I'm making good progress getting to grips with Toon Boom Animate, but what has quickly become clear is that I need to work on my drawing skills some more.
To that end I've dug out my copy of Christopher Hart's book "Drawing on the funny side of the brain" and started to work through it again. I did this years ago but using pencil and paper and quickly became frustrated; being able to use the drawing and colouring tools in Animate to create "sketch" and "clean" layers using the pencil and brush is an absolute revelation - especially the undo, smoothing and cutter tools!
I also want to give a shoutout to Justin at cartoonsmart.com for his training videos which are a great visual demonstration of how to apply these techniques in Animate. It's an odd thing to say, perhaps, but watching him stroke, undo, stroke, undo, stroke ... until he got the exact shape and texture of brush mark he wanted when making his clean layers made me realise that not every line has to be right first time, and indeed probably isn't. To remember that when drawing is enormously liberating!
So here's the first drawing - the two characters are copied from the book, the background is original. The important thing here isn't the originality of the image, but the standard of it, which for me is very high, and that gives me confidence that I'll be able to create my own characters that look this good in the near future, and then I can get on with animating them!
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