Preparation#1 - Drawing character

I decided to abandon my walk-cycle for this project, as well as the previous version of Murtagh which I had created in Flash (which was my first half failed attempt at drawing in the program!), for a new version, based off his frontal pose from the character sheet. This was by far my favourite pose from the character sheet and so I definitely wanted to include it in this project.

This is the 'frontal' pose of Murtagh, taken directly from my character sheet. I knew that I wouldn't be able to get the same gradient in the tone of his flesh in Flash - as I had no idea HOW to use the tools very well at all, so I would have to render him in roughly the same way as I had last time for his 'side-on' view for the walk-cycle project.

I imported this image into Flash, and placed it on its own layer. Then I made a layer over the top of that where I traced the separate elements of the top half of his body onto. I only traced the top part of his body, as I had decided that he would be standing behind the table where the plant and other objects are set.

After drawing the individual elements, I found that I had the same issues as last time, when I was drawing Murtagh in Flash for the walk-cycle project. Each individual line was a separate object and I could therefore not use the paint bucket tool to colour him in. Last time I had resorted to colouring him in manually, which took such a long time and gave me a reasonably poor result. I decided to play around a little more with the tools and options so see whether this issue could be overcome.

Luckily, within a few hours of me playing around with the tools, I found a solution to my problem! It might not be the best way of going about things, but it worked and at the time, that was absolutely the most important thing! I found that after drawing the character's outlines, I could join them by selecting all the individual parts and clicking on 'combine objects' from the 'modify' menu, and selecting 'union'. This usually wasn't enough to allow me to use the paint bucket, but for some reason selecting 'ungrouped' instead of 'grouped' at the bottom of the 'modify' menu, and then selecting 'break apart' from the same menu would allow me this time-saving privilege!

Here are the separate parts from this drawing experience which I will use in my project:

Here is Murtagh's head.

I used the same colours from the guide on my character sheet, to make him seem as close as possible (although very 2D) to the original Murtagh (pictured above).

Here is Murtagh's body.

I decided to keep his chest and stomach in the same object this time, instead of separating them as I had done for the walk-cycle project. I did this for two reasons:

Firstly, it looks more seamless and smooth.

Secondly, I don't think I'll have to really animate his chest moving differently from his body - after all, he is standing behind a table which will probably block most of his lower body from view, making walking unnecessary.

Any other movements which in reality require the movement of the upper body can probably be done just using the head and arms.

This is the lower body! Yes, all of it!

Murtagh won't have legs in this project - or at least, they'll be hidden by a table!

This is just to help give the impression that something downstairs does exist!

Here are all four upper arms.

They will probably look better once they are joined with the lower arm bits...

Again, I really tried to bring some sort of tone into this character by using both the light purple of his skin (#e3c0ff), and the mid-tone purple which is meant to show some shadowing (#d396f6).

Here are the 4 forearms.

I decided to use a darker purple with flecks of light purple on the end of the stump arm (bottom forearm) to make it seem more gruesome and more like he has lost his arm in battle rather than in a surgeon's lab - which would have made the amputation a lot smoother.

This is aesthetically pleasing to me, and also highlights the other dark areas on his body - such as his nipples.

Here are 2 - or well, actually 3 of his hands.

The hand on the left will be duplicated and used on two of the arms, and the hand on the right will be used on the one remaining arm (the one that isn't a stump! Poor Murtagh!)

So, after hours and hours of drawing in Flash, and then a fair while afterwards of putting all the body parts together in the right places, this is the result!

I am extremely happy with this!!! He looks very similar (although, not as nicely rendered) to the image of Murtagh above, from the character sheet.

I think that he looks very smoothly drawn and coloured, and I'm proud to say that I think I have become much much much better at drawing in Flash from the last project!

Now, I just need to draw the objects and scenery for the project and then I can start to animate!