paint write on or stroke a drawing being drawn

[Simon Bonner]

Hi Anita,

Yes, you can do this. Draw your picture on paper (the simpler the better) and scan it in. Then follow these steps:

1: Add it to a new comp.
2: Add the luma key effect, and make it key out white. Change the threshold amount until the white bg is keyed out and only the black ink is visible.
3: Go to the layer menu and chose ‘auto trace’. Make sure the ‘new layer’ box is checked. The other default settings should be fine. Hit ok.
4: To the new layer with all the masks on, add the stroke effect. Set it to stroke all masks, and to stroke sequentially.
5. Set keyframes for the start property, animating from 100 – 0.

Voila. You should have something like the video below. You can change the order of the masks if you don’t like the default order AE has chosen. You can also change the stroke colour, width, BG color, etc to your preference. Good luck!

ps, I like your website – best use of animation ever!

Simon Bonner

youtube.com/simonsaysfx

[Anita Sancha]

hi…

Thanks… Looks like this could be useful but I have not quite “got it” unfortunately, I am doing something wrong…. !!!???

But anyway on a test of just a drawing of a box and a roof and a chimney (3 shapes) I could not get this to work even like you say.

Set keyframes for the start property, animating from 100 – 0. Do you mean 100% and the end 0%. Also key out white as in key out brighter?

Also on stroke can “reveal original image” work to expose the original drawing. So I can use the colors of the children s pens in the drawings?

Anyway this may not seem clear…. but I must be “missing” something. Tried 3 times.

Thanks for all your help
Anita Sancha.

http://www.anitasancha.co.uk

[Simon Bonner]

For animating, look up keyframes in help. Basically a keyframe is when you tell a property (like scale, position, start, end) to be a certain value at a certain point in time. If you then set it to be another value at another point in time, it will animate between those two values.

Yes, you can set the stroke effect to ‘reveal layer’ instead of ‘on transparent’, but if i remember correctly this only works as expected if the stroke effect is actually on the layer you want to reveal. In this case, it is on a separate layer. So what you want to do it keep it ‘on transparent’ and set the bottom picture layer to use the solid layer as an ‘alpha matte’ To find out how to do that, check the help files for alpha matte (in brief, there is a drop down menu on the layer in the timeline panel – if you can’t see it, hit f4).

Yes, but key out white I meant key out brighter. Be sure to change the threshold or it won’t work. You might have to toggle on transparency (button on bottom of composition panel) to see it working.

Anyway, let me know how it goes. You might find it useful to check out the list of podcast tutorials here at the cow and search for the stroke effect – i think there are a couple of podcasts on that topic. And if you are stuck with the concept of keyframes, check out tutorial number 3 here https://www.videocopilot.net/basic/

Simon Bonner

youtube.com/simonsaysfx