Sneek Peek

I've been working on a short piece that is done entirely paperless but is made to look like a classic old short. The background above was painted in Mirage. The animation and compositing is being done in ToonBoom Digital Pro. Soon I will have it done and will post it both here and on my site. Everything from storyboarding to the finished composited piece has been done in a traditional way though all in a digital environment. I'm using this as a way to keep up on the newest technology.
I will be teaching ToonBoom Storyboard Pro soon and this was a way to get completely up to speed with all the features. I was able to not only draw the board but create the animatic directly from my timing slugs inside SBPro. It also integrates well with ToonBoom Digital Pro so any camera moves I created in the animatic are brought directly across and I don't have to recreate them.
When it came to the background layouts and paintings I used Mirage so I could get the feel of real pencil and paint. Toonboom doesn't give real world painting capabilities and even though the pencil in TB can have a texture it doesn't give you the ability to do smudges or any other real world techniques.
Doing the animation in ToonBoom worked well since I didn't need more than a line texture to have the feel of pencil. Also having the use of an x-sheet is very nice. Below is a sample of one frame of the pencil test output from ToonBoom.