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Cleaning up: Tracing paper or lightbox?

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Cleaning up: Tracing paper or lightbox?

When cleaning up a line drawing, would you recommend using a tracing paper or a lightbox?

To exercise I use ordinary typewriter paper, although not the "normal" 80g/m² type. 60g/m² is lighter and more translucent.

Lightbox for sure. I use my animation disc and regular Ingram bond animation paper for cleanup.

If the drawing is meant for animation, using tracing paper would be insane.

If its just for an illustration, either or can work, but expect to augment and "re-clean" the drawing if using tracing paper.

"We all grow older, we do not have to grow up"--Archie Goodwin ( 1937-1998)

To obtain the best results for animation clean up you should only have the back-light on for those parts of the drawings that are straight tracings (like tracing back the feet or other parts of a character that are not moving) or for very close line-between-line inbetweens. The rest of the time you should flip/roll the drawings one on top of another , checking the clean up drawing against the rough drawing underneath as you lay down the fresh clean up lines. This is why we often block-in the forms of the clean up drawing with a colored pencil line (blue or red) and then build up a final line in graphite over that , constantly referencing the rough animation drawing underneath. (when the drawings are scanned the scanner is set to drop out blue or red , whatever color is used for the underdrawing) I'm not saying that you should never use the backlight , but it has to be used in combination with the technique of comparing the clean up with the rough by flipping, carefully checking that the volumes and placement of details on the drawings are correct. If the backlight is kept on the entire time the clean up can often become merely a mechanical tracing of the rough.

The best quality animation paper is slightly translucent , allowing some see-through to the drawing underneath, though it is not usually as thin as tracing paper. The translucent quality of good animation bond paper lessens dependence on the backlight .

"EustaceScrubb" has left the building

I usually get the Prograde animation paper, and I have a painting disk + animation stand with a back light that I picked up from Chromacolour. It's nice to have an animation supplier in my city.

They do have some good stuff and they ship internationaly.

http://www.chromacolour.com

It's either that or I scan them into the computer and clean them up digitaly using my 19" x 12" Wacom tablet.

Lindsey Keess
Animator