There are several ways of animating in Painter – using nothing but the canvas or by using layers in various degrees of complexity.

By placing an object or drawing on a layer and moving it into different positions in the simplest way of creating an animation. This would be a good first step if you haven’t created a Painter animation before – this tutorial will take you through this process step by step.

The first part will create a brush stroke of paint on the canvas – using frame-by-frame drawing. The second part will then add the brush which will be placed on a layer and moved along the existing stroke.
>> download sample image of brush [from morguefile.com]

PART 1 :: brush stroke

1. create a new movie file with the following settings (please read previous post for further details):
   • 680px x 480px
   • 150dpi
   • 50 frames
   • 4 layers of onion skin
   • 8 bit color system palette
2. to work more efficiently – enable the tracing paper in order to work with the onion skins.
   
3. select a broad brush and colour of your choice – here – purple paint on a grey canvas has been set with the brush options as shown below.
   
4. start drawing your brush stroke in frame 1 with a small dot – move to the next frame and redraw the initial stroke and extend it a little. Repeat this until you have completed a brush stroke as shown below.
   
   final stroke:
   

PART 2 :: paint brush

1. create the image of of paint brush at a suitable size -
   NOTE: Painter can read multiple file formats and will open Photoshop files including most layer types.
   - or download sample image of a brush here.
   
2. open the image in Painter and move the brush image into your movie file. This can be done by simply clicking on the brush and dragging it across into the movie window (you can only drag the actual image across and NOT the layer as you can in Photoshop!).
   Make sure to place the brush into frame 1 of your existing movie and position it in place above the first dab of paint on your canvas. If you need to create an empty frame in front of your existing movie – you can do so via the top menu > Movie > Add Frames…
   If you are using the sample graphic – you will see an error on opening – due to the text layer which is not supported by Painter. Click ok to the error message and the file will open with the text converted to a graphic.
   As you can see the layer mask has been applied and the brush tip edited to show the colour of the paint.
3. as previously for the brush stroke – work through your existing movie – one frame at a time and move the brush into the appropiate position according to the stroke length, using the onion skin layers as reference.
   
4. once you have reached the last frame – you can save your movie in different formats.
   
   depending on how you are going to edt your final movie – choose your preferred format.

>>> view sample movie