STEP 1 - Drawing the character

For this project we had to create 4 ninja characters with different body movements and a series of weapons to accompany each.  The assignment used basic tools I was already familiar with but also introduced me to new tools such as align stroke.

To start off, I created a template ninja with simple arms and legs so that I could copy this each time and change the movements to suit each of the characters.

The limbs were created using the rounded rectangle tool to form a tic tac shape and then I added a circle for the head. Instead of arranging these objects in the layers panel, I used right-click/arrange/ bring to front. I find this method to be more time efficient working on projects like this 1.

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Challenge: For the tic tac shapes, I am trying to practise using the up & down arrows to edit the corners of the rounded rectangle while drawing. It took me some time to get the hang of this!

The legs were then highlighted and right-click, ‘arrange/send to back’.

For the half-moon face, I copied the previously drawn circle and drew a larger oval shape across the top.  Careful to ‘align to centre’ when both highlighted!

Highlighting both shapes, I used ‘Pathfinder – minus front’, to cut the bottom shape out.

I then placed this moon shape back into the centre of the ninja’s head using align to centre.

For the eyes, I drew little circles with no stroke and just black fill.

A good tip was to go to Windows and pull out the ‘Pathfinder’, ‘Appearance’ and ‘Stroke’ windows on to my workspace as I used the tools a lot in this project.

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Applying colour -

For this, I firstly had to combine the body and limbs. I selected the legs and arms (not the head), ‘Pathfinder – join together’.

Using swatches, I picked dark grey for the body fill.  The first stroke was black and was set to ‘align stroke outside’.  The second stroke was set to ‘align stroke inside’.

Success: Initially I found this command difficult to understand but once I changed the colour of the second stroke, it became clear how the strokes appeared. 

I also found it helpful to note that the centre line between the 2 strokes is blue when highlighted so it became more obvious to me how the 2 lines sat either side of this mid-line.

 

At this point I was able to copy and paste the remaining ninjas and change their poses as per assignment notes. For colouring each of them, I used a quick method – ‘eye dropper’ tool. Unfortunately, it didn’t copy the strokes, so I made these changes manually.

 

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Drawing the weapons –

For the Staff, I simply used the rectangle tool with a brown fill and darker brown stroke, aligned to outside. The inside stroke is an even darker shade of brown. 

Note to self: I kept making this simple task more difficult by forgetting to select the stroke and then I couldn’t understand why there were no changes being made!

 

For the Star, draw a star with a grey fill and black outer stroke, lighter silver grey inside stroke.

At this point I mixed up the inner and outer strokes and so my star didn’t look like the assignment notes.

Using the direct selection tool, I selected the inside points of the star (x5), holding down shift, I used the rotate tool to turn the star.

Clicking into the inside points of the star, I dragged them into the swirly weapon shape. To draw the centre circle, I held down alt, shift to pull circle from mid-point. To finish, I applied a metal grey fill and 2 strokes, inner and outer in black and a darker grey.

 

For the Sword, I drew a triangle. To do this, I selected star tool and reduced the number of points using the down arrow. Then I clicked on the top point using direct selection tool and dragged it upwards. The 2 lower points were then squashed downwards to resemble a sword.

I drew a small brown rectangle for the handle, created in the same way as the Staff weapon. Finally, the pen tool drew a shape inside the sword to give the illusion of a chamfered shape.

 

To complete the series of weapons, 2 Nunchuks.  The first task was to create the handles using the copy and paste of the previous staff weapon.  I simply reduced the length of this object and duplicated it to make the second handle. To make the chain effect, I created 2 small circles with a light grey fill and darker grey stroke.  Positioning both circles in a start and end position, I then selected both and ‘Object – Blend – Blend Options – 5’ (number of steps). The pen tool was used to create the desired direction of the chain. With the blend selected, I used Object – Blend – Replace Spine.

 

All that was left then was to allocate the weapons to the appropriate ninjas and adjust the sizes to the correct scale!