How to Apply Gradients

[CoreyAnimator]

About to start coloring an animation soon and I was wondering how do you go about adding gradients to your character entire color fill from head to toe. I want the character's entire self in a gradient but I cant figure out how to make a gradient that just effects the character and doesnt feel the background too. If I was in photoshop I would simply click to mask or use an alpha or something, but not sure how to do this in tv paint. I know u can fill a gradient for one area at a time but I want a gradient that covers all section of the character with from head to toe. Would anyone have any idea how to achieve this?

Also...is it possible to animate a gradient?

[slowtiger]

The checkbox right to the layer's visibility checkbox is the stencil on/off. When checked, a second checkbox appears under it which inverses the stencil. The stencil is the mask and can be used on the same layer as well as any other layer. There is only one stencil acive at any time.

[Peter Wassink]

yes, you can use the stencil function of the layer.
but its not even necessary.

To color, fill the entire character on a separate layer with one color (single color or gradient)
To create a color layer use the "duplicate current layer and clear heads button" in the animator panel ( its that white X2 button)
a method i like when the character lines are well clean and closed is to use the freehand filled stroke to roughly circle wide around the entire character.
then remove the excess color outside of the lines by erasing it with the paint bucket (right click the paint-bucket = erase ) make sure you set the shape to expand so it removes cleanly under your lines)
this way you don't have to click&fill all the little compartments formed by the inside lines of the character.

now you have a layer with only the color shapes of your character.

then to add the gradient consider using the spotlight FX in the keyframer, the advantage is that you can animate it relatively easy and have much more control over the shape of the gradient (though a bit less over the colors) see what fits best for you.

[CoreyAnimator]

Thanks alot guys. That spot light seems to do the trick pretty well! Although I do have 2 simple questions

1.)Im having trouble actually selecting things I want to fill with the fill bucket. For example if I want to select the pants, the ghost selection doesnt select the entire open area but instead portions of the open area. I have to keep dragging to find an open a spot that will ghost select the entire pants. Any way to make ghost selecting with the fill bucket any easier so I can use the fill bucket quickly? Im just having trouble selecting areas to fill the way I want.

2.) Is there way to hide all the menus and just get a full screen to work with? I tried View>Show Full Page. Which is exactly what I want, but I dont seem to be able to actually draw from here like I want.

[Peter Wassink]

Thanks alot guys. That spot light seems to do the trick pretty well! Although I do have 2 simple questions

1.)Im having trouble actually selecting things I want to fill with the fill bucket. For example if I want to select the pants, the ghost selection doesnt select the entire open area but instead portions of the open area. I have to keep dragging to find an open a spot that will ghost select the entire pants. Any way to make ghost selecting with the fill bucket any easier so I can use the fill bucket quickly? Im just having trouble selecting areas to fill the way I want.

2.) Is there way to hide all the menus and just get a full screen to work with? I tried View>Show Full Page. Which is exactly what I want, but I dont seem to be able to actually draw from here like I want.

1) do you have an example image? you could try and adjust the fill bucket range, but a picture would help us help you.

2) this is an older feature request that i share, so the answer is no.
you could set the panel bins to slide away, this does create a pretty clean screen, still the panels pop in when you'r near the screen edge,
other option is to set one of the rooms to have no panel bins and all panels switched off(pro only)

[ZigOtto]

1) ... you could try and adjust the fill bucket range

yes, the first thing to try is to increase the threshold of color/opacity detection, try 40, 60, 100, ... and keep the higher value which doesn't run through the lines.

btw, are you going to colorize digital drawings (drawn directly in the software via a tablet) or scanned drawings imported and ScanCleaned ?