Onion Skinning: Displaying Drawings from Next and Previous Panels

With onion skinning in Toon Boom Storyboard, you can display the drawings from previous panels in the current panel so you can see where to place the drawings for the next panel. You can also display drawings from next panels in the current panel so you can see where to place the drawings for the previous panel. You can use these drawings as a reference to determine the size, angle or position of the drawing in the current panel.

You can display the drawings of up to three previous panels or next panels in the onion skin.

Use the Onion Skin button in the Onion Skin toolbar to turn the onion skin feature on and off.

In the Drawing View, Toon Boom Storyboard displays the drawings of the previous and next panels in the onion skin in a different colour so that you can distinguish them. You can also use the onion skin in the Timeline View to display drawings in the previous and next frames in the current frame. Toon Boom Storyboard also makes use of a flipbook feature allowing you to rapidly move between drawings.

To set the previous onion skin depth:

Select one of the following options from the Show Previous button in the Onion Skin toolbar:

To set the next onion skin depth:

Select one of the following options from the Show Next button in the Onion Skin toolbar:

Setting onion skin options

By default, onion skin drawings:

• are displayed as filled shapes
• display drawings from the previous panels in shades of red
• display drawings from the next panels in shades of green

You can change how drawing objects are coloured and shaded in the onion skin to suit your working style.

Onion skin shading and colour preferences

To set onion skin shading and colour preferences:

1. Select Edit > Preferences (Windows) or Toon Boom Storyboard > Preferences (Mac OS X) to open the Preferences dialog box.

2. Click the Drawing View tab.

3. In the Onion Skin panel, select your colour shading option:

4. To change the colour values applied to drawings, do one of the following:

5. Click OK when you are done.

Onion Skin Flipbook feature

Toon Boom Storyboard makes use of a flipbook feature allowing you to rapidly move between onion-skinned drawings.

In the Onion Skin toolbar, click and drag the flipbook slider to flip between the drawings you have already selected with the onion skin tool. This is an extremely useful and time saving feature. To automatically play the onion-skinned drawings as a flipbook, click on the play button in the flipbook slider.