Design of the Character's in the project: 5 Professor Moriarty

Section 1. The Design process:

In many stories there is an antagonistic character who challenges the hero and often becomes just as if not more memorable than the hero they are opposing. And few villains have had a greater impact on fiction everywhere as Sherlock Holmes's most famous enemy Professor Moriarty!

I love villains and i love Professor Moriarty specifically. And you could say that he was the reason why this entire project became more than just a thought in my head. So you could imagine that it was vary important for me to get not only his design but also the ideas that his design communicates just right.

As with every re design it was important to narrow down the specifics of the depiction i will be adapting. As with most of these i chose the original illustrations from the Arthur Conan Doyle stories.

With these as the base i began with my first design (which fun fact: I made even before i consciously started working on my project)

It was a mostly clean adaption of the second illustration down to the position i was using. But when i eventually got around to designing the Professor for the project this early experience came in handy.

We can gather from these illustrations that in the original books Moriarty was a tall, thin, older gentleman with sunken eyes and a receding hairline. He is also likened to a spider in pretty much every Sherlock Holmes story he appears in with this comparison being a staple of the character. And i do love me some animal symbolism so i wanted to include as many spider like details as i could.

Something i also wanted was for Moriarty to not dress or present himself as a wealthy man. His cover story is that of a university professor with people in education being notoriously underpaid. So if he was decked out in more bling than a world famous rapper it wouldn't take a genius to ask the question of where exactly he is getting this money from.

With these ideas in mind i started with the first official design.

I was not vary happy with this. I wanted the face to have a bit of a different shape and a warmer expression but i couldn't do it in a way that i felt good about. The ascot he was wearing here also made him look richer than i wanted him to.

I made his fingers long to symbolize the legs of a spider but i didn't feel like it was enough.

So in the second official drawing i tried to keep these in mind.

With this one i also felt disappointed. With a face like this he looked too evil, changing the look didn't solve the ascot problem and i just overall started disliking the posture that i was using. It made Moriarty feel closed off and like he was up to no good. Which a person like him who is actually up to no good but is smart enough to disguise this would't be caught dead looking like.

Before i started with the third drawing i asked my Sister what would make the character look more spider like. She said that i could give Moriarty some type of eye glasses to imitate the multiple eyes of a spider.

I settled on circle frame glasses with red lenses as i felt that they looked the most like eyes.

I also thought of a design choice myself as i have noticed that a lot of spiders have a puffy part between their head and body. This is the closest picture i found to that.

I believed that i could imitate something like this with using a normal scarf instead of the ascot that i was using before.

I also changed the position into something more open and "normal" looking.

I was finally happy with this design. Not only does it accomplish what i set out to do but also comes together vary nicely. This new body position is also not only open but even inviting. A detail that you also might notice is that i put a pen in his breast pocket and a piece of chalk and a piece of paper in his lower pocket. As an indication of his day job as a professor.

(Any resemblance to Anton Ego from the Pixar movie Ratatouille is purely coincidental and was only discovered after the drawing was finished)

Section 2. Previous characterization:

With every previous character there was some common personality trait or characterization that i could point out across multiple iterations but with Moriarty there isn't something like that. From the original book versions initial chess game against Holmes in The Final Problem, to the menacing portrayal by Jared Harris in A Game of Shadows, and the psychotic adaptation played by Andrew Scott in Sherlock. It can be seen plainly that these characters have vary little in common with each other. Except that they are all opposed to the titular detective of the story.

And i found that this is what defines a Moriarty more than anything else. And as long as it they fulfill this simple story function they don't even need to be called Moriarty to be this characters equivalent and part of Professor Moriarty's legacy in fiction.

Section 3. My Version:

I wanted my version of Moriarty to be different yet fulfill the same functions as the others. I also believed that it would be advantageous to make him not only a foil for Holmes but Watson as well. As i believe that in a lot of stories about the battle of wits between Holmes and Moriarty the good doctor can be overlooked and almost reduced to the equivalent of a background character. And so with one of Holmes's defining characteristics being his antisocial behavior and Watson's being his high levels of empathy i thought that Moriarty should be a character who can easily conform to societal expectations and someone with a high level of cognitive empathy (or the ability to tell what someone else is feeling without actually relating to them).

I also wanted him to be somewhat creepy and so i did research on the most dangerous personality types. (note that i am not a mental health professional and i don't claim this to be a legitimate diagnosis). And eventually i settled on making the Professor a "dark empath" a personality type that some people don't actually believe exists but is theoretically characterized by having a vary low emotional but vary high cognitive empathy, and also having a high concentration of "Dark Triad" personality traits (those being: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy).

And thus my favorite character that i ever adapted was designed.