Drawing

When you are working in the Animation module, you will have the pencil automatically selected as the tool at your disposal in the first frame of animation.

Fig # 36. Entering the Animation module

Now, let’s draw a guide line which will define the trajectory of the butterfly, as defined in the script, using the pencil tool is already selected:

Fig # 37. Drawing a guide line

Note that, once drawn, you can adjust the path of your guide line, using the Nodes Selection button located in the workspace toolbar:

Fig # 38. Activating Nodes Selection

When you select the line you’ve just drawn, it will look like this :

Fig # 39. Activating Nodes Selection

Now, change those nodes where the guide line needs to be adjusted. The goal is to draw the curve that is as close to the path that you want for your butterfly. You should be looking for a result something like this:

Fig # 40. Revised guide line

It’s time to draw our protagonist. The first thing to do is to adjust the thickness of the line to your liking. Click the Brush properties button in the left sidebar.

Fig # 41. Brush Properties

Now adjust the brush thickness according to the type of line you want to work with.

Fig # 42. Assigning a new thickness to pencil

Now you just need to choose the colour you want to start drawing with. To do this, click on the Colour Palette button, located on the left sidebar.

Fig # 43. Colour Palette

In this case choose a shade of brown for the body and a blue hue for the wings. Let’s start with coffee.

Fig # 44. Selecting the colour brown

Okay, now choose the Pencil tool and start drawing:

Fig # 45. Drawing the body of the butterfly

Change colour to blue for the wings, and finish drawing the first position of the butterfly. Remember that we are in frame # 1:

Fig # 46. Drawing the butterfly wings

Tip: Because this version of the application is still in development, it is possible that the program might occasionally close unexpectedly. We recommend that you regularly save your work right from the start.

Fig # 47. Saving the project

The first frame of your animation is now ready, so now you need to know about adding frames