Created attachment 169342 [details]
Example where onion skin is drawn on top of the art so you can see the onion skin for a previous cel/frame even though the drawing is smaller than the current frame.

I write to request that the option to draw onion skins on TOP, rather than underneath (the current behaviour), be added to Krita. I believe the same request was made here already over a year ago (forgive me for not putting the link in, but I was not allowed to because of being a new user, and I didn’t want to necro an old post). However, when I did a search on bugs.kde.org, I couldn’t find mention of it, so I assume it never got logged as an official feature request? (Forgive me if I’m misunderstanding how the system works.)

This would be helpful when creating VFX with solid shapes. At present, I am working on a practise animation where smoke is kicked up by a car and the cloud slowly grows. However, because the onion skins are drawn underneath the art, in each new frame I cannot see how big the cloud was in the previous frame, making it difficult to space the growth of the cloud nicely.

Aseprite does have this toggle in its onion skin settings, so I used it to produce a simple example of what I mean. In the image, I have a green ball on two frames, with the playhead currently on the second frame. I want the ball to grow just a tiny bit in this frame. I need to see how big it was in the first frame so I can get the desired spacing. Because the onion skin is on top, I can see exactly how much bigger the ball is in the second frame, enabling me to do what I needed to.

With Krita's current behaviour, this would be impossible to do, as all you would see is the larger, solid green ball of the current layer, and the only way to compare its size to that on the previous frame would be to quickly "roll" the frames rather than just having the onion skin tell you all the information at once.

The addition of this feature would make Krita more useful for animating, particularly VFX like this, as it allows the animator to simply draw the entire shapes frame-by-frame, rather than having to do outlines first and then fill them in in a second pass. It would be lovely to have a simple switch in the Onion Skin docker that allows the user to choose whether to see onion skins above or below their art.

Thank you.