When you’re retracing animation, 2B pencils are good choices. They are soft enough to give for a varied line but hard enough to make dark clean lines. Three-hole-punched paper attaches to a small peg bar taped on your light table to hold the paper in place. Buying the paper already punched saves you the trouble of punching it manually or taping it on the table, and makes it easier to align pages. Some light tables are expensive; professional glass-top rotating tables can cost thousands, or you can find a large desktop box for just under $100. A small light tracer box with a 10-inch-by-12-inch slanted drawing surface works for the budget-minded animator. This type of transparency film used on overhead projectors, but you have to make sure to buy the kind that is heat safe and copy safe. The easiest way to transfer from paper to transparency is using a copier, but you have to use the right kind of transparency, or it’ll melt in the copier and ruin it. Although you can use watercolors and pastels, most traditional animators use colored Prismacolor markers with a clear blender to run the shades together to deliver a watercolor look with control. Occasionally, Prismacolor colored pencils do the job for backgrounds.
