Paint & Stick is an After Effects tool that lets you paint directly in a composition using custom Photoshop brushes. It also give you the ability to have onion skin views of your work in After Effects. How that isn’t a “thing” natively in After Effects is beyond me. Onion skinning and brushes in Paint & Stick makes it ideal for creating hand drawn frame to frame animation.
The “stick” part of Paint & Stick lets you slap on paint directly on 3d layers without leaving after effects. The new beta, now lets you stick entire live compositions. This will make it even easier to work with 3D rendered scene from your favorite 3D app.
You can get the new Paint & Stick 2 as a public beta. It is for everyone to try out and use. It is fully functional and watermark free for the entire month of March. After that, P&S 2 will be released and the beta will expire.
If you are a P&S user already, the work you create with the beta will still be usable and renderable with the official released version.
If you are an animator, Paint & Stick is one of the only tools that extends Ae’s capabilities how you would need for creating animation. So, if you haven’t used it before, now is a good time to get on that!
