How to copy and paste original drawings to a new cel?

As the title says I’ve been having some problems reliably copy and pasting drawing elements to new drawing cels. Here’s the situation: I’ve created an animation on one layer and now I’m adding shading / tone / hilight elements on higher layers in the timeline. Because the a lot of the animation is so closely inbetweened I’ve tried to lift the shading of I’ve done for the previous frame, paste it into the next frame, and then edit it as needed. The problem is that sometimes when I do this (ie: select the region I want to copy, press CTRL+C, move to the next frame and press CTRL+V to paste) I’ll later find out after I’ve done the necessary alterations that I’ve ALSO edited the copied area from the PREVIOUS frame. That really sucks and the reason it’s been annoying me is that sometimes that copy-and-paste process works successfully and the pasted artwork is treated as a genuine new entry in the drawing substitution library.

So what’s the trick then? What do I have to do to copy a region or entire drawing and paste it into a new cel without it being treated as a copied clone / instance of the original artwork?

You need to duplicate the drawing. Right click the frame, click extend exposure, in the new frame created right click and hit duplicate drawing.

Aha! That does indeed help out tremendously, -thank you! I’ve been working on a project that involves several idle animations that are performed twice, once with a blink and once without, and I was just copy and pasting the previously completed shadow tone cels onto the new frames and it was driving me bonkers figuring out how to make the thing work like I expected. This helps out so much!

There’s one remaining question though, -in some instances I’ll have created a complete shadow tone image and I want to just copy and paste one segment into a follow up frame that already has art onto, for example the character is standing still and no adjustments need to be made to the existing shadow tone except for his hand or face. In that instance I’ve drawn a selection area around the necessary element I want to copy and then I’ll paste it into the new frame (CTRL+C, CTRL+V) but for random reasons I can’t explain sometimes instead of pasting that region into the following frame the entire drawing will be copied and then pasted as a drawing substitution into the following frame, completely overwriting the existing artwork. Is there any advice on how to avoid that?

My guess is that you are selecting the elements in a drawing that you want to copy with the transform tool. Instead select with the selection tool, the black arrow at the top of your tool set.