From the course: Toon Boom Storyboard Pro Essential Training

Why move from paper to digital drawing in Storyboard Pro? - Storyboard Pro Tutorial

From the course: Toon Boom Storyboard Pro Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

Why move from paper to digital drawing in Storyboard Pro?

“

- Drawing storyboards on paper is fun! It's got that great, wonderful feel of your pencil lead gliding across the paper. We all learned to draw on paper, we all have our favorite pencils, so it is comfortable to keep drawing that way. So why would I wanna change how I draw? Well, speed, efficiency, making more money as a story board artist... Just a few reasons. When I made the move from paper to digital, I never looked back, and I saw nothing but benefits. Plus, Storyboard Pro offers great digital preset brushes that replicate the look and feel of my graphic pencils. And the Wacom Cintiq tablets have a fantastic feel to them. And the Cintiq pens have different nibs on them which have different feels. So so the light gray nibs have a bit more grip, so it's like drawing more on paper. One of the small benefits of drawing digitally is I no longer have smears on my art. My hand doesn't smear my pencil lines, and the lines erase perfectly, and copy machines no longer drag long smears across my pages. And if you've ever used a soft 2B lead on paper and ran it through a copy machine like all storyboards eventually have to, you'll find you've got two long streaks down your drawing. What a pain. Well come to think of it, I don't even have to erase anymore. Since I draw digitally, I simply keep my roughs on a separate layer, and turn off that layer when I'm done! No more blue lines peeking through my art. There are many other benefits too. I no longer have to keep redrawing backgrounds, I can save any drawing in a virtual library and drag it into any panel and reuse it. No one likes making changes, but that is part of our life as a story artist. Making changes to a digital drawing is quick! Moving panels into a different order is as fast as clicking and dragging. No more cutting and pasting and re-scanning. And if you're like me, (laughs) your handwriting sucks. Writing notes and scripts took a lot of time, and then are often illegible. Working digitally, I can cut and paste the script. Remember how much time it takes to renumber a sequence by hand? Well, we now have instant renumbering in Storyboard Pro with the click of a button. And Storyboard Pro has great tracking changes. And if you've ever used track changes in Microsoft Word, you know how great it can be. Now, as I draw my storyboards, I'm drawing directly on a timeline. And I'm creating an animatic as I work. I can click play at any time, and see how my shots are playing. I can also add camera moves, and layers moves, all within the same software. And when I was working on paper, well then I would have to draw a panel, scan it into Photoshop, clean it up, separate layers for an animatic, color it, export the layers to After Effects, add layer and camera moves, then export to Premiere, some other editing software, add the timing and audio, just to see how it all worked together. And any time there was a change, I would have to go back to the beginning and repeat every step. Now I can draw, move, color, add audio, edit timings, all within the same software. And if there are any changes, I simply make the change, and click play. It's that fast and easy. You can add scratch track audio as you work, and you instantly know if your shots play the way you hope they would. If it's not as good as you hoped, fix it on the fly while you draw. Client wants a PDF for delivery? Make one with the click of a button. They want a movie file? No problem, one click! They prefer individual JPEG images? No more separating your drawings on your scans. Just click on the export bitmap. See every minute or hour I'm not doing some repetitive task, is an hour I can spend with my family or working on another job. I'm making more money, and spending more time doing the things that I want to do, now that I draw digitally. Bottom line is, working digitally makes you a better story artist.

Contents