name, renames your layer as I was just speaking about. I renamed my layer to "Head Base" - you can name your layer whatever you like so long as you understand it later on. Colour changes the colour of the Vector Line of all of your shapes on that layer. The vector line is the thin coloured line you see as you draw your shape with the Pen Tool, or as you tweak it with the Direct Selection Tool. You might be thinking "What do I care whether its Blue or Green?" and to some degree you're probably right. But once you start drawing a green shape on a green background, the last colour you're going to want your vector line to be, IS GREEN. Be sure to click OK to accept the changes.






The easiest way to navigate around your image is to press and hold the Space Bar. This turns your cursor into a small white hand as shown above. Simply click and drag your mouse while the Space bar is pressed down and you can drag yourself around the screen! This is so much easier than trying to use the scroll bars on the sides of the screen...


As before, I create a New Layer for my geometry and Lock the old layer so I don't get them all mixed up.






I Start as I did with the head and draw around the path of the drawing.
When you are drawing something that you know will be behind another shape, you don't need to worry too much about what it looks like because it wont be seen. Unless of course you will be revealing it through animation - like the body behind an arm.






Because the body is behind the head, we need to move the body layer below the head layer. This is done by clicking and dragging the layer with your body shape, below the layer with your head shape. Don't forget to Rename your layers as you go!






As you draw more and more shapes using up more and more layers you might find your screen starting to get very full up. You will also find it very difficult to see the drawing you are working from. It would be very tedious having to make all of your different shapes transparent and then opaque again in the transparency window every time you wanted to see them. The best way to solve this problem is using the "Toggle Visability" in the Layers window. This allows you to click a layers visability On or Off with ease. Each layer's Visability Toggle is located directly left of the Lock Toggle in the form of an Eye Icon (as shown above).

Remember to keep the different limbs as seperate shapes!
Otherwise you will have a lot of trouble when it comes to animating your character.






Using the different techniques I have talked about and also using some educated guess work, I was able to finish drawing the base layer for the different parts of the character.

As you start vectoring various characters, you will come across parts of a character that are partly behind one object while in front of another - similar to the Tail of our Fox. Because the tail is only wrapped around the one thing (the foxes body), we can get away with just "drawing what we see". Also, because of the complexity (the shooshyness) that would make a good animation for a fox tail, any movements would have to be drawn as a new image rather than just moving or rotating the body part (like the movement of an arm).






On the note about Animation - Notice how I have drawn the Foxes front left leg and back left leg. I have drawn two different shapes for the limbs in relation to where the bone joints would be. These are both on the same layer. This is to make more realistic animation while using the same shapes without having to draw another image (unlike what will have to be done with the tail).

All we need to do with the Main Base of the Fox now is to add the Outline!



Continue to Part 4 - Head Outline