DryBrush-The traditional way to motion blur 2D Animation(And you can still do it today)

One thing I've always been fascinated with in traditional 2D animation is the tools you can use to create exaggerations and blurs.

One such thing is the Dry Brush Blur. This is a technique used by artists to simulate speed and blur on acetate cel animation.

The issue however is you have to not only reference the animation cels but also pay attention to the inking but when executed right, you get that wonderful blur.

The joys of 2D Animation using the right tools.

Nowadays, we don't see this type of drybrush blur anymore. Now it's you have to keep things stiff or do things like add speed lines or use some weird in-between shit just to exaggerate the movement.

Or at worst, let your computer calculate what it thinks is a blur which only works well for 3DCG.

CGI Motions blurs do however become a burden on both your CPU and GPU and I bet you even your RTX 4090's RT Cores won't do any good for speeding up your MAYA renders unless you're using a rendering engine that specifically uses RTX technology. The RT Cores are more or less built for real-time raytracing on gaming.

But still, you don't need to enable any blur tools in the rendering settings in 2D Animation because you can just replicate it the traditional way just like the good old days.

Such as this screengrab from one of my demo reels where I did use a drybrush technique to exaggerate Shasta's arm motion.

Well, I say drybrush technique loosely. What I actually did was use a brush preset that doesn't truly look like a drybrush but is actually a close approximation of the technique.

What I did was create a separate drawing layer on ToonBoom Harmony Premium so one layer has the drawing labeled SHASTA, which is the character shown above, and another layer called DRYBRUSH.

With that, I'm able to retain the original drawing without effing it up but still get my intended blur.

This does however complicate things where Because using the same colors for things such as Shasta's skintone, her clothes, or even her hair, the colors blend a little too well but no need to worry. I use the premium version of Toon Boom Harmony so I have access to advanced Node Tools.

It's where I have nodes for things like composites, drawings, etc.

I use what's referred to as a shadow node which creates a pseudo drop-shadow like you see on animation cels on things like old school animation or anime and that helps to read the drop shadow so it doesn't get lost on the actual cels. 

Of course, to keep things aligned, I have to create a peg node which is a node used to hold all things together in the node graph.

Ahh technology. Maybe I should start using the nodes more often for my animations.