#pattern brush

I was recently reminded of how old Firealpaca animation mode actually is, so I thought I would write about it!

This blog hasn't always archived all the updates from Firealpaca so I thought I would go looking if there were any posts about one of the biggest feature updates Firealpaca has had: animation mode

Animation mode released on 28th of October 2015. So it's already over 10 years old! Here's some fun animations done with it by the Ever-Blue webcomic author Ten. If you want to remember what it looked like, a tutorial was also posted by Obtusity on DeviantArt in 2015.

Animation mode was called "Onion Skin Display Mode" and came with 3 important features once you switched to it from the View menu: "Show Next/Prev Frame" as well as "Select Next (Upper) Frame" + "Select Previous (Lower) Frame" and "Autoplay". You could also export your frames when in Onionskin Mode. This feature works the same way as it did then: the PNG frames are numbered from 000 and you can select a folder to export them into.

The Onionskin Mode did not feature a "Export GIF" function however, so the makers of Firealpaca released a website just for that: AlpacaDouga. Obtusity posted a tutorial about this on October 12th, 2016.

In 2018, the "Always display the first frame" feature was added with version 1.9.1. This meant that if someone had a background or a non-animated graphic they wanted under the animated part, it would always be displayed as the bottom layer! An earlier update also added the “Import frames as Layers” feature.

With the update 2.3.11 released 2020-09-07, Onion Skin Mode was renamed into Animation Mode

Frrom 2020-10-12, it was possible now to export GIFs from Firealpaca directly with version 2.3.17 and onwards.

Starting from 2021-07-12 and version 2.5.7, all animation mode features were moved under their own menu. File exports were still handled from the File menu, but you could now export more than still frame PNG sequences. It also became possible to specify the display time of frames in auto-playback - change the fps. This meant the autoplay function now let you set the fps. A/N: Although I personally remember that changing the fps settings was always a feature, I might remember wrong - so if anyone has screenshots of that, reply in the comments!

In 2021, this update also meant that the AlpacaDouga service was discontinued:

But the Animation Mode itself got more quality updates, such as extra onion skin settings (changing the color of the onion skin frames) as well as onion skin numbering.

This is what the animation menu has looked like now from 2021 to now in version 2.14.1 (january 2026 update)

Now it is possible to export as frames, as GIF, APNG and even MP4.

For the sake of archiving this log, especially since it's not documented on this blog, here's the old update log from 2015, google translated from the japanese update log:

FireAlpaca version 1.5.0 released (2015-10-21)

Add pattern brush and bitmap watercolor brush

Allows free deformation of folders (applies to 1,8,32bpp layers)

Supports parsing correction during free deformation

Added Onion Skin Display Mode

Added layer sequential PNG output function (in onion skin mode)

Layer auto-play function (in Onion Skin mode)

Change UI color to blue base

Move the filter to an independent menu

Enables movement lock of color palette

Fixed some bugs

And that's it! I can't believe Animation mode in Firealpaca is already more than 10 years old! Thank you for reading this far and I hope this helps more people become interested in using this under-appreciated feature of Firealpaca!

In recent versions there is a Pattern option when creating a bitmap brush so you can use a small piece for the pattern and it will get tiled as a texture wherever you paint.

You could also try the recent mesh warp feature to distort a patten (or scanned texture) for folds in cloth. Disclaimer: I have not tried this seriously, so I don’t know how well it will work in practice.

Hello!

Unfortunately, I do not know exactly, but since the the word "tone" is usually related to how shading is done. I tried looking up if anyone has posted or talked about this online, but seems that people don't use the Pattern type brushes as much.

So far it seems that the only thing "Tone" does is make the brush black-and-white, over-riding even the "use foreground color" option when in both are checked in the brush options. I am guessing this is for brushes which have more color variety in them originally, to make the brush act more like a black and white pattern rather than just any image with various color data.

I made an example with a bigger colorful image so you can see the differences clearly:

so I guess this is just used for when you have a colorful pattern, lets say a pattern of leaves or flowers for example, and even though you mostly use them inside color illustrations, maybe some other time you will need a single color variant or a black and white version, just to tone the backgorund of a comic or something (but you don't want to switch your color swatch). In that case this "tone" option becomes useful.

No, they are only a visual indication of vertical/horizontal constraint, they are not actually guidelines.

If you can create a four-tile piece, you can set it as a Pattern-based bitmap brush for perfect tiling.

One of many ways to create the four-tile piece - fill a 100x100 pixel image with black (size and colours for example only, change to suit). Create a new 200x200x pixel image and fill it with white. Copy and paste the black tile into the new white image. It will fill the top left quarter as another layer. Paste it again, use the Move tool and a steady hand to align the corners of the two black tiles.

Save the four-tile piece as a PNG image.

Load the image as a Pattern brush - use the Add Brush (Bitmap) at the bottom of the layer list, pick your PNG image, set the Type to Pattern.

You can now paint in your tiled floor.

You can use the Transform function to give it perspective.

-Obtusity

Update: If you are using a view mode that does not show comments, incaseyouart added: “Alternatively you can find a tiled floor texture online, load it into the program as a layer, then erase what you don’t want, and then transform it.”  

Floral Illustrator Pattern Brushes

These floral pattern brushes for Illustrator are perfectly seamless and can be used to add floral elements to your designs such as invitations, menus and certificates. Using them is as easy as selecting a pattern brush, choosing a color and then drawing with the brush tool.

They can also be applied to shapes such as circles to create decorative rings. Each brush includes tiles for corners and start and end points.