Toon Boom Harmony – Drawing Tools Tutorial

Welcome to these introductory tutorials about using the drawing tools in Toon Boom Harmony 12.
This Tutorial is broken up into 2 parts as we will discover the many possibilities with the great drawing tools that comes equipped with Toon Boom Harmony.

Drawing Tools Part 1

Part 1 in this series of tutorials we go over using the vector drawing tools and using the vector layers. There are many benefits in using vector graphics. One of the benefits to using vector graphics is that they are resolution independent. This means they can be scaled up or down and your lines will still be sharp and crisp. In other words, they will not pixelate.

Vectors are made up with many individual scalable objects defined by mathematical equations. Other benefits to using vector graphics are that they’re easy to control and manipulate using control handles. Toon Boom Harmony makes the creation and modification of vectors very easy with its simple to use tools. Toon Boom Harmony’s vector tools offer features such us the ‘Pencil Editor’ to create thick and thin lines and adding textures to your vector lines.

Watch Part 1 on using vector layers in Toon Boom Harmony on the following video:

Drawing Tools Part 2

We move along now to Part 2 in this series of introductory tutorials using Toon Boom Harmony’s bitmap layers and bitmap tools. If you are used to using ‘Photoshop’ or ‘Corel Painter’ or any other painting software, then you will know all about bitmap graphics. Bitmap graphics are made up of individual squares known as pixels. When you paint in bitmap, you are essentially painting in many pixels which form your image. Depending on the resolution, while viewed from a distance, or at the actual size, your image will look fine and not evident that it is made up of many squares or pixels. However, when zoomed in, your image will start to pixelate. Meaning, you will start to see the individual squares and it will appear to be blocky.

There are advantages to using bitmaps however. You can create unlimited amounts of colour and gradients and create seamless transitions which can make for a pretty picture. Some features of using bitmap tools are texture brushes, adjusting opacity and flow of your brush and you can create really great paintings. The only downside to using bitmap layers in Toon Boom Harmony is that, it may make for a bigger file size (but we have fast computers these days!!) and pixelation will occur when zoomed in.

Watch Part 2 on using bitmap layers in Toon Boom Harmony on the following video: