Freedom of being an artist for Plain Ketchup: You can create your drawings in any drawing style you want! You can also choose how many drawings to do. Just want to do a few seconds worth of animation? Okay! Want to have an entire 5-minute section to yourself every month? Okay! We'll send you the audio and you can create whatever scenes come into your head. We are not art dictators. But we do have some suggestions and tips that will make your drawings easier to animate. (If you, however, are doing your own animation in addition to drawing, do whatever the heck you want.)

There are 2 types of drawings that you can submit to be animated: frame-by-frame and limb-by-limb. You can do a mixture of both or just pick the one method you like better. Most of these tips reference Photoshop, but you can use whatever program you'd like.

Frame by Frame
This is when you have a lot of jpegs, each one a little different from the last. The pictures will be put in a row and played through like a flip book. Depending on how different one picture is from the next, large sweeping movements can look a little jerky. But it's an excellent format for a closeup on someone speaking because you only need 6 jpegs (each with a different mouth shape): closed, Ah, S, V, L, oo. Every file should be 720 pixels by 405 pixels with a resolution of 72. Please don't think you have to redraw every picture. Just tweak the picture you just drew and resave it as a new file.

Limb by Limb
This can be used for large movements like someone running, or for a closeup of someone talking. Your background should be a 720 x 405 pixels JPEG. Everything else should be a PNG with transparent background. (If you don't know how to do this, please email Jaime at jaimeandlindsey@gmail.com. It's very easy to set up in Photoshop.)

For large movements, each limb should be a separate file (PNG, not JPEG): head, arm 1, arm 2, torso/neck, leg 1, leg 2, mouth open, mouth closed (if applicable). Also make sure the size is in proportion to your background. You check this by creating the limbs in the same file as your background, just on a different layer.

 
Please note correction in picture: Backgrounds should be 720 x 405 pixels, not 655 x 480. Thank you.

For close ups, each thing that moves should be a separate file (again, PNG): neck/shoulders/head, eyeballs, eyebrow 1, eyebrow 2, and various mouth/chin shapes.

Now that we've got format out of the way, let's talk content. There are a regular characters in the series that need to be recognizable from one scene to the next, even if the drawing style in scene one is anime and the drawing style in scene 2 is Charlie Brown. To do this, please use our color swatches for hair and skin. Below, you'll find the basic look for each person, like hair length, and if they wear glasses, etc. You can have what clothes you feel suitable.