drawing

To start our animation process, we need to start with a drawing. This should be a very simple drawing, something like a stick figure, without a lot of detail.

I chose to draw a spider. He is basically a smiley face with six legs. 

Here is what my drawing looks like:

Here is a closer look:

What do you notice about this picture? There is no shading, no background, and I did not color anything in. You only need a simple drawing like this. If you put more detail in your drawing at this point, you will find it hard to work with it in our Inkscape drawing program.

Once you have a drawing you like, use your computer's scanner to scan it. Save this drawing as a bitmap file, which is a .bmp file. This type of file imports into most drawing programs very easily.

I named my picture "spider rough.bmp." (Original, huh? :-)

Once your drawing is scanned and saved, then go to the tutorial menu on the left of the screen. We are ready for Part 2: Inkscape.