#firealpaca tutorial

Let’s start with the tool bar. Here are the common tools that I use. Some of them are self explanatory, so I’m not gonna go too in depth.

Pencil and Eraser tools

The first one is the pencil/brush tool. When you click on it, you will see the brush preview and you can play around with the settings.

When drawing line art or sketches, I would make the correction to about 15-20 to get a smooth line or curve. It helps a lot if you don’t have a steady hand!

To edit an existing brush, just double click on it and this pop up will appear. You can also make new brushes and stuff using the “add brush” option at the bottom (the button that looks like a piece of paper).

For the eraser tool, I turn on soft edge just cuz it will look more natural and not jagged.

Here’s what it looks like when you erase with a soft eraser.

However, most times, I actually use the brush itself to erase my painting. How do I do this? Well, when you are on your pencil tool, hit this alpha swatch. This will turn your brush to ‘an eraser’ with the brush settings.

As you can see here, the alpha brush is even softer cuz it is set to my ‘watercolor’ brush.

Lasso Tool

Pretty simple. Just draw over the stuff you want to move.

To move something, hit V. To transform or scale/flip something, hit Ctrl + T.

To deselect, hit Ctrl + D.

Shortcuts while painting

Sometimes, while painting or sketching, you might want to flip your canvas to see if it looks alright. To quickly do this, hit your down arrow on your keyboard.

To rotate 15 deg angles, hit the left or right arrow keys.

You can also use these to rotate manually.

To make it go back to the original position, click this:

Layers Tab

Okay, so now, when you’re coloring and may want to add highlights or shadows on a new layer, you may need to clip the layer to the base color layer, so the shadows you’re painting on won’t go outside.

If you are someone who likes painting all of this one one layer, then you will need to hit “protect alpha” after you are done with the base coloring.

Cropping

To crop your image, use the rectangle tool to select the part that you want. Then, go do to Edit > Crop.

this will put a little dinky cube in perspective on your canvas. you can resize it with the Operation tool, which is the little white pointer under the text tool in the sidebar. 

next step is to doubleclick on the special 3D layer’s name, which will make a new window pop up! 

in order, the tools available on the lefthand side are: 

 camera, which lets you change the camera angle and zoom in and out. to get out of camera mode, click on its icon again.

selection tool, to select which item you want to edit

move tool can drag the object on the x axis with left click, and up and down on the y axis with right click

slider control will change the angle of the selected object in relation to the ground plane

haven’t figured out what the bottom two tools do yet, whoops. 

after messing around with those tools and figuring out how to use them, you can put together a set to play with, using the box and plane icons below the righthand panel to put new objects on the set. i decided to make an L-shaped sort of building with two cubes and a plane. 

okay, i’ve settled on my backdrop and the angle i’m gonna use, so i hit ‘okay’ and go back to my canvas. 

to make your lines snap to perspective, select the 3D Perspective option in the Snap toolbar at the top left. first you need to select one of the items you placed in your backdrop, and all the lines you draw in a new layer will be in relation to that object’s qualities. 

this gets kind of whacky when you have objects that you’ve edited to have varied rotations, but for something simple like this, it doesn’t matter that much. 

if you need to select a new object, click the little black dot to the right of the Snap toolbar, and select the object you want.

so, here i’ve got an incredibly basic building sketched out. and now, because firealpaca has an animation function and because i hate myself, i’m going to go ahead and try and make a zoom-in on this object.

first, i hide the layer i made my drawing on and make a new one. then i doubleclick on the 3D Perspective layer again, to change the angle and zoom in a little. then i do the same thing i did in the last step and trace over the building shape. then i hide that layer, and keep repeating this until i’m happy.

next i rearrange the layers so that they’re in order, remove the 3D Perspective layer and any empty layers, enable onion skin mode under the View menu...

... export layers from the File menu into a new folder i’m going to call ‘perspective project’...

... and upload the pictures in that new folder onto Firealpaca Douga.

and there we go! i’ve only got three frames in this gif, because i didn’t want to be here all day redrawing the same building, but you can use this process to make stuff like this

and, if you’ve learned how to use boxes to draw humans in perspective, you can now become an animation superhero!