Digital tracing paper: The Onion Skin tool

Drawing your own animation by hand? You can use the Onion Skin tool to show how nearby frames of animation look. This tool is like digital tracing paper!

Follow along to see how it works. To draw a new actor yourself, go to Add Actor > Drawing Tool. Then let’s suppose you’ve already drawn a single frame, like this dog, that you’re happy about and ready to start animating.

Let’s add a few frames of animation—so that this dog wags his tail. First, copy the starting costume using the Copy Costume button.

Then switch to your new costume, erase the parts you want to change—for us, that’s the dog’s tail.

Then click the Onion Skin button:

Just like real-life tracing paper, this shows a translucent overlay of nearby frames, so you can so you use it as guidelines for your new frame of animation.

Draw the tail of the dog in a slightly different spot for each successive frame, using the Onion Skin, Copy Costume, and Animation Preview tools, as you work. The result can be smooth motion like this: