Drawing Menu

The Drawing menu lets you access many tools related to drawing, painting, dirt removal, optimizing strokes, and more.

  • At the top of the interface, select Drawing.
Command Description
Drawing Tools

Allows you to select one of the drawing tools available in Harmony.

Select

 Allows you to select and reposition, scale, rotate and skew brush strokes, pencil lines, shapes and other parts of your artwork.

Contour Editor

 Allows you to edit the vector contours of brush strokes, pencil lines and shapes in your artwork. You can add, remove, tweak and move vector points, move the Bezier handles of the vector points as well as deform vector outlines.

Centerline Editor

 Allows you to tweak and deform a brush stroke by manipulating the points at the centre of its line rather than its contour.

Pencil Editor

 Allows you to adjust the thickness of a pencil line at its different points and corners, tweak the shape of its extremities and scale its texture.

Cutter

 Allows you to cut a part of your artwork, then reposition, scale, rotate and skew it.

Smooth Editor

 Allows you to optimize contours and lines by removing its extra points, making them easier to edit.

Perspective

 Allows you to deform artwork by applying a perspective effect on it.

Envelope

 Allows you to deform and warp artwork by moving points and tweaking lines in a grid.

Reposition All Drawings

 Allows you to reposition, scale, rotate and skew all drawings in the current layer.

Drawing Pivot

 Allows you to position the pivot on a drawing layer by clicking where you want its location to be.

Brush

 A pressure-sensitive tool for creating a contour shape with a thick and thin line effect, as if created with a paint brush.

Pencil

 A pressure-sensitive tool for drawing outlines. Pencil lines are made of central vector lines, making them easier to tweak and edit than brush strokes.

Text

 Allows you to add text and to format it.

Eraser

 A pressure-sensitive tool for erasing parts of a drawing.

Dropper

 Allows you to select a colour by clicking on a colour in your artwork.

Morphing

 Allows you to create and configure a morphing sequence, which will automatically generate the in-betweens between two drawings in the current layer.

Line

 Draws a straight line segment going from one point to the other.

Rectangle

 Draws a rectangle.

Ellipse

 Draws an ellipse.

Polyline

 Allows you to draw shapes, segmented lines or complex curved lines by clicking to create each point in the sequence of line segments.

Paint

 Allows you to fill colour zones with a colour or texture.

Ink

 Allows you to recolour pencil lines with precision by changing the colour of one segment at a time.

Repaint Brush

  • Like the Brush tool, but only paints over existing brush strokes.

    • Close Gap

    		 Allows you to close open shapes so that they can be filled with the Paint tool. By drawing a stroke near a small gap in a shape, this tool will create a small invisible stroke connecting the two closest points around the gap.

    Stroke

    		 Allows you to create invisible lines that can serve as colour zones that can be filled, or close the gaps in existing colour zones.

    Edit Gradient/Texture

    		 Allows you to adjust the position, angle and size of gradients and textures in a colour zone.

    Hand

    		 Allows you to pan the Camera and Drawing views.

    Zoom

    		 Allows you zoom in and out of the Camera and Drawing views.

    Rotate View

    		 Lets you rotate the Camera and Drawing views just like with a real animation disc.

    Shift and Trace

    		 Allows you to temporarily move drawings so you can trace over them in other drawings using Onion Skin.

    Clean Up

    Remove Dirt

    Opens the Remove Dirt dialog box where you can specify the number and size of dots removal from a selected drawing.

    Remove Hair

    Opens the Remove Hair dialog box where you can specify the number and length of hairs for removal from a selected drawing. This removes any small strokes created in the Colour Art layer from very thick lines or filled zones. Increase the value to select larger strokes for removal from the drawing.

    Close Gaps

    Closes small gaps in a drawing by creating small, invisible strokes between the two closest points to close the colour zone. You do not need to trace directly over the gap. You can draw it a few millimeters away. The two closest points automatically close the gap.

    Remove Art Inside Selection

    Removes any art inside a selection. It is recommended that you clean your Colour Art level as well. If you have a stroke accumulation in the Colour Art, it can result in large output files, especially if you work in high definition resolutions.

    Remove Art Inside Selection on All Drawings

    Removes any art inside all drawings selected with the Permanent Selection option in the Select tool.

    Remove Art Outside Selection

    Removes any art existing outside a selection. It is recommended that you clean the Colour Art level as well. If you have a stroke accumulation in the Colour Art, it can result in large output files, especially if you work in high-definition resolutions.

    Remove Art Outside Selection on All Drawings

    Removes any art outside all drawings selected with the Permanent Selection option in the Select tool.

    Paint

    NOTE The Paint commands require you to use the Permanent Selection option in the Select tool so you can maintain a selection over multiple drawings.

    Unpaint Selection

    Unpaints any art existing inside a selection.

    Unpaint Selection on All Drawings

    Unpaints all art contained inside a selection on all the drawings within the same layer.

    Unpaint Outside Selection

    Unpaints any art existing outside a selection. If no selection have been drawn using the Select tool, the entire drawing will be unpainted.

    Unpaint Outside Selection on All Drawings

    Unpaints all art outside a selection on all the drawings within the same layer.

    Repaint Selection

    Repaints any art inside a selection.

    Repaint Selection on All Drawings

    Repaints any art inside a selection on all the drawings contained within the same layer.

    Repaint Outside Selection

    		 Repaints any art outside a selection. If no selection has been drawn using the Select tool, the entire drawing will be repainted.

    Repaint Outside Selection on All Drawings

    Repaints any art outside a selection on all the drawings contained within the same layer.

    Convert

    Pencil Lines to Brush Strokes

    Converts the selected centreline pencil strokes into contour strokes brush lines.

    Brush Strokes to Pencil Lines

    Converts selected contour strokes into centreline pencil strokes. The brush stroke thickness will be lost.

    Strokes to Pencil Lines

    Converts the selected invisible line to a pencil line.

    Break Apart Text Layers

    Text is treated as a single drawing object. This separates the text so each character becomes an individual drawing object you can select and modify independently.

    Optimize

    Flatten

    Merges drawing objects and brush strokes into a single layer. If you draw new lines to fix a drawing or line with many brush strokes, it can be useful to flatten them all into a single shape. By default, lines are drawn one on top of each other. If you intend to repaint the lines or modify their shape, it will be easier if they are flattened.

    Smooth

    Smooths selected drawing strokes and removes extra points.

    Create Contour Strokes

    Adds a permanent invisible line around a shape that was drawn directly in Harmony. This allows you to unpaint lines with the Paint tool but maintain the shape of the lines, should you need to repaint later.

    Remove Contour Strokes

    Remove any permanently invisible lines that were created while scanning and vectorizing drawings or manually adding contour strokes. This is useful for removing the intersection triangles created during vectorization.

    Remove Extra Strokes

    Removes strokes inside painted area. This option only works after the painted drawing is flattened.

    Optimize

    		 Reduces the number of layers, such as overlapping brush strokes, in the selected drawing objects. Drawing objects will only be flattened and optimized if the selected objects do not change the appearance of the final image when they are merged.

    Crop Brush Textures

    		 Crops an unnecessarily large texture bitmap that lies unseen beneath the vector contour of a textured line. This often occurs when you cut and paste textured lines from one drawing into another. If you cut a portion from a textured line and paste it into a different drawing, Harmony pastes the entire unseen texture bitmap from the source drawing into the new one, even if you only took a small portion of the source drawing. Using the Crop Brush Texture command will crop away extraneous texture that does not touch the vector area. If there are many textured lines in your scene, this will greatly reduce the file size.

    Reduce Drawing Texture Resolution

    When you import and vectorize as texture (colour) a high resolution image, the size of your drawing can be heavy. You can reduce the size and resolution of the textures in a drawing.

    Transform

    Flip Horizontal

    Flips the current selection horizontally.

    Flip Vertical

    Flips the current selection vertically.

    Rotate 90 CW

    Rotates the current selection 90 degrees clockwise.

    Rotate 90 CCW

    Rotates the current selection 90 degrees counter-clockwise.

    Rotate 180

    Rotates the current selection 180 degrees.

    Arrange

    Bring to Front

    		 Moves the selected art to the front (on top).

    Bring Forward

    		 Moves the selected art one level forward (closer to the front).

    Send Backward

    		 Moves the selected art one level lower (behind).

    Send to Back

    		 Moves the selected art behind everything (bottom / back).

    Create Empty Drawing

    		 Creates a drawing in the selected cell, replacing any drawing that may already be exposed in that cell and the following ones until it meets another drawing, key exposure or a blank cell.

    Duplicate Drawings

    Lets you duplicate the drawing and work on a copy of it. This lets you modify an existing drawing but retain the original. When duplicating a drawing, the selected cell is replaced with the new drawing. The exposure of the original drawing that was on the current cell is removed. The original drawing is not deleted from the project folder or other cells in which it is exposed.

    Delete Selected Drawings

    Permanently removes selected drawings. Once you save your project, these drawings cannot be recovered.

    Rename Drawing

    Lets you give a selected drawing a new name.

    Rename Drawing with Prefix

    Lets you rename a drawing sequence with a prefix, which can be quite useful for cut-out puppet breakdown and deformation animation. This applies to any deformation work done in pre-Harmony 12 versions.

    Rename by Frame

    		 Lets you rename a series of drawings relative to their frame position. This is useful in hand-drawn animation.
    Select Strokes with Current Colour

    Lets you select drawing elements and painted areas with the same colour as the currently selected colour in your colour palette.

    Distribute to Layers

    Every selected stroke in the Camera view is placed on separate layers; one layer per stroke. If artwork is composed of several strokes, you must group them to put them on the same layer.

    This operation cannot be done in the Drawing view.

    Create Colour Art from Line Art

    Lets you use the outline you traced on one of the four embedded layers (line art, colour art, overlay, underlay) and create invisible strokes to paint your drawings on separate layers. This provides more inking and painting flexibility.

    You can also configure this option to create the invisible strokes on any of the four embedded layers.

    Create Breaking Triangles

    Useful for brush strokes, creates triangular breaks at natural line intersections. These intersections are the probable locations where colour line breaks may occur, such as where a sleeve meets a hand.

    This makes it easier to soft trace lines in different colours when there are flattened or unflattened clean brush strokes.

    Generate Auto-Matte

    Fills colour based on currently selected colour swatch on different drawing layers (overlay, underlay) so overlapping lines are more visible during a line test.

    Adjust Line Texture Opacity

     

    		 Lets you adjust the contrast and opacity of textured lines in a drawing.
    Change Vector Drawing Brush Resolution

    Allows you to change the pixel density of textured brush strokes in vector drawings in your scene.

    NOTE When you create a new vector drawing, its pixel density for textured brush strokes is based on the settings in the Drawing Resolution tab of the Scene Settings dialog.

    Change Bitmap Drawing Resolution

    Allows you to change the pixel density and canvas size of existing bitmap drawings in your scene.

    NOTE When you create a new bitmap drawing, its canvas size and pixel density are based on the settings in the Drawing Resolution tab of the Scene Settings dialog.

    Previous Drawing

    When a cell is selected in the Timeline or Xsheet view, displays the previous drawing.

    Next Drawing

    When a cell is selected in the Timeline or Xsheet view, displays the next drawing.

    Previous Layer

    When a cell is selected in the Timeline or Xsheet view, displays the previous layer.

    Next Layer

    Once a cell is selected in the Timeline or Xsheet view, you can navigate between the drawings, frames, and layers. Displays the previous drawing, next drawing, previous layer or next layer.

    When a cell is selected in the Timeline or Xsheet view, displays the next layer.

    Colour Protection

    Toggle Current Colour Protection

    Temporarily enables/disables the Colour Protection feature so you can quickly correct wrongly inked or painted areas under protected colour without readjusting the Current Colour Protection option.

    Respect Colour Protection

    		 In the Colour view, you can protect a colour swatch to avoid repainting or unpainting the zones linked to that swatch. If you using the Paint tool and this option is deselected, you will repaint or unpaint the protected colours on your drawings until you enable the option again.