Manual 05 colour

Colour

The Color panel offers a hue ring with the saturation/value square inside it — hue around the ring, light and strength in the square, no separate slider to reach for — and HSV, HSL, RGB and CMYK slider sets.

The swatch at the bottom does two things, told apart by whether you move:

• Click it for the numbers — hex, HSV and RGB — in a flyout.
• Drag it onto the canvas to fill with that colour.

Foreground and background

Two colours, shown one over the other at the left end of the Quick options bar, just after the active tool's icon, shared by the brush, the fill and the gradient. X swaps them; D resets to black over white. They are global on purpose — reaching for the same colour in three tools and finding three different answers is what this prevents.

The pair is always there, whichever tool is selected, and always in the same place: it does not come and go, and the tool's own options begin after it rather than shifting along. It also never collapses into the bar's ▾ overflow, which the tool's own controls do when the window is narrow.

The swatch link travels with the swap, so trading to a palette colour and back leaves your strokes still following that swatch.

Either half does two things:

• Click it to open its own picker — the same ring-and-square wheel, readouts and palette the Color panel shows, editing that half of the pair.
• Drag it onto the canvas to fill with that colour.

The ▾ beside the pair opens the foreground picker directly. It is there because the swatches themselves are a press-and-maybe-drag gesture, and a hand that moves on the way down should get a fill rather than a panel.

Choosing a colour anywhere else

Every other place a colour is set — a palette swatch, a gradient stop, the brush's secondary colour — is a swatch you click, and it opens the same ring-and-square wheel and the same readouts.

Hex is at the bottom of that flyout, under the wheel, in the same order the Color panel uses. It is a readout you can also type into, which is the right rank for it: typing #c04a2f is transcribing a colour you already found, not choosing one.

A checkerboard swatch means no colour, which is a different answer from black. The brush's secondary colour is the one place that matters, and it has a ✕ to get back to it.

Keeping a colour you found

Every picker has a ＋ beside the word Palette. It puts the colour on the wheel into the palette the Palette panel has selected, and makes a palette first if the document has none — finding a colour and keeping it should be one gesture, not a trip to another panel and back.

The new swatch is then the one you are painting with, so the stroke that follows references it. A colour you went to the trouble of writing down would otherwise be the one colour in the drawing a later palette edit could not reach. Adding the background colour, or a gradient stop's colour, leaves the brush where it was.

A colour already in the palette is not added twice. The same colour arriving twice is almost always a slip — the wheel moved a little and came back — and a palette full of near-identical entries is a palette nobody can use. What happens next depends on which wheel you used:

• Foreground or background — the swatch already there is selected instead. That is the useful answer: the point of adding was to paint with a live colour, and that swatch already is one.
• Anywhere else — nothing is added, and it says which swatch already holds the colour.
• The wheel in the Palette panel — the copy is made. Somebody working in the palette who asks for a second copy wants one.

When you do want two of a colour — the same grey filed under two characters, say — use Duplicate in the Palette panel. It makes an independent swatch with a new identity, so recolouring the copy leaves art painted with the original alone. That is the whole reason to have two.

Palettes

Every document starts with a palette holding pure black and pure white, with black selected.

This is the one place the "absent unless asked for" rule does not apply, and deliberately. A swatch is not a feature you opt into — it is the difference between a stroke that carries a colour and one that carries a reference, and only the second can be recoloured later. Starting empty would mean the first hour of work is painted in literals that can never follow a palette edit.

The palette appears in every colour picker, not just the panel. Picking from it links the swatch, so the recolour still reaches the art.

The Palette panel manages named palettes. Import and export .gpl (GIMP) files.

Palettes are live, Toon Boom style. Paint with a swatch and the stroke remembers the swatch, not the colour. Edit the swatch and every stroke that used it repaints — across every layer and every frame at once. A run of edits collapses into one undo step.

Choosing a colour any other way breaks the link, which is what you want: a colour picked off the canvas is a colour, not a palette entry.

In a project, palettes belong to the project, so all of a character's animations paint from the same one.

Drag a swatch along the grid to put it somewhere else in its palette. While you drag, a coral line in the gap shows where it will land — before the swatch under the pointer if you are over its left half, after it if over its right half. In the empty space after a row it lands after that row's last swatch, and below every row at the end of the palette. It is the same coral line the Layers panel draws at a row's edge. The swatch keeps its identity, so the art painted with it still follows it; in a document palette the move is one undo step. Dragging it onto another palette in the tree above moves it there instead.

Filing palettes

The Palette panel's top half is a tree. 🗀 makes a folder, ＋ makes a palette, and both land inside whatever is selected — where you were looking, not at the bottom of the list. ✕ deletes whichever is selected.

Drag the divider between the tree and the swatches to give either half more room — organising wants the tree, painting wants the swatches. A tree deeper than its half scrolls; neither half can be dragged away entirely.

Move things by dragging a row onto a folder, or by right-clicking it and choosing Assign to. The two do the same thing; the menu lists every folder by its full path, which is what tells two folders called "Knight" apart. Right-click also has Rename and Delete.

Double-click a palette or folder's name to rename it — or choose Rename — and type. Enter or clicking away keeps the new name, Esc leaves the old one. In a document palette the whole name is one undo step; a project palette's rename, like every project palette change, is not on the undo stack. Folders you closed stay closed while you work; the tree only opens what you open.

Deleting a folder keeps the palettes in it — they come back one level up. A folder can hold folders, and can sit empty: filing before there is anything to file is the normal way round.

With a project open the tree has two headings, Document and Project, and nothing moves between them. A document palette travels with its file and a project palette is shared by every animation in the project, so dragging one into the other is not filing — it is a change of ownership, and it would leave the strokes that reference the palette pointing at nothing. Without a project there are no headings at all, only the document's palettes.

A project's hierarchy is saved with the project, so a project you filed last week opens filed. A document that has never had a folder carries no filing system in its file.

Gradients

Pick the gradient tool and its options appear in the bar, with the ramp itself as the preview. Click the ramp to edit it.

The editor has two rows of markers, and they are independent:

• Above the ramp: opacity. Click to add a stop, drag to move it, select one to set its value.
• Below the ramp: colour. Same, and selecting one gives you the colour picker.

Middle-click a marker to remove it. A colour ramp always keeps two stops; an opacity track keeps two or none, because one stop holds its value everywhere and that is a flat opacity wearing the costume of a gradient.

The two rows exist because opacity genuinely changes in different places from colour. A sky fading out at the top while going orange in the middle needs two stops in one place and one in another, and tying them together would force you to author a colour you did not want in order to place an opacity you did.

A gradient with no separate opacity track is the ordinary case and writes nothing extra to the file.

Drag on the canvas to lay one down; the drag sets the axis, or the centre and radius for a radial. If you have no gradient yet, picking the tool makes a black-to-white one.

Gradients are live in the same way palettes are: edit the definition and the art follows.

The Gradient panel shows the same editor, for when you want it open permanently rather than behind a click.

Channels

The Channels panel shows what the canvas shows, one channel at a time: red, green and blue as grayscale, and alpha as coverage — transparent is black, solid is white. It ships as the last tab of the colour family.

Click a channel to view it alone on the canvas; click it again to get all of them back. The solo is viewing only — like zoom and mirror it never touches the drawing, so nothing you do while soloed records any differently. Painting while a channel is soloed paints with your actual colour; the canvas just shows you one channel of the result.

The thumbnails follow the current frame and redraw as you work, so the panel doubles as a running answer to "where is my ink actually going" — line work that should be pure black shows up identically in all three colour channels, and a stray tint shows up as a difference between them.

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