Learning Paperless Animation

TV Paint Opening Logo
This posting is about my trying to learn the program TV Paint. TVP originated in France. It’s heavy software with more features than I will ever use and can do effects and compositing like an Avid. It also has 2D capabilities that I wish they would break out and make a separate module. There is a 460 page manual poorly translated and not arranged in any usable manner. The terminology is cryptic and not intuitive, (to me). So I chucked the manual and started pushing buttons. But having said all that, I find I’m beginning to like it.

These tests show color pencils normally used in roughing out things, (in my case very rough). You have erasers for each color so you can be discrete. Also you can turn the whole drawing into a solid color and draw with a different one on top.



The animation didn’t warrant going as far as I did because of sloppy inbetweening and just being bad but no one was paying me to do this and I wanted to learn to paint. So after playing around I found it easy to do a colored line and went for the old school ‘self traced’ line I’ve always loved. I also found ‘toning’ to be very easy too so I threw in shadows with no highlights because I found I could do it and that was all I cared about. I still haven’t tried panning and zooming and I still don’t know how to make an exposure sheet or how you would get other people involved. I think I’ll keep playing with it and it is kind of nice not having all that paper lying around. All those wigglies are driving me nuts, I may have to go in and fix those.