Hello all,

Not sure if onion skin is the write term. I am looking for something that I can do a simple character standing (even if it is a stick figure, lol), and then with that image in the "background" for reference, be able to do another image on top of that. Mainly a 2D thing I am looking for, as 3D is still kinda beyond my grasp at the moment. I have Paint.NET, but do not really notice a way to do that, or is there? Any info would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Shawn

*Edit* On hind site on this question, is that what different layers are used for, a onion skin effect? If so, how do I then take the...say second layer, and extract it away to make it a separate image from the original layer? I know, I probably make no sense, after all I am a programmer, not an artist, lol!

I would say yes, in 2d paint applications layers can be used to do some tracing of a reference image. Side note: Most 3D packages support such things, too.

As for the saving of your work only: any application that supports layers allows you to hide/disable individual layers and when saving/exporting to an image format that does not support layers (e.g. PNG and BMP) the layers are flattened and the hidden ones are discarded.

So, it is an export technique on the layers then? I can extract one layer from the other? Basically it's in order to make a sprite sheet, but to make things line up right, I myself kinda need to draw on top of the previous image, if you follow what I am saying.

jwatte:

For the particular case of sprite sheet, I think I'd just copy the specific frame (with the sprite size), and paste it into the square for the next frame. Then I'd use "Fade" to make it be 20-30% of full opacity. Then I would draw on top of that. When done, I would make sure the paint the faded pixels to fully transparent (or white, or whatever). That's just me, though, and I'm not an artist.

I did not think of doing it that way, good call though, that would work very easily.