Digital Storyboarding: How to Make a Smooth Transition

Making a Smooth Transition From Traditional to Paperless

For some artists, the transition from traditional to digital can often look daunting. Using a digital storyboard has many advantages; a paperless environment, ease of correction using the undo feature, ease of drawing reuse by copying and pasting. In this article, we’ll show you how Toon Boom Storyboard can facilitate the transition from traditional to paperless methods. Its elegant interface, intuitive tools and practical shortcuts will make your shift to digital storyboarding a breeze.

Capturing traditional techniques using digital drawing tools
Toon Boom Storyboard tools are derived from the tools used in traditional paper storyboarding, enabling the traditional storyboard artist to feel more “at home” while drawing.

Pen Tablet, Texture Pen and Pressure Sensitivity

To maintain the traditional feel of drawing on paper you can use a Pen Tablet. This comprises a tablet and a digital pen. This partially, or completely, replaces the mouse. A pen tablet gives you more control than a mouse, even to point of being able flip the pen and use the digital eraser in the same way as you would use a regular pencil eraser. If you want to keep the paper feeling while you draw, you can always stick a piece of paper on your tablet!

The Toon Boom Storyboard Brush tool responds to the pen pressure you place on the pen tablet. In other words, the harder you press on the pen, the darker and thicker the line becomes. The lighter you press, the lighter and thinner the line becomes.

Use the Texture Pen to recreate that “sketch” look and feel. Toon Boom Storyboard has some default texture pens that you can use and adjust to suit your own taste. You can easily identify them by the “T” symbol marker alongside the pen size.

You can also load your own bitmap textures to create different pens. Just create a new pen and using the Pen editor, bring in any Targa (*.tga) or PSD (*.psd) file you want.

You can adjust the maximum and minimum size of any pen and change its colour by selecting a new one in the colour palette. The colour change will also work on the texture pens regardless of the texture file colour.

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