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Traditional Animation Techniques in Toon Boom Harmony

by Kurt Jones

In this tutorial, you'll learn how to begin using some of the powerful tools that Toon Boom has to offer with your own traditionally styled animations. Software required: Toon Boom Harmony.

What you'll learn

In this tutorial, you'll learn how to begin using some of the powerful tools that Toon Boom has to offer with your own traditionally styled animations. We'll begin by creating some rough thumbnails to visualize the story of our character's animation. Following this, we'll spend a few lessons sketching out the different character poses such as the keys, extremes, breakdowns, and in-betweens. We'll also use the onion skinning feature to aid us as we draw these poses. From here, we'll learn how we can use the brush tool to apply clean line work over all of our sketched poses, and how we can quickly clean up this line work using the cutter tool. Following this, we'll learn how to create color art from line art so that we can keep our line work and color on separate modes. Next, we'll learn how we can effectively color all of our character's poses using the paint bucket tool. Finally, we'll learn how we can import a layered Photoshop file into Harmony to be used for our animation's environment. NOTE: All of the techniques, methods, and tools that we'll cover can be executed in Harmony, Animate, and Animate Pro. Software required: Toon Boom Harmony.

About the author

Kurt is a design tutor at Pluralsight. Ever since he could hold a crayon, Kurt has been in love with drawing. Apart from his dedication to training artists at Pluralsight, Kurt has an extensive background in illustration. He has previously worked for a book publisher, as well as Rhythm and Hues Studios. It was through his extensive industry background that Kurt learned the way of the Wacom, and that the Pen tool is truly mightier than the sword. Along with creating beautiful 2D illustrations,... more

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