About Mirror View

A recurring challenge for artists is to draw characters and objects with their elements properly aligned and with respect to their proportions and shapes. While drawing, the eye tends to get used to the imperfections in the shapes and proportions in your artwork, making it hard to spot and correct them. A common trick to avoid this pitfall is to flip your artwork horizontally. This allows you to look at your artwork as if you were looking at it for the first time, making all the mistakes in shapes, positioning and proportion obvious to your eye.

Using the Mirror View command, you can temporarily flip the drawing space horizontally, whether in the Camera or Drawing view. This will allow you to see your artwork and your animation as if your whole stage was flipped, and you can even use the drawing and animation tools on the flipped artwork. Once you are done, you can disable Mirror View to instantly undo it and resume working with your artwork in its original orientation.

NOTE Just like panning, rotating and zooming in or out of the Camera and Drawing views, Mirror view is strictly a temporary visual effect. It does not affect the rendered image nor does it have any permanent effect on your artwork, your layers or your scene's layout.
or Drawing view horizontally

  1. Click anywhere on the Camera or Drawing view to set the focus on the view you're drawing in.

    TIP

    You can click on a view's tab to set the focus on it without clicking on anything inside it.

  2. Do one of the following:

    • In the Camera or Drawing toolbar, click on the Mirror View button.
    • In the top menu, open the View menu and select Mirror View.

    Everything in the Camera or Drawing view will now appear flipped horizontally. A small overlay with the text Mirror View appears in the top-left corner of the drawing space to help you remember that you are working in Mirror View.

TIP

You can add a button to enable and disable Mirror View to your Camera or Drawing view toolbar. To customize a toolbar's buttons, right-click on the toolbar and select Customize.

NOTE

The Customize option will only appear if you click the upper part of the toolbar. For the upper part of the toolbar to appear, select one of the following toolbars:

  • Alignment Guides

  • Clips and Tracks

  • Keyframes and Control Points

  • Pen Settings

  • Scripting

The Customize option will only appear if you click the area above the toolbar

  1. Click anywhere on the Camera or Drawing view to set the focus on the view you're using to draw.

    TIP

    You can click on a view's tab to set the focus on it without clicking on anything inside it.

  2. In the top menu, open the View menu and select Mirror View.

    Everything in the Camera or Drawing view will be unflipped. The "Mirror View" overlay will disappear.