Part of Lesson Plan: Ink and Paint

Activity Overview / Details

Inking and Painting Procedure

Open image editing or ink/paint software. 

Import or open image in the software

If necessary make an image adjustment using Brightness/Contrast levels to change your scanned drawing into  a black and white image. Your lines should get darker and open areas should be brighter and whiter. When you get the right levels you should make sure to save the changes you made.

Now the fun of adding color to your images can begin.

Most image editing/paint/animation programs have a color palette you can choose colors from, add to, and save.  As you begin selecting and creating new colors for different parts of your image you should name them by part or object you are painting and save them to your palette. You should also save your palette to your project folder in case you or another production team member should need to use it for another sequence or correction.

Begin painting your frame. As you paint you should be able to move fairly quickly using a bucket tool to dump and fill areas or your drawing. If you should encounter any paint spilling into unwanted areas you should undo and look for any gaps or breaks in your lines and use a brush tool of appropriate size to repair the line and then refill with the desired color.

As you finish painting the frames you should save them and then repeat the procedure for the next frame in your sequence. 

If you wish to use frames or images in composting you should use your paint programs magic wand to select areas that you wish to remove, by clicking in those areas and deleting those portions.  When you save these images as .tif or .png files make sure the layers box is checked to ensure that the alpha channel layer is preserved (maintains transparencies). In most paint programs transparency is indicated and visible by the appearance of a checkerboard background below the layer