All images are from Producing Independent 2D Character Animation: Making and Selling a Short Film by Mark Simon. Reprinted with permission.

This is the eighth in a series of 12 excerpts from Mark Simon’s book, Producing Independent 2D Character Animation: Making and Selling a Short Film. This book is a full-color, concept-to-pitch guide that teaches animators, students and small studios the art and business of producing short, cel animated films. Animation producer Mark Simon has detailed the process in an accessible how-to manner using his award-winning series, Timmy’s Lessons In Nature, as a guide. This 432-page book contains more than 600 full-color images, interviews and a CD-ROM containing sample animation, animatics and sample software described in the text.

Years ago our only option for painting animation drawings was to trace the drawings with ink onto clear plastic celluloid sheets, or cels. Then the colors were painted, one at a time, onto the back of each cel. The cels were then stacked on racks to dry and took up a great deal of space. As clear as the cels are, they can only be stacked to six or seven levels due to a slightly increased loss of light and color with each layer (Figure1).

Then digital ink-and-paint came along and offered us a quicker way to paint the drawings. We can now keep the quality of the pencil drawing in the final work, and we are no longer limited in how many levels we may composite (layers of art and effects stacked together to form one complete frame).

[Figure 1] Notice that the lowest layer (left) of art is slightly darker than the top layer (right). This is due to the slight pigment in each cel. In the digital world, this loss of light is no longer an issue.

Digital ink-and-paint is the computerized version of finalizing animation art using scanning, instead of inking, for each pencil drawing, and digitally coloring instead of hand-painting each cel. With all the ink-and-paint programs now available we are able to drop fill (single-click paint an entire enclosed area) or use a digital paintbrush to fill colors into our characters. We can change the line color, fix problems in the original art, move and scale the layers of our animation, build a custom palette and export the final art in a number of different video and sequential still image formats. They also all offer dope sheet interfaces for keeping track of scenes.

There are only a few major differences between the available ink-and-paint programs. The biggest differences may be found in the varying interfaces of each software, how user-friendly they are, project management features, camera and compositing capabilities, and whether artwork is kept as bitmap images or converted to vector images. Vector images have much smaller file sizes, are resolution independent, and can be scaled to any size with no loss of quality, but they can lose some of the subtlety of the original penciled line.)

The different processes within ink-and-paint software are broken into sections called modules. A number of the more expensive software programs allow you to purchase and install only certain modules, which helps keep the cost down for a large production. A person doing digital painting will probably not need camera or compositing modules, so only certain modules need to be purchased, and these can be spread out among many computers.

Each of the digital ink-and-paint programs labels its modules differently, but the main modules are usually pencil testing, scanning, ink-and-paint, camera, compositing, project managing, rendering and others.