Anime Animators Do THIS While Animating

In this video, I'm going to explain to you why animators use these different colored lines for most forms of animation. I have grown famous on TikTok for sharing my original animations, work in progress shots of my indie anime, and sharing information that I've learned about the Japanese animation industry, and I get asked all the time, "What do those red and blue lines mean in animation?" So that's what I'm going to answer today. A lot of the examples I'm covering are going to involve both Japa

nese anime, as well as Western and Indie animations that basically use a similar technique. I'll even show you some behind-the-scenes shots of some of my latest fully animated videos, which you can check out in the description below or linked at the end of this video. To put it simply, animators use colored lines in order to mark off specific parts of the drawing that are going to be a different color. The different colors of the lines are so that each part of the animation team clearly knows wh

at parts are going to be colored in during the painting stage. This is most commonly seen in animation drawings like anime keyframes, where the entire drawing is a mix of these different colors. Looks complicated, right? But in actuality, there's only three or four colors being used here if we include the black lines. You might be thinking at this point, "Well, what about art like this? Do they need to use these red and blue lines?" Well, no, because this drawing wasn't designed with animation i

n mind. Typically for animation, the goal is to have a character design that can be easily and consistently animated by an entire team of animators. This applies to everything from cel-shaded animation like in anime, to Western animation like Invincible, or even for modern TV shows like The Amazing World of Gumball or Teen Titans Go. In contrast, this type of smooth or painted style of artwork is not meant to be animated, and even if you look at the layers for these types of drawings, you can se

e that it takes dozens or even hundreds of layers to achieve this effect. Whereas for animation, you want to hopefully make things as easy as possible for the animators because they are drawing these characters over and over and over again for hundreds and hundreds of frames. And yes, even in Japanese anime, where sometimes the character designs go super crazy with the hair or the eyes, it's still something that is a million times easier to animate than something that is fully rendered like this

. Let's compare this shot here to its final design. Let's start with the red lines. These are what's known as "highlights," which typically are the areas on an object where light is hitting the object. As you can see here, the light is coming in from this side of the drawing, so the artist will block off these sections of hair with red lines in order to showcase where that light is hitting the hair. Same thing with this part here, the light is reaching this part and in turn will be shown with a

red line. Next, let's move on to the blue lines. These indicate where the shadows will be, so in a similar fashion to the highlights, the artist will use blue to indicate all the different shadows in the hair, face, clothes, and anywhere else that a shadow will form on the character. Keep in mind that this is just the absolute basic usage of the red and blue lines in animation, and it's not even a super strict rule that every studio has to follow. There are some methods of animation where all th

e flat colors with no shading is completed first, and then the shadows are drawn, painted, or added in during post-production. SpindleHorse, the animation powerhouse behind Hazbin Hotel, and Helluvaboss, are pretty well known for having a crazy amount of compositing in their shots, to the point where the final results will add in shadows on shadows in after effects on top of everything else like glow effects, highlights, and little finishing touches. Or take for instance anime styles like that o

f Summer Wars, which was animated by Studio Madhouse. Here, the art style takes on a very minimalistic approach to shading, and even no shading in some cases. This makes the characters stand out from the highly detailed backgrounds and gives the entire scene a completely different feel. I also want to point out the different colors that are being used to fill in certain areas during the animation process. I typically see this more in Japanese anime production, but sometimes certain sections of t

he animation will be filled in with a blue or purple or yellow color. As far as I'm aware, this is not exactly required and is typically seen more in the layout and rough keyframe stages, where you would want to block out big shadows and different hair layers. It even differs from studio to studio, as some rough animations will look almost fully filled in with these temp colors, while others stick to plain white and maybe some blue for the shadows. You can even see this in traditional animation,

like in Japanese anime, where a lot of the keyframes are drawn by hand, they sometimes fill in those colors with colored pencil. So to play it safe, just assume that these fill colors don't matter and are just temporary until the final coloring stage. Now let's start to look at more advanced techniques. There are animation keyframes that sometimes use other colors than red and blue to indicate things. Colors like green or magenta or even purple have been used, especially for parts of the animat

ion like the eyes, clothes, props, or other elements. Honestly, these extra colors can be chalked up to personal preference or the standard set by the individual studio, but for the most part, the other colors can be assigned to a variety of things. Now take for instance this drawing. You might look at it and ask yourself, what is this random green line that is going through the hair? If we were to compare it to the final shot, that solid line isn't there. Actually, this line is meant to indicat

e that a gradient is to be used in the hair during post-production and compositing. Of course, the animator can also write an extra note somewhere like directly on the keyframe or in the timing sheet. In this example from Dong Chang, an animator working in the Japanese anime space, he is using an After Effects plugin called F's Select Color in order to isolate the colors of the hair and apply a gradient effect to it after the fact. This way, the coloring team only has to focus on getting the fla

t colors down and then they pass it along to post-production in order to add in the gradient effect. This way, the animation stays consistent throughout the entire process and there's no weird movement of the gradient in the final product. Green lines are also used in combination with other colors such as red to indicate different types of blushes. In this case, the green circles usually represent this circular blush that is keyed out during post-production and then blurred heavily to get this s

oft blush effect, whereas these anime blush lines are left colored in to give this multi-layered blush effect across the face. Or take for instance this specific drawing of a character from the anime To Love Ru While normally, red lines are meant to indicate highlights on a character, in this case it's specifically meant to indicate this specific pattern on the character's uniform. You can see that he is using red lines for the pattern of the skirt as well as in the highlights of the hair. Also

keep in mind that the amount of colored lines will vary depending on the complexity of the character's design. Let's take a look at this keyframe from the anime Rent a Girlfriend. Notice how extremely detailed some of these close-up shots are and how many shadows and highlights are in the hair and the eyes. It's to the point that there are multiple instances of red, blue, and green lines in the eyes alone in order to represent the different levels of highlights that are present in the eyes. Of c

ourse, this is specific to this shot as it is a close-up on the face during this scene. If the character is zoomed out, then less details will be needed in order to complete the character and thus less colored lines. Before I talk about the comparison of how Japan uses these techniques versus Western animation, I want to thank Paperlike for making me an ambassador of their products. I'm specifically an iPad-only animator and thus having a good screen protector is very important. Not only have I

been using Paperlike's amazing screen protector, but also I've been using their magnetic folio case on my iPad Pro. This is a new case made by Paperlike that sticks magnetically to the back of my iPad. It's got this amazing textured finish that feels awesome to hold. It folds into a tri-fold to stand up my iPad at various angles, and it even comes with this amazing magnetic flap that keeps my Apple Pencil secure when closed. It can even be folded closed completely without the Apple Pencil. You c

an support my channel by going to the Paperlike affiliate link in my description or use code "spywismindpalace" at checkout, and every time you purchase something using the URL or the code, I get a little commission kickback for every purchase. So if you want to continue supporting my animations or just want to get some useful accessories for your iPad, then head on over to paperlike.com/spywismindpalace or use the code "spywismindpalace" at checkout. Note that you do not get a discount when usi

ng my code. Thanks. I've talked a lot about the Japanese anime industry, but that's because that's the industry I'm most familiar with. But honestly, the concept of using shadow and highlight lines also translates into Western animation. If you look at this animatic from Jaden Animations on their Anime Intro video, you can see that in a lot of these shots they are using blue lines to indicate shadows and red lines to indicate highlights or effects areas. Or look at the work of Studio Grackle and

Studio Titmouse, who worked on The Legend of Vox Machina. You can actually see a lot of influences from Japanese animation techniques in these animations, including highlights and shadow lines. I mean heck, even looking at some of these layout shots, they've filled in the shadows with blue, which is again, something that you see a lot in anime keyframes. Even in smaller ways, shows like The Owl House have even used elements from these colored lines in their production, even if most of the show

did use a puppet rigging style of animation. Spoiler alert for The Owl House if you somehow haven't seen this episode, but during Eda's fight with Lilith, you can actually see some specific animation scenes that utilize colored lines to separate out the different shades of Eda's hair, the small shadows and highlights on Lilith, or even to indicate the different color layers on Luz's bubble in this shot here. And finally, we come to my animations. I have definitely utilized the Japanese anime sty

le of coloring and animation in my own channel videos, even going as far back as the beginning of my channel, where all I had was a simple purple shadow under my character's head. Yes, I was one of those people that used purple to shade and set it to multiply. Deal with it. Looking at these keyframes from my past animations, you can clearly see that I've labeled out which parts will be highlights, which parts are shadows, and those end up getting translated into the final animation. Even with my

most recent animation, it's still the same technique just used in different ways to achieve the look that I want in the final result. I definitely think that this particular keyframe is my favorite because it utilizes so many different types of shading and highlights that I had never done before at this point in time, and I'm really really proud of how this shot turned out in the final animation. Keep in mind, this is not the only way to animate highlights and shadows. Every single studio has a

different way of doing things, and even amongst animators in the same studio, everyone has a different method of doing things. There are different people that use different mediums, like pencil and paper, versus iPad, versus using a Cintiq. There are people that color in things a certain way, or there are people that don't color in things at all. But the main purpose of these colored indicator lines at the end of the day is to show that within a project or studio, there are certain guidelines t

o help each part of the team communicate with each other, to know exactly where each part will be colored, shaded, highlighted, or composited. That way, there's no guesswork or misunderstanding when the animation travels from the beginning to the end of the pipeline. Again, I've used this in my own workflow and with my own animation team. During the layout and keyframe stage, I would indicate exactly where things would be highlighted or shadowed, handed it off to the next team, and they were abl

e to understand easily, okay, this is where the highlights go, this is where the shadows go. Well I hope you guys learned something from this video, whether you are new to animation or you are a seasoned veteran. And hey, who knows, maybe this inspires you to start implementing some Japanese anime techniques into your animations in the future. Be sure to check out my latest animations, they will be up on the screen now. Thank you guys for visiting the Mind Palace, and I will catch you all next t

ime. Bye bye.