Masking Animation

Today I learnt how to animate a moving pencil making a line as it goes.

Right off the bat, I decided that I didn’t want to make a pencil.  So I made my alternative artwork on Adobe Illustrator and imported it into Adobe Animate.

I then made the hand into a symbol.

I then added a Classic Motion Guide to the symbol.  These allow you to draw the path that you want your symbol to follow.

This is what it looked like.

I selected the pen tool, with the ink option because I wanted a somewhat smooth line.

I proceeded to draw a spectacular continuous line drawing.

I placed the pivot point in the tip of the finger so that the finger would follow the line, not the middle of the forearm.

I created about 70 frames, and added a Classic Motion Tween to that bad boy, then moved the red slider on the timeline to the end, and placed the hand on the end of the line, and it snapped to it, creating a keyframe.

When I played the animation, the hand followed the OwO, finger first.  But the line was not visible.

Next up was masking.  I made a copy of the OwO and changed its colour.  I then made a mask of it.

This is what it looked like.

I then selected the mask layer and went to the first keyframe.  I selected the brush tool and painted along the line behind the finger, went to the next frame, where the finger had moved, and painted the line behind it, and went on like this for the whole animation.

This made sure that the line didn’t appear on screen until after the finger had passed it.  This made it look as if the finger was finger painting the OwO on the page.

I then went home, and big surprise, I edited it for several hours.

I’m super happy with how this turned out.