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Tips for creating drawings

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Here are some guidelines to help you to create drawings which will scan well:

• Clean, dark, sharp, pencil lines scan best. They can be of any thickness, but if they are very thin, you will need to increase the scan resolution. Use resolutions of less than 100 dpi (dots per inch) cautiously; if you do need to use these lower resolutions, output test a couple of drawings before doing the whole batch.

• By ensuring consistency between the keys and inbetweens, you can use pre-set processing values, which will save time.

• If you enclose the regions on the drawings, you will eliminate the need to close the gaps in the computer, and avoid color spilling into adjacent regions. Animo 2.0 automatically searches for, and joins, gaps in lines at the processing stage, but this can never be 100% accurate.

• Underdrawing must be done only in the lightest of non-photo blue (and is best kept to a minimum in any case). Any other color on your drawing will be picked up by the scanner as a tone of gray, and will probably need to be painted out, which means extra work.

• Don't shade in areas. Most scanners are very sensitive to tonal differences and can even detect shading done on the back of the paper as a pale gray.

• You do not need to black in eyes, or inside mouths, as the line processor treats this as a lot of tiny regions, which can slow down its operation.

• Self-color lines should be drawn in black, not red or blue. The final color should be indicated on the color model.

• Avoid marking up colors on the original drawings, as the markup may be scanned and need to be cleaned off later. You can mark up your drawing later in the production process; see Marking up the color reference model.

• If you are using regged drawings, you need to ensure that all drawings regged together are of similar quality and line weight. If you don't do this, you may face problems later at the Ink & Paint stage of production.

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Animo NT User's Guide - Version 2.0 - 29 Jan 1999 Copyright © Cambridge Animation Systems