Animation: Outlines and joints on your character in Illustrator.

I now have my character all coloured and almost ready to take over to After Effects but one of the problems I am going to have to deal with is where the joints of my character overlap. Let’s take an arm joint as an example. First I start off making a copy of the upper arm layer as this has a black line over lapping the lower arm as you can see below.

Next I move one of the Upper arm layers below the Lower arm. This will be the outline of the Upper arm. I’ve made it all black in the illustration below.

Finally on the Upper Arm  layer which is above the Lower Arm Layer I use the paint bucket tool with the no colour fill option to get rid of the outline around the arm. Now I can see through to the Upper Arm layer below.

Of course you can deal with the whole problem by designing your character in Illustrator from scratch. We shall do that at a later date. Tomorrow I shall be looking at mouth shapes and eye blinks.