Happy Valentine's Day! Four Toon Boom Harmony tips animators will love

Roses are red, violets are blue, animation can be more efficient and easy too! Instead of a box of chocolates, we are sharing four quick tips to improve your experience in Toon Boom Harmony this Valentine’s Day.

Getting butterflies in your stomach? Check out these pro tips from our expert trainers Genevieve Demers and Marie-Ève Lacelle that will help you create more animation in less time.

Fall in love with these Toon Boom Harmony animation tips

TIP 1: Create and save custom brushes
Harmony feature: Basic tools
Benefit: Collaborate more easily, save time and create brushes every time  
How to: Did you know you can export brush presets into an .xml file that will contain all of your brush's settings? This can save a huge amount of time if you want to back up or share your brush presets. It gets better: you can then import brush presets that you previously exported from Toon Boom Harmony right back in.

How to export brushes in Harmony:
https://docs.toonboom.com/help/harmony-16/premium/drawing/export-brush-preset.html

How to import brushes in Harmony:
https://docs.toonboom.com/help/harmony-16/premium/drawing/import-brush-preset.html

TIP 2: Saving character poses and designs in a stamp
Harmony feature: Stamp tool
Benefit: Get a quick(er) reference than importing an image, and scale it
How to: In Toon Boom Harmony, you can create a stamp containing a series of drawings. All you need to do is create each drawing you want to add to your stamp in a separate cell, then create a stamp with those drawings selected. The resulting stamp will cycle through each one of those drawings as you use it. In order to create a stamp using multiple drawings, your drawings must either be in a single contiguous horizontal or vertical sequence.

How to create a multi-drawing stamp in Harmony:
https://docs.toonboom.com/help/harmony-16/premium/drawing/create-multi-stamp.html

TIP 3: Create closed shapes
Harmony feature: Cleanup with pencil and brush tool
Benefit: Save time by easily painting inside your shapes
How to: Do you struggle to close up your shapes in Toon Boom Harmony? Fun fact: once you start tracing with the pencil or brush tool, you can press CTRL (PC) or CMD (Mac) to link the end of your line to the start and create auto-closing shapes.

TIP 4: Import a model in model view
Harmony feature: Model view
Benefit: See your reference image inside your soft window; good for mono screen set up
How to: Toon Boom Harmony makes animation more efficient with fewer steps. Case in point: use it to load any TVG drawings in your model view and avoid browsing for models every single time you work on your scene. Instead, store default models in your scene and load those. Then, make your model view appear and import a toon boom drawing frame from your timeline, and drop it in your model view.

How to import a model in model view in Harmony:
https://docs.toonboom.com/help/harmony-16/advanced/colour/load-colour-model.html

Download your 21-day free trial of Toon Boom Harmony now to try out these handy animation tips. Happy Valentine’s Day!