About Advanced Drawing Tools

Drawing with the advanced drawing tools is like drawing with the basic drawing tools. You can draw a freehand stroke, create a filled ellipse, or perform an area fill. However, with the advanced drawing tools you do not draw objects with one solid color. Instead, you fill them with a gradient or an image taken from another layer.

There are three advanced drawing tools: Gradient, Reveal, and Clone.

The Gradient tool lets you apply smooth transitions between two or more colors and opacity levels to Paint objects. You can use the default gradient settings, or you can create your own gradient.

You can also place gradients on the alpha channel to create gradient transparency masks. For information, see Example: Drawing Gradients on the Alpha Channel.

The Reveal tool provides a quick way of "erasing" through one clip to a clip that is placed behind it.

The Clone tool allows you to copy parts of a clip to another clip (or elsewhere in the same clip).

You often use the latter two tools for rotoscoping. Rotoscoping also refers to the process of drawing over top of live action to create realistic looking animation. This topic is discussed briefly in Rotoscoping.