TOON BOOM HARMONY – Sketching Simba

I have recently made the switch from Toon Boom Animate Pro 3 to Toon Boom Harmony Premium 12.
This is a demonstration on using the bitmap brushes to sketch out a character. For this demo I decided to go with a character from my favourite film of all time, ‘THE LION KING’.

Young Simba illustrated by Manamations

For quite some time I have been using Toon Boom Animate Pro for animation, but not for character design or quick sketching. Toon Boom Harmony has made that change for me. In the past I have been doing character design and sketches in Photoshop and more recently Sketch Book Pro.

For animation purposes, I would do all rough animation within Animate Pro, a vector based, paperless animation system. Though I love working in vector, I did however, not like doing rough animation in vector. I often found myself drawing a few strokes and later erase them, which leaves an ugly cut on the vector brush stroke, due to the fact that vectors are solid shapes. You can not soften the stroke or slightly remove opacity as it’s either there, or not there.

Screenshot of Toon Boom Harmony 12

With the move to Harmony 12, I can now draw rough animation in bitmap and slowly erase as much as I need to fix a line or shape. It behaves very much like Photoshop. In fact, it is so similar it has all the familiar brush settings Photoshop has. The only down side to this is, because it is bitmap based, the file size will be larger, as opposed to smaller vector file sizes. This is not an issue for me really. I will do all my rough keys and breakdowns first in bitmap and then for final ink and paint, I will use vector. It is just the feeling of drawing that I love with working in bitmap. It feels more like pencil and paper.