Art Software

[Addison]

Hi everyone!

With my story nearing completion I'm mapping out a promotional sight. I have some small drawings, mostly pencil and colored pencil, that I can scan in, but I know it's not enough. With my current plan for my site I know I'll need good drawing/illustration software and some sort of animation software as well.

As someone who has minimal experience in these fields (fooling around with my brother's face on photoshop and old-school animation in high school) what do I use?

Photo shop is still good right? I heard of a few others...InDesign, Dreamweaver, and Illustrator. When I looked up animation software all I found was Flash.

All advice will be greatly appreciated.

 

[Nihal]

Yeah, Photoshop is still good for illustration. A large number of professional digital artists use it.

InDesign is a layout software, it's useful for formatting your book; Illustrator is the vector one, besides vectors you may use it to prepare pieces for print (but the artwork itself would still be done on photoshop or another software). Dreamweaver is for websites creation, though I don't advise using it to create them, heh.

You can use Photoshop to do some simple animations, saving them as .gifs, and there is Flash, which works for more complex stuff. Adobe also has some softwares for video editing like After Effects, where you can do some "animation", but it's something of different nature.

Photoshop CS2 used to be (accidentally) available for free at the Adobe site. Outside Adobe I've used PaintTool SAI for painting. It's a cheap and light software, and it has some pretty cool features, however it lacks all the edition tools and filters Photoshop has.

Oh, and since you're scanning your works this tutorial might be useful. It's a bit old, my English was worse, but the methods still stand.

 

[Jabrosky]

I use Photoshop CS6 for coloring, shading, and highlighting. Everything before that I do by hand. I have considering inking with Illustrator, but so far its Pen tool seems a bit tedious.

 

[Jabrosky]

Oh, and I'm also taking a course on Autodesk Maya at a local community college this fall semester. Thankfully I was able to download the program for free using a student account.

 

[Lunaairis]

There are A LOT of animation programs the ones I have used are as following;

Flash- 2D-GREAT for beginners and those who want to maybe do more than just an animation. You can program straight into it using action script and make interactive novels and other kinds of games. Recommend cause no matter what computer you are on flash will work the same way. You can hand draw frames or tween symbols, newer versions let you create color pallets so if you need to change something you can change it in the pallet instead of having to recolor the cell. I learned how to use flash when I was 9, so its pretty easy to self teach. Rather cheap considering its an animation program.

ToonBoom-2D- Great for studio work and big projects with lots of people. You can hand draw frames or tween symbols has a color pallet. Looks like it was designed by 4 year old as in lots of pictures but VERY LITTLE information on what the thing actually does. A class or two is definitely recommend. Pretty expensive.

Pencil Check Pro-2D- If you like to hand draw each frame in photoshop this is a little handy dandy program created by the toonboom company that lets you scan in or import already scanned in images and will play them for you so you can have a digital flip book.

Autodesk Maya (aka. MAYA)- 3D- TAKE A CLASSES OR DEATH! Well I guess if you are really determined you can teach it to yourself. I just know if I did I'd have failed badly. Its the main program I use for modeling, animating and rendering my animations. If you want to try it out just got to the autodesk website and download a student version its free for 3 years which should give you enough time to get acquainted with it.

Blender- 3D- DO TUTORIALS TO UNDERSTAND HOW THIS WORKS. There aren't really any classes seeing as this is a free 3d animation program. Its awesomely powerful though, and although its not really used in the industry. People have done amazing stuff with it. Like I said its free and open source and the internet would love to help you if you have any problems.


For Post production:

After Effects: Version CS4 is still being handed out for free by Adobe. Meaning if you don't mind using a few years old software you can use after effects to add in cool magic effects,backgrounds, link up scenes into a final film, or add music.