Transcripts
1. Introduction: If you've always seen GIFs and thought, wow that's so cool, I'd really love to do that. But you just don't know where to begin, then this is the class for you. Hello, my name is Mao and I'm an artist, illustrator and teacher. In this class, I'm going to show you how to make three different types of GIF. They are the color changing GIF, the wobble effect GIF, and the image changing GIF. The skills that you're going to learn in this class can be applied to a wide range of artistic styles and can boost lots of different areas of your creative practice, from creating social media campaigns to making your website, newsletter, or emails stand out from the crowd or you could simply enjoy making the GIFs a standalone artworks. Animating your drawings even in a really simple way can be a fantastic way to boost your engagement, draw more attention to your portfolio and just breath some more life and energy into your drawings. This course is aimed at beginners or anyone who would just like to think the artwork move. We're going to be working by hand on paper and then taking our handmade drawings into Photoshop to create art GIFs. But don't worry if you don't know anything about Photoshop, I'm going to be going through all the stages of the process step-by-step. We'll start by brainstorming your initial sketches, looking at different lettering styles and how you might adapt them with illustrations in different ways. I'm going to be giving you a few tips and templates for you to use if you are less confident withdrawing. I will then be showing you how to prepare and digitize your artwork ready to be animated. We' then going to be looking at colors, the important considerations of using colors and gifts and then we are going to select some color palettes to use with your GIF designs. We are then going to take the drawings into Photoshop and make our first color changing GIF. After this, I will walk you through how to make the GIF with that distinctive wobble effect that can really make your drawings look alive. Finally, I will show you how to make an image changing GIF, which can be really playful and a really fantastic way to play with letters. In the class, I have included a bonus lesson shown you how to export your GIFs as MP4 files. Currently, the GIF format isn't supported by Instagram. This lesson's going to allow you to share on that platform. Once you know how to make GIFs, you are going to have so much fun making your artwork move. I can't wait to see what you are going to make. Let's get animating.
2. Class Project: For your class projects, I'd like you to make one animated letter, GIF. Illustrating a letter is really quick, but also really super effective. It means that you can learn all the skills that you need to make GIFs in a really short space of time. Then you take those skills and apply them to all sorts of other areas of your creative portfolio. I've got a passion for illustrative quirky lettering. It's something that I returned to a lot in my own work as an illustrator. I love that into play between text and image, and creating something with humor or that tells a story in a really simple way. A while ago, I took part in an Instagram challenge where you have to illustrate a letter of the alphabet each day. I've decided that I wanted to do this with GIFs. I've never made a GIF before. I ended up making the whole alphabet. I was really surprised at how manageable, yet, really how fun it was. I learned a lot about making GIFs in the process and through that learning experience then applies the GIF making principles for lots of other areas of my portfolio. That's something that I hope he will gain from doing this course. I'm going to be showing you how to achieve three different GIF effects. They are the color changing GIF, the wobble effect GIF, and the image changing GIF. You might like to choose the style that you like best or why not have a go all three. The first color changing GIF is going to cover the bulk of the food shop process. Once you've followed through that process with me for the first style, let, actually, learning the wobble effect and the image changing GIFs are going to seem fairly straightforward because you'll be really familiar with some of those processes and principles. Once you've got a high levels, we get styles, you might even decide that you'd like to mix them up. Combine a color changing GIF with an image changing GIF, for example. Really, once you've learned those processes, I think, it could be excited at how many things that you can apply this to. By the time you finish this class, you have at least one, really, fantastic GIF that you can share to your social media, your website, blog, or email signature. Most importantly, you can upload it to your class project to share with our Scotia Community. I can't wait to see the moving images that you're going to be making. Let's get started.
3. Tools and Materials: In this video, we're going to just cover the tools and materials that you're going to need to create your fabulous class project, and create your animated gifts. You don't really need a lot, but it's worth having everything ready so that you can dive straight in and follow along with me as we go through the class. So you're going to need, a printer to print out your worksheet or a piece of white paper, pencil, and ruler to create your own hand drawn template if you don't have one. You'll need a pencil, a rubber, a black pen. It's quite handy actually to have a couple of black pens, maybe one thin one and one slightly fatter one to give you different effects. A piece of tracing paper or just thin white paper. It can just be a scrap that you have lying around. You'll need a scanner or camera to import your drawings into Photoshop, and you will need Photoshop. So please go ahead and gather those materials together. In the next lesson, we're going to be sketching out your letters. We'll be looking at some reference material and sources of inspiration to help you to develop some interesting illustrations around your letter design. We're going to decide which letter you're going to animate and we're going to complete the worksheet of 10 drawings that's going to enable you to create all three gift styles. So when you're ready, join me there.
4. Sketching Your Letters: Part 1: Great, so you've got your materials together and now you're ready to start illustrating your letters. In this lesson, we're going to look at some different resources to inspire your illustrations of letters. We're going to decide which letter you're going to be illustrating and we're going to complete your worksheet of ten drawings, which are going to form the basis of your animated GIF. If you don't have a printer to print out the worksheet, just grab a piece of A4 paper and draw ten boxes on that, roughly six centimeters square. Where do I get my inspiration from? Well, there's a number of places. One of the first things I always do is I grab some of my reference books I have. This is one of my favorites. It's full of tons of different types of hand-drawn typography. Have a looking at local bookshop or library. There's probably some really fun examples in there that you could just borrow. It's really nice to be able to see a broad spectrum of how other artists approach hand lettering it, can really spark some interesting ideas. Pinterest is also one of my favorite places to research, although it's really easy to get lost, I have a Pinterest board which you're very welcome to have a look at. I've linked within the class project resources and that can be really helpful starting point. Advertising, so there's some fantastic ways of using text in advertising. Obviously there's a advertising in print form, newspapers and magazines and really great to have a look at. But one of the things that's really creative, I think in terms of using shapes and lettering in a really interesting way is those items that you see at the beginning of TV shows. These examples are from BBC two in the UK. But lots of TV stations will have similarly creative and really varied ways of communicating their visual identity like this. YouTube can be a great place to look at examples like this. Children's books and animations. These two things go hand in hand. I really love to use humor and elements of characterization in a lot of my work or things that are a little bit playful. Actually, children's books and children's animations are really fantastic source of inspiration. Which letter are you going to animate? Maybe you want to animate your initial, or maybe you want to animate someone else as initial. Maybe it's going to be a letter that has some connection for you. Maybe it's your business name, if you will, less confident withdrawing I'd really recommend choosing a letter that has straight edges. Thinking about working in capital letters, you want to choose letters like a, h, l, m, n and avoid those letters with curves like, o, p, b,d. Curves can be a lot harder to work with. It might really help you to follow along with my examples as we go through the class. I'm going to be using the letter H. If you're not really sure which letter you want to do, but you want to follow some of my examples then, why not go with H? Join me in part two of this lesson to complete your worksheet of ten drawings. I'll see you there.
5. Sketching Your Letters: Part 2: As we now begin your 10 drawings feel letters, there are two rules that you need to bear in mind to get the best results possible. Your letter drawings should have a continuous and unbroken line running all the way around the outside. This is going to make our life much easier later on in Photoshop and they should not touch the edges of the boxes on your worksheet. Drawing one is actually the template for all the other letters. I recommend that for drawing one, we actually keep that drawing very, very simple and I recommend using a sans serif font. Sans serif just means it doesn't have those fiddly, bits on the top and bottom. For example, Times New Roman is a serif font with little fiddly bits on the ends but something like Arial is a sans serif font, so it's a bit more simple. The reason for that is that if you make drawing one really complicated, it's not going to give you as much flexibility for the other drawings. In drawing one, I'm going to be doing an H. If the idea of just drawing a letter fills you with dread. In the class project resources, there is a template with some letters on it, and these are just the right size to fit into your boxes. If you would rather trace a letter than actually draw a line, you can use this. I'm just going to draw in box one, the letter H. You don't want to draw it so that it's touching the edges because that's not going to give you very much room to play with the design later. You want a little bit of space around it but you want it quite big in that box. Something around about that. Something that I'm going to do now that's going to help me with the rest of my drawings is actually trace that letter onto my thin paper or transparent paper. I'm just going to put a piece of scrap, blank paper underneath my worksheet which is going to help me to see that tracing through if I'm not using a light box. Let's start now with drawing two. We're actually going to repeat drawing two several times because drawing two is going to form both our color changing GIF, it says up here on the top of the sheet the color changing GIF and the wobble effect GIF. For the wobble effect GIF, we actually need to have the same drawing done five times. In those five boxes, two, three, four, five and six, that's all going to be the same design. I've decided for my color changing and wobble effect GIF that I would like to use the inspiration from the front cover of my hand-drawn typography book. I like this use of pencils to create the letters. Whilst we're discussing inspiration, there's another help sheet that I provided in the class project resources. Just to give you a bit of help if you're not really sure what to do with your letter in each of the 10 drawings. These are common things that I've seen done with hand lettering in lots of different ways. You could make your letter look like it's in perspective, give it a decorative border, make it look like it's made out of objects. Fill it with patterns, make it look like it's made out of a really interesting texture like bubbles or hair or jelly or characterize your letter. I'm going to just in pencil first, create my first drawing. I'm fairly happy with that. That's my first version of that drawing. I'm going to now repeat that another four times. In drawing three, four, five and six, we're going to have exactly the same sign as in drawing two. This is where your transparent paper comes in again. There we are. We've got our first five drawings in draft so we can now make our two first GIF effects, the color changing GIF and the wobble effect GIF, I'm going to use these drawings. For drawing seven, I've been thinking about doing something perhaps inspired by some children's book illustrations I've been looking at of fairly boxy shaped animals. I'm going to use my base letter template again, to do a bit of sketching. If you're going to characterize your letter, it can help to think about the legs first. In the case of an H, I'm quite lucky because there are two limb like bits touching the ground. I can use those as two legs or divide them into four to make a four legged animal while still retaining the overall shape of the letter. Some sort of funny tail. There's kind of made-up animal. It has somewhere between maybe a horse, a giraffe and a dog that you can do what you want with these drawings. That's what's so fun about using letters is that it can really push you to create something a bit unusual when you're working with this kind of a base that gives you this slightly restricted, brief in a way because you've got to think of something that fits this shape. It can push you to come up with some really creative things. For my next letter, drawing eight, I'm thinking about those items that I was looking at earlier, I quite liked how they really played with materials and texture in a lot of them in what the letter was made from. I'm going to make my H look hairy in this one. I'm going to do it really roughly, and then when I do it in pen I'll do it a little bit more carefully. For my drawing nine, I would like to do something quite pattern-based. I've seen some really nice things on Pinterest where they use patterns in letters. There are some examples of just using all over pattern on my help sheet, but I think what I'm going to do with this one is divide it into strips almost. One more drawing to go. For drawing 10, I'm going to do something very simple. I'm going to add some borders to make it a bit more interesting. I've made my letter a serif font now from a sans serif one. Then I'm going to add some borders onto it as well to make it feel a bit more fancy. I've got the basis of my different letters now. You could then revisit and think, do I want to do something a bit more to some of them? I feel, for example, like my drawing nine that's made of pattern needs something more. Maybe I'll also make it a little bit perspective. I'll just add some little lines here to make it. You can be really playful with your drawings. Add more features or combine some different letter treatments to get a set of illustrations that you feel really happy with. There we go. I've got my, my 10 drawings. I'm happy with them all. I've got enough drawings here to create all three GIF styles. What I need to do now, they're all in pencil, I need to actually work with pen on top. I've got two thicknesses of pen here, a thick Sharpie and a fine liner. I'm going to use a combination of these to give a bit of variation through my drawings so that they feel I'm a bit different. I like to make my color changing and wobble effect GIFs fairly simple. I'm using the thicker pen for those drawings, then we'll use a combination of finer a pen with a thicker pen in the image changing GIF drawings. By drawing eight, the one that I'm making look hairy, this is the one where it can be quite more challenging to try and make sure that there is a continuous line running all the way around the outside of the letter. If you want to do something where you really can't have a continuous line up around the outside of your letter, I will show you a way that you can work around that when we're in Photoshop later. But for the purposes of making my life easier, I'm going to keep adding more and more hair to the outside so it looks nice and hairy, and then when I've got enough that I think it's not going to actually be very noticeable. I'm going to run my pen in a continuous line all around the hair, so that it creates a boundary for when we're later using Photoshop. It's going to make it a bit easier just to select the inside of the letter and the outside of the letter if they're enclosed. I've now inked up my letters, I'm going to leave it for about 30 seconds and then I'm going to rub out all those pencil marks really, really carefully. Once you've done your rubbing out and got rid of your pencil marks, have another look really closely at your drawings and check for any line gaps that you might have. You can see that I've got one here. Basically, a line gap is just where your line doesn't meet the next line. There's a little gap in there and that's going to give us a little bit more work to do in Photoshop later. I'm going to close that up. Check all your other drawings to make sure that they're fully enclosed around the edges. Top tip, if you spend time now cleaning up your drawings, making your worksheet of drawings really clean and closing those line gaps, taking any pencil lines away, it's going to save you lots of time later in such shots, so it's worth just spending time on that now. Now it's over to you. It's time for you to complete your 10 drawings on your worksheet. I'm really looking forward to seeing what you're going to be illustrating. I hope you've had fun playing around with your fat and funky letters. I'm looking forward to seeing how you've made that one letter different in all your drawings. In the next class we are going to be digitizing your worksheets, grab your camera or scanner and join me in the next lesson.
6. Preparing to Animate: Fantastic. We now have our illustrations ready to take into Photoshop and animate. In this lesson, we're going to be digitizing your hand-drawn work so that we can really easily work with it in Photoshop. First, you'll need to ideally scan in your worksheet. If you don't have a scanner, you could photograph it and you want to scan in your worksheet at 300 DPI to make sure it's nice and high resolution. If you're unsure how to scan or photograph your worksheet successfully, you might like to refer to my other class, Photoshop Basics: Creating a Simple Color Separation. In a lesson titled, Digitizing Your Design I go through some best practices in how to scan or photograph your work. I've now got that selected. I'm just going to use Scan. My scan is here on my desktop and I'm just going to open it with Photoshop. I've just done that by clicking whilst holding down the Control Key. There's my worksheet. As we go through some of the elements of Photoshop, I am using a Mac, so sometimes I might refer to the Command key and the Command key's next to the Space-bar. If you're working on a PC, change the Command key to Control and those shortcuts are usually the same. We've got a nice scan of our worksheet and the first thing that we're going to do is just brighten it up a little. Going to Image, Adjustments, and Brightness and Contrast. A top tip, there's a box in this little pop-up box that says Use Legacy, and if you tick that before you change your Brightness and Contrast, it's going to give you a much better result. I'll show you the difference if you don't tick it, and we bring the brightness right up and the contrast right up, it's really going to wash out your drawing. So I'm just going to cancel that, and see what happens. When we tick the box, it says Use Legacy. It's going to give you a much better result of working with a black and white image, so it's worth ticking that box before you change anything in your brightness and contrast window. That's quite high. I'm going to take it down. I don't want to distort my image too much. Normally I find the figures about 20 for brightness and about 30 for contrast work fairly well for me in my particular scanner. It might be different for you. If you've photographed your work, you might need to play with those a little bit more. What we're aiming for is a nice white background and nice black lines on your drawings. If you're new to Photoshop, you won't necessarily be familiar with your workspace here. We have, over here on the left, these are Toolbars. So these are some of the tools that we're going to be using. We're missing, at the moment, our Layers window over on the right-hand side. If your Photoshop is opened without it like mine has, if you just go to your Window menu, just click on Layers, then your Layers window should appear. This is going to be really important throughout the class that you've always got this in your workspace. A word about Layers. Layers are a really intrinsic aspect of working in Photoshop. Working in layers is really important because anything on a different layer can be changed independently of things on other layers. That makes it really easy to change parts of an image without destroying the rest of it so that you don't have to go back and start again. That is one of the great things about Photoshop. If your drawings don't look necessarily really dark, something that you can do is duplicate your layers so that you have two layers of your worksheet. If you could just go to these little lines at the top of your Layers window and click on Duplicate Layer, it's going to make you a layer called Background copy. At the moment it won't look any different. The reason for that is that both these layers at the moment are in normal mode. This drop-down here is normal. If you imagine the normal mode as being a little bit like your worksheet is printed on a piece of white paper, and so you've got two normal mode layers there. It's like a piece of paper with your worksheet on it on top of another piece of paper with your worksheet on it. Now if we change the Layer mode of that top sheet to Multiply mode, it's actually going to create an effect more like it's printed on a sheet of glass. So the lines are there but the paper is not. If I just turn that layer off, you can see that's with just the one background layer, and that's with both layers and you can see the difference that that makes. I'm just going to zoom in so that we can have a good look at our drawings close up. I'm zooming in if you just hold down Command plus to zoom in and Command minus will zoom out. That's with my two layers together and one layer together. You can see the difference is much stronger black with the two layers. I actually want that to only be one layer, so what I want to do is actually merge my layers together. There's more than one way of doing that. If you go up to your Layer menu at the top of the screen, you can say Merge Down or you can say Merge Visible because you've only got two layers that are currently visible. Now we're going to be using Merge Down, and we're going to be using this quite a bit through the class. You can see on the right-hand side of the menu here, it's got the symbol there Command E, and that's the keyboard shortcut to merge down and it's quite handy to know some of the shortcuts that you're going to use often because it just makes everything feel a bit more natural. This time we're going to be using the menu to do it, but when we do it next time, we might use the shortcut. I'm going to press Merge down and you'll see that now our layers have Merged into one background layer. At this stage, it can be really useful to actually remove the color from our image, and you're probably thinking, but this is black and white image, which it absolutely is. But if we zoom in really close, when you start looking at the pixels, I'm just going to get my color picker here. Each time I click, it will show you what color the pixels are in this window. See there's some orange in there, some brown, some purple. It's actually quite a few colors, even though they all look like they're black. To remove the color, if you just press Command U on your keyboard, it will bring you this box up, which is a hue and saturation changing box. If you just take the saturation slider and take it all the way down to minus 100, that's going to take all the saturation out of your image. Now we just have black, white and different shades of gray in our image. We're now going to remove the white background so that your drawings are on a transparent background. This is really helpful because we don't want to be picking up any stray pixels around the edge of your drawn lines, which can make them look fuzzy, particularly when we transform them into GIFs. I'm going to show you a method that involves making a layer mask. There are loads of different methods of making your background transparent with your drawings and if you have your own preferred method, then please do go ahead and use that. I'm just going to show you this method that I think is a really good way of doing it. First we're going to select all and the easiest way of doing that is just to, on your keyboard, hit command A, and that's going to give you the marching and dotted line all around the outside. Then we're going to copy command C, and then we're going to create a new layer. If you go over to your Layers window again, similar to what we did before, instead of duplicates in the layer, we're just going to go, New Layer. Just say okay. Now we're going to actually delete our background layer. You can just highlight it and drag it into the bin, and it's gone. We're now going to fill our new layer in black. If you just go to the Edit menu, go to Fill and then from the drop down box here, make sure Black is selected and that the opacity is 100 percent and select, Okay. We're going to add a Layer Mask by just selecting this little rectangle with a circle in it at the bottom of your Layers window. Our mask has appeared here on our layer as the white box. Now, hold down the Alt key on your keyboard and click on the white rectangle, select that mask. Now we're going to paste, so on your keyboard, press command V. Now we're going to invert that. So we're going to be making the white black and the black white. So press command I. Now click on the layer, which is the black rectangle in your Layers window, and then click on the mask again. Then we're going to delete the mask just by clicking on the trash can at the bottom of your Layers window. When you do that, it's going to prompt you to ask if you want to apply the mask to the layer before removing it. So just click apply, and that's it, you've now made your background transparent. I'm just going to zoom in so we can have a closer look. I'm really pleased with that. This method of using the Layer Mask is really effective at grabbing just the drawn parts of your worksheet. Sometimes when you use one of the selection tools like the magic ones, or another method of selecting the white layer and deleting it. Sometimes you get this ghosting around your drawings where you getting a few gray and white pixels on the very edge and you don't get that with this method, which is why I really like this method. It's a few more steps than using the magic ones, but I think it's really worth it. Now through that process, you may have found that your drawings have become lighter again, it's very likely that they're looking a bit gray now. We can just repeat what we did earlier by duplicating the layer. If you go over to your Layers window again, click on those lines on the top, and then select Duplicate Layer and Okay. You don't actually need to make this one multiply mode because it's already transparent, you probably notice that as soon as the layer came up that those lines got darker. Let's just zoom in to have another look. That looks really nice and dark now. You can see the difference just with one layer. That's the effect and with the layer duplicated, it's a really, really nice dark black line. I'm really happy with that. We'll use our shortcut this time to merge those layers together. We're going to hit on our keyboard Command E. Just a tip about using Command E. Remember Command E is merge down, so this only works as you intend it to if you're on the top of the two layers that you're intending to merge. It merges from the top layer down to the layer underneath it. Our worksheet is looking really, really nice now, really strong black lines, no background. What we can do now is in your toolbar, over on the left-hand side, you could select the rubber if you need to. We can just zoom in and tidy up any little stray bits on the edges of your drawings if you have any little marks that you forgot when you were rubbing out or sometimes you can pick up little bits of fluff on your scanner glass. As you're using the rubber, top tip for you, if you want to make your rubber bigger, using the square brackets, so the right-hand square bracket will make your rubber larger, and the left-hand square bracket will make your rubber smaller. It's just to save you time instead of going up to the brush size at the top, you can just use those bracket keys. I've cleaned up my worksheet with my rubber and now I'm ready to save it. Just go to File and Save As. We're going to save actually two versions of your worksheet. First, we're going to leave the format in this drop-down as a Photoshop document, that means that it's going to retain the transparent layer. If we then save it as a JPEG, it's actually going to put that white background back in. First we're going to save it as the Photoshop document, just click Save and Okay. Then we're going to go to File and Save As. Then we are going to change the name to Worksheet just because I'm saving it on my desktop and I've already got the original scan there as a JPEG and this is going to also be a JPEG. So we need to give it a new name and Save and Okay. You see how it's just put that white background in again. You can see on my desktop I've got my scan as a PSD file that's got the ninth transparent background, that's what we're going to be using. I've also got the original scan. That would look like however it came into your scanner or camera and then you can see as a comparison, what we've just done to prepare it to be animated. You can see the difference there in how the white is and how the black is, we've got a much stronger contrast. Also, the other reason that I wanted you to save it as a JPEG file is so that now is the time that you can start your class project. Please go ahead and start your class project. I'd love to see your original drawings, it's always really fun to see the process as you go through. Once you're happy that your worksheet has been really nice and cleaned up and you've got really strong black lines, you're ready to make your first GIF. But first, we're just going talk about color palettes because the colors that you choose to create with your GIF have a really big impact on the mood and tone and style of it. In the next lesson, we're going to be looking at color palettes and had how to pick some successful colors to use in your GIF designs. So I'll see you there.
7. Choosing a Color Palette: It's really important that we think carefully about what colors we choose for your GIF, what they say about you, and how to choose them. First, a bit of technical information about GIFts and how it affects color. Technically, you can create your GIFs with up to 256 colors. Now this sounds like a lot, but actually it isn't. How many colors do you imagine there are in just one of our black and white line drawings after it has been desaturated and cleaned up? There are more than 256. Once you begin adding more colors, the number increases. GIF files are designed to be lightweight animations with a low file size, which is why they work so flawlessly. But this means that they're highly compressed. As you add more colors, you may begin to get a little bit of distortion in your final GIF. This is particularly noticeable if you were to use photographs or scan textures in your GIFs because they contain so many different colors. We're working with flat Photoshop colors for your class project, which is going to prevent any distortion in our finished GIFs. But this is something just to bear in mind if you start to make GIFs in other areas of your work. In our color changing GIF, the color changing is what sets it apart. This is the GIF with the most different colors in it. I recommend each frame having just three colors, one for the background, one for the letter, and one for the line work. Anymore than three colors per image, can be a little bit overwhelming once the colors then change in each of your frames. Technically for this GIF, you could have three colors per frame and five frames, which allows you to have up to 15 colors in this palette. 15 colors is a lot, and if they're all different, it's going to give you a pretty crazy effect. Once it's animated, you may really love that if it suits your style, but I recommend using a five color palette for this GIF. Five colors in this color palette will mean that you will use the same color three times over the animation. In one frame for the background, one for the line drawing, and one for the latter base. It also means that any two frames next to each other will share at least one color in common, which can give a really nice continuity. In our warbling GIF, simplicity of color palette is key because the movement of the image is so subtle it's just gently wobbling. The colors for the line work background and letter base, should be the same in all five of your frames. Whites can also work really well in this GIF, either in the background or in the letter as can leaving the background transparent. It can also be surprisingly impactful, left as a monochromatic color palette. For this GIF, I recommend between one and five colors. These could be colors that you've already selected from your first color palette or it might be a new mix if you're going to be making more than one of the GIF styles. For the final image changing GIF, as there's so much changing visually, I recommend more limited color palette of one to four colors. Drastically changing colors and drastically changing images can just be a bit much. Where do we find inspiration for successful color pallets? You may already have a color palette if you have a website logo or any branding. You might have an existing piece of work where you really love the colors that you've used. It can be really fun to revisit a color palette that you've already got. Do you have a favorite color? Think about how you've decorated your home or workspace and have a look in your wardrobe to see what colors appear a lot, you might be surprised. You could create a whole palette from this one color. A good way of doing this is to find that color in Photoshop, then press command U that's going to give you a box that comes up where you can change the hue, saturation and lightness. Changing all three can be a bit too much variation but if you just keep saturation and lightness the same, just change the hue. You'll get a spectrum of colors which share a similar tonal value as your first color. This is a technique I use a lot in my own illustration work. I'll find a piece of paper that I like the texture and color of, scan it in and then I use Photoshop to change the hue while keeping this saturation and lightness the same. This gives me a fantastic color palette that can be very varied. Yet all those colors seem to go really well together. Extracting color pallets from photographs is a really popular way of making color palettes. There are so many colors present in a photograph, and you can generally tell that if you like, the overall feel of a photograph, you'll probably like the color palette that comes from it. You might have a favorite photo of your own or you could find something online. Pinterest again, is always a really fantastic place to look for inspiration. It doesn't necessarily have to be a photograph it could be an illustration, for example, just use the color picker tool, find a color that you like, and then you can just put some spots using the paintbrush on the edge of your photograph. Now you've got a color palette, there are tons of color palette generating websites, apps, and bits of software that you can use to generate color palettes for you. For example, Adobe color is a great resource to create your color palettes on. I also love [inaudible] , but you might have preferred site or app that you like to use. Even Google searching color palettes is going to give you some results that you might like. What do these color palettes communicate? It's likely that you'll be naturally drawn to color pallets which suit your personality, your work, and your brand if you have one. But just have a think about whether the color palettes that you've chosen sits well with this. For example, muted colors in a harmonious palette convey a more mature, sophisticated atmosphere. Whereas a vibrant palette of contrast in colors will communicate a more young and funky look. Having some digital snapshot of your color palettes is going to be really helpful for us in Photoshop. It's going to save a lot of guesswork when you're choosing the colors. If you're on a Mac, take a screenshot using the buttons command shift and fall on your keyboards or if you're working from something that's a real object, you could take a photograph of it or you can print screen on a PC. We can then open up that photograph or screenshot in photoshop when we're making your GIF and use the color information directly from it. Now it's over to you it's time to find your color palettes. To recap, you can use a minimum of one up to a maximum of 15 colors in your color changing GIF. But I recommend using actually no more than five colors in any one GIF. Take photographs or screenshots of your color palette so that you've got them digitally and we can open up in photoshop as we're creating our GIFs. I hope this lesson has helped you come up with a color palette that you feel really excited about. You can't wait to get into making those GIFs. Now that we have your color palette and we have your drawings all ready to animate, we can get straight into making your first GIF. Let's go.
8. Color Changing GIF: Part 1: In this lesson I'm going to walk you through how to make a fabulous color changing GIF. We have our nice cleaned up work to open in Photoshop and we're ready to start making our color changing GIF. I've got a screenshot saved on my desktop that's got my color palette on it for this particular GIF, so we're ready to go. On your worksheet you've got the same design drawn out five times. There might be one that you like more than the others even though they're the same. Choose which one you're going to be using for your color changing GIF. We're only going to be using one design in this one because it's not going to be moving. From your toolbar to select the rectangular marquee tool and I'm going to use drawing six. I'm going to just hold down the Shift key while scrolling a box over my drawing. I'm being careful to keep my selection to inside the box on my worksheet because I don't want to copy that line on the worksheet as well. You can use the arrow keys just to nudge the position of your selection just to get it in the right place. Then we're going to copy, Command C. We're now going to make a new file. So go to "File" and "New." You can make your Canvas size whatever you choose. The processes that we're going to use are going to be the same regardless of the size but it's worth noting at this point, if you're intending to share your GIF on Instagram, there's an optimum size for Instagram of 1080 by 1080 pixels, and there's a recommended minimum of 720 by 720. I'm going to make this 1080 by 1080, and then click "Create." I'm now going to paste in my drawing with Command V. From your toolbar, just make sure you're on the move tool and you can move your drawing around into the position that you like on your Canvas. If it's helpful you can drag some guides by clicking and dragging on the ruler into your Canvas. This can be quite helpful especially if you've got a symmetrical letter like an H. It can be quite helpful if you're trying to find the center of it. If you're unhappy with the size of your letter on the background, you can also make that bigger by on your keyboard just hitting Command T, which is transform, and just drag the sides of the box out and that's going to just increase or decrease the size of your drawing. When you're in transform, you can also rotate if you go near the corners. You can get your letter into a position where you are really happy with it. Once you're happy with the size and position of your letter, just hit "Enter." I'm going to open up my color palette as well which is on my desktop. I'm going to go to "File" and "Open." I got the screenshots here of a color palette. That's opened up in a separate tab. As you can see we've got the tabs at the top here, the screenshot. There's my new document I've just made and that's the original scan. On the move tool if you just click on "New color palette" and drag it into the tab that says untitle your new document and then drag it back onto the Canvas and then drop it by letting go of your mouse, there's our color palette is very, very large, so it's covered everything up. I'm going to zoom out really far and on my keyboard press Command T, which is transform. That means you can just make the thing on that layer bigger or smaller. I only need it to be small to go lose colors visible. When you're happy with the size, just press "Enter", and then we'll zoom in again. If you have a look at our Layers window, we've currently got three layers. There's a blank white background layer. There's our letter drawing in the middle, and we've got our color palette. Our color palette, we're going to keep turning on and off and eventually we're going to delete it.That layer is going to end up being deleted. For the time being we are also going to delete the background layer so that we're just left with our drawing. I want to now change the color of my line work. We're going to use the color overlay down at the bottom of your layers window. If you just go to "Color overlay", you can see it's already changed color and that's not actually a color that's in my color palette though. I'm just going to click on the "Color", and then hover over my color palette. I'm going to turn it orange and "Okay", and "Okay" again. I've got my, the orange version. Now I'm going to repeat this layer another four times so that I can make all the different versions of it in the different colors in my color palette. Lets go to duplicate layer as we did before when we were preparing to animate. As we go through, I'm going to keep using these eye symbols on the left-hand side. This just turns your layers on and off. Its quite useful because we're going to be ending up with lots of very similar layers. Sometimes it's useful to be able to just have a look at whichever one you're working on. Again, color overlay at the bottom, and this time I'm going to go for the pale yellow color and click "Okay." Then I'm going to repeat this process three more times for the other colors. You can see I've now got five layers with my drawing on. I'm in my layers window. I'm just going to go through and turn them off in turn so that we can see that we've got one of each color from our color palettes. Let's turn the color palette back on again. We've done our line layer already for each of our frames. Now we're going to do the backgrounds. We're going to make a new layer, so new layer. We remember this shortcuts as well. Command, Shift and N makes a new layer because we're going to be making lots of new layers through the different GIF making processes. This is a shortcut we might want to remember. In this particular layer I'm going to do the background. If we do Command A and that selects all and then we can go to "Edit", "Fill", "Select color." Then we can use the color picker tool again, going back to the orange. Don't worry about that. What's happened you see is our layer order, the orange layer is on top of all our drawings so you can't see through it. Everything is in normal mode. It's acting like an opaque orange piece of paper. I'm just going to drag it down to the bottom of the layer order. We're going to make another new layer. I'm going to turn the orange one off just because it's a bit confusing with the color palette. Then we're going to go "Edit", "Fill", "Color", "Second color.". There we go. We're going to keep repeating this again exactly as we did for the line drawings until we've got all five colors as just a solid background layer. You can now see in our layers window we've got our color palette still at the top, which we can be turning on and off and then we've got our five different colors of line drawings and then we have our five different colors of background. We're now going to create the color that is the inside of the line drawing. To do that, we're going to go onto our layer 1, which is going to turn the other layers off so it's not confusing. We just want our color palette in layer 1. From the toolbar just select your magic wands and we're going to select somewhere in the background. It doesn't matter where as long as it's in a blank space. I can see there's a problem. See what is selected is going outside of the color palette as well as it's picking up the color palette and the reason for that is up here in my toolbar menus appear, it's sample all layers is ticked. Although I've selected layer 1 is actually picking up any of the visible layers. I'm going to de-select with Command D. Now that's unticked I will try it again. You can see it's ignoring the color palette now, which is what I want. What I've actually selected is outside of the letter but I won't select it is inside the letter. I'm going to go to the select menu and select inverse and you can see that selection changed from being outside the letter that included the bounding box to inside the letter. Now I'm just going to zoom in a little bit more so we've really super close. Now, as I was mentioning about magic wand earlier and the reason why it isn't as ideal as a layer mask when we're using it for removing background. As you can see the edge here is a little bit fuzzy and that's just the nature of Photoshop. We're using very small images that are just small drawings so you can see some of the pixels there it's got a little fuzzy edge. What we don't want to happen is for there to be a ghosting effect, when we fill the color in here we don't want to see any of those pixels spilling out around the edge of our line work. What we're going to do is actually shrink our selection a little bit so that it's completely covered by a thick line drawings. If you go to the select menu and then go to "Modify" and you can go to "Contract", there's also the option to expand. These are really useful for all things. You might want to come back to this tool. We are going to contract our selection and we'll just try to pixels to begin with and see how that looks. You can see the line jumped back there and that should give us a nice buffer so that we're not picking up any of our different color pixels outside our orange line. We need to make a new layer now. I'm going to use the shortcut this time, so Command, Shift and N and then Okay, I can just press Enter. I've got a new layer and I'm going to zoom out so I can see my color palette and "Edit", "Fill", "Color " I'm not going to start with orange this time because I've got orange line work so I'm going to start with the second color. There we go. You can see what's happened. Why it looks the way it does is because of the layers that's visible, the inside color of the letter is actually on top of the line work. We can easily switch those around and that's how it will look. I've now got to do exactly the same thing as I did with the line work and with the background colors in that I need to make this exact shape again four more times in the different colors of the color palette so that I have one in each color. I'm going to keep making new layers each time, which is Command, Shift and N. I've already got the shapes selected so I don't need to do that again as long as I'm on the new layer. Then I just need to go to "Edit", "Fill", "Color" and keep selecting each of the colors and I'm just going to repeat this each time. I've now done that. I've got five versions of that layer in the different colors from my color palette. I'm just going to stretch this out so we can see, well done. You've now done the bulk of the work for your color changing GIF, you're nearly there. Join me in Part 2 of this lesson to complete your GIF. I'll see you then.
9. Color Changing GIF: Part 2: I'm just going to stretch this out so we can see all our layers. Now what we need to do is we're basically going to be matching them up, and making five little sandwiches. Buy a sandwich. I'll show you what I mean. Imagine that the background is like a slice of bread, so this orange one, for example. Then we've got our pale yellow. I'm going to just drag this layer down. Then we can put one of our colored lines on top. We're not going to choose the orange because it's not going to show up with the orange background. That's the yellow, that one is a bit to pale I think. That dark green is nice, so we'll use that one. I'm just going to get rid of my selections. We don't need that any longer, so just do Command D. Then I'm going to grab this green line layer all the way down to the bottom and say, we've got our sandwich. This is like the top layer of bread, and the inside of the latter is like the sandwich filling. Then the orange layer is like the bottom layer of bread. We're going to repeat this four more times so that it's going to give us five different colored versions of our same design. You can just play around until you've got five images that actually look really good. I think I've now got my layers into a place where it's making me five really nice versions of that design, and it is quite useful at this stage just to put each of your layer sandwiches into a folder too so that you can double-check them before we actually merge the layers together. If you just highlight by holding down the Shift key, the top three layers, ignore your color palette, remember, and then go to the bottom of your Layers window and click on the folder. Then it's just grouped them together. If you click on the array, you can still see them again. See how they're indented slightly from the rest. But it just means you can turn the whole group on and off. I'm not going to do that for my other four images and make four groups for them. I've now got my groups. You can see that they're currently all switched on. If I just gradually switch them off using that visibility symbol, at this stage, we're now going to delete the layer that has our color palette on it. You just drag it into the bin. Now we're going to flatten each of our groups into just one layer so we can use the shortcut merged down that we used before when we were just merging one layer in to the other. You can just on your keyboard use Command E, and it will just turn that whole group of three layers into one layer. I'm now going to do that on the other groups. I've now got my five different colored layers. We're ready to transform it now into a GIF. Just go to your Window menu at the top, and go to Timeline, and it's going to give you this little extra bit at the bottom, just click on the button here that says Create Frame Animation, and then over here on the very right hand side, you can just see there we've got some of those little lines like we've got on our Layers window. If you just click there, and then go to Make Frames from Layers. What you can see over here on the left-hand side is we've now got our five images on our timeline. At the moment they say zero seconds underneath. If I play our GIF, you can see it's pretty much strobing. It's a little bit intense because it's much too fast. If you just click on the first image, hold down the Shift key, and then click on the Last Image, and then you just click on the time. I'm just going to try first 0.2 seconds, and it's down changed all of them to 0.2. You can have a play around to see what timing you think works really well for your particular design and your particular color palette. Then let's have a preview of that. Okay, so there we are, our very first GIF. Now we just need to export it. Just to note, our GIF is currently permanently looping, so just go on forever and ever. That is because we have this drop down here, which usually it's set as default to forever. But you can't tell it you want it to loop once or three times. But for GIFs you normally will want it to loop forever. We feel GIF is not looping forever, It may be that you need to change that drop down. We're now ready to save our GIF. So just go to File, Export and Save for Web. You've got two windows here. On the left-hand side, it's showing you what the original looks like on your screen. On the right-hand side it's showing you what that particular version will look like when it is exported. Then you can preview it over here by pressing play. It's just said you can see if you're going to get any distortion happening in your image. If there's a lot of compression, you can fix it at this stage by choosing a different file type, file size. You can see if you click on the Presets drop down, we've got lots of different types of GIF here. As long as it's not going to make a huge file size, I normally save my GIF as a 128. You can see the file size down here. It's only going to be 153 kilobytes, so it's not too big, but do you note that I tend to not really worry about it too much. It just really is about how Photoshop fills in the details. It doesn't really make very much difference for these type of GIFs. But if you are going to be working with photographs, you might want to experiment with that because sometimes that can make a bit of a difference to the quality of your GIF overall. Then click Save, I'm going to save it on my Desktop. I'll just call it Color Changing. File type is still GIF it already knows that, and save. Now you have your first GIF. Yeah, hey, I can't wait to see what you've made, so please upload it in your class project. I hope you've loved creating your first GIF as much as I know, I'm going to love seeing them. I'm really excited to see your projects. Now that all the ground work's been done, creating your next GIF is going to be a piece of cake. So join me in the next lesson and I'll be walking you through how to create the wobble effect GIF.
10. Wobble Effect GIF: In this lesson, we're going to be creating a fabulous wobble effect GIF. We're now going to make our wobble effect GIF. It's fairly straightforward. It's going to be using the same principles as we've just used. I've still got open the same files that we were using for our color changing GIF. I've got my color changing GIF open in front of me now and it's got all five of those different colored frames. I still got the same color palette open and my original worksheet there with a transparent background. At this point you could be using a new color palette if you want to. Something that I'm going to do instead is actually looking at each of my five frames and pick the favorite of my colored it frames from there. I really liked this orange background with the green line drawing. I'm actually going to delete the rest of my layers. I'm just going to highlight them and drag them into the bin, so I'm just left now with my one layer. Don't worry at the moment about what's happening on the timeline. Things will look a bit strange down on the timeline, but we're going to sort that out at the end. If you want to a new color palette at this stage, it's quite straightforward, you can just bring in a new color pallet onto your canvas here and then I would just use the magic wand to select each of your different colored areas and go to edit so to color it in. If you've got something like this yellow area that separated by lots of drawn lines, rather than having to select each one individually, you can go up to the select menu and select similar and it's going to find all that pale yellow for you so that you can just really easily go to edit fill and make it a new color. But I'm just going to keep my color scheme as it is now. We then going to go back to your worksheet in our wobbling GIF because it's gently moving, we're going to be needing slightly different drawings for each of our frames. This is where our other drawings come in. We've obviously already used drawing six, so we're now going to be using drawings 2, 3, 4 and 5. Again, I'm going to take my rectangular marquee tool, hold down the Shift key to make it square selection and then copy command C, go in to my file and then paste Command V and you can see the drawing appear on top as a layer. I'm just going to use the Move tool and just align it as closely as I can with one underneath. It's not going to be perfect and that is entirely the point, so don't worry too much if it looks a bit different. If you need to rotate it, if it's not straight, you can just do Command T, as we did before with your color palette to make it larger and smaller and that will rotate your drawings so you can use that as well. We've now got our second layer. I'm going to now go in and grab the next one. I'm Just going to deselect and then draw a box over my next drawing, copy and paste. I'm going to just turn off the drawing I've just brought in so that I'm always lining it up with my colored one each time. I'm just going to repeat this for the other drawings. Now if you look over in my lays window, you can see that I've got now the other four drawings. They are just black and white still on top of my colored frame, so I've got all of the five frames in there now. What I need to do now is make the new frames the same color scheme as that frame that was there originally. It's going to have an orange background, it's going to be yellow in the center and it's going to have green line work. I'll start with layer four and just do my color overlay, choose my green and you can just go through one at a time and do the same thing to each one. I think it's actually quicker to do it that way. Now all my line layers are green, I'm now going to make four more orange background layers. I'm just going to go to Command Shift and N for New Layer, Command A to select all and then edit, fill, color and I'll just sample my orange. We've now got our plane orange background layer. Now I've got one of those, I can just duplicate that up here. I'm just going to start spreading my orange layers out so that there's one underneath each line drawing. Then we're going to be making now the color layer in the middle. I'm going to start from the bottom up so that I can just sample that color. I'm going to double click in my foreground color, just click on that pale yellow. Now I'm going to put my background in with my very bottom line drawing. I'm going to take my magic wand. Make sure you are on your line layer, with a magic wand, just click in the background exactly the same as we did before. Hopefully this all feels quite familiar. Go to select inverse, so that we're now selecting the inside of the latter rather than the background. Remember, we're going to shrink our selection as well. Go to select, modify and contract just so that we didn't get those feathery edges. Now we need a new layer between our background and our line layer. Remember, is like a layer sandwich. We go Command Shift N for new layer and then edit, fill and the foreground color is the yellow that we selected suggest now, so we can go okay and then we've got number 2. I can merge these layers straight away because I know that I've got that correct. There's nothing that I need to check because I've already checked the realignment. I know that I'm making the colors from the base layer color, so I'm just going to highlight those three and do Command E to flatten. I've got two of my five frames. I'm going to repeat that exact process for the other three frames now. I've just made a mistake there, but I thought I'd just point out. If you accidentally fill on your line layer, that's got the color overlay on it. It's going to go the same color as your line work, might be a bit of a surprise. You can just do Command Z if you do anything like that and it'll just take you back, it's because I've forgotten to make my new layer with Command Shift and N, K and then edit and fill. Fantastic. I've got my layers. I'm just going to use the eyes to just have a little look at them. You can see how it's going to work with that sort of gently warbling effect once it's animated. If you have a look at out timeline down here, it will look like it's actually got the animation on there. But if you've got your timeline open when you're editing, it tends to just copy the first frame. The easiest thing I think is just if you come over to your lines over here again and just say delete animation and then click again and say make frames from layers and now it's showing the different layers. It's a bit strange because it's got zero seconds or 0.2 on the first frame. I'm just going to highlight them all as we did before, let's try not 0.2. I feel that's a bit slow for this GIF, so I'm going to just try. Let's just highlight them all again, let's trying not 0.1 and I think that is much better. It seems to suit this particular GIF and this color palette much, much better. There we are. That's how you make a wobble effect GIF. It's fairly straightforward once you know those processes from the color changing GIF. Now we're just going to save it in exactly the same way as we did before. So file, export, Save for web, GIF 128 did it again, just have a little preview just to see that it's going to look okay. Happy with that, save. I'm going to save it on my desktop as wobble effect. I hope you've loved creating the wobble affects GIF, I'm really looking forward to seeing them. If you've created one, please upload it into class projects so that I can see and give you feedback. In the next lesson, I'm going to take you through the final GIF effect we're going to look at, which is the image changing GIF and that's going to use the rest of the drawings that you created on your worksheet to create a really fun and funky GIF. I'll see you there.
11. Image Changing GIF: Part 1: [MUSIC] In this video, we're going to be creating your image changing GIF. Some of the principles we've already covered in the color changing GIF and the wobble effect GIF. This is a really great chance to embed what we've learned and create something really fun in the process. I've decided in this GIF, I'm going to use a new color palette. I have open here, I've used an app to generate a color palette from a photograph with my pencil case. I'm just going to crop this, because I don't need as many colors as it's given me. I'm going to wanted to be using four colors as a maximum in this GIF and these are the four that I'd like to use. I'm just going to crop and leave it at that and because I'm using a new color palette, I'm just going to start a completely new file for this one I've decided, rather than trying to work from one of the frames in the last GIF. I'm just going to go to File and New and create a new document. I'm just going to make it that size that was optimal for Instagram, so 1080 by 1080 pixels and create. I'm on my rectangular marquee tool again, and I'm going to start with this funny little animal that I've drawn here, holding down the Shift key, drawing a box over. Just missed a bit there, and copy into my new document and paste Command V. I'm going to make him a bit data so that my latter is filling more of the space. I'll just press Command T on my keyboard, just going to track those corners out. I think that's about the size that I'd like to use, so Enter. I'm going to go back into my worksheet and I am going to do exactly the same thing with line drawings for drawings eight, nine, 10 and then I'm going to take drawing two as well so we've got five drawing frames. [MUSIC] You can see that I've got my five frames in here, my five different line drawings and let's just have a look at them. There's one, two, three, four, and five. Good to delete the background layer, so I'll do that now. There we go, so I'm just going to have a look at our color palette now, to think about what colors I'm going to use for the different parts of my GIF. You can see in this palette, I've got one very dark color. Then this pink and purple are fairly close together in a way. You want to think about creating the most contrast really between your line work and the solid part of the latter and the background. I really want this dark color to be involved there. I think it's probably going to work best if I use this really dark color for the line work. I'm just going to go on the Move tool and just bring this color palette into my document. Here it goes quite small, but it doesn't need to be any bigger than that and there we go. I've decided the line work is going to be this really dark color. First step we can just change all our line drawings and with our color overlay method to this color here. I'm just going to change the layer order because I prefer my color palette be at the top. I'm going to start from the bottom up so I'm on my animal. Go to Color Overlay, click on the color, and then click on the color on my palate. I'm going to repeat that for my other line drawings. [MUSIC] Now, all my line drawings of this dark navy color, we can do exactly what we did in the wobble effect GIF now and we can create our background color and that's going to be this turquoise. I'm going to go down to the button, make a new layer Command Shift and N. I'm going to drag it to the very button, select all Command A, and then go to Edit, Fill, Color, and then I select my turquoise. Then remember you can just duplicate this layer another four times, to give you one of those background colors for each of your frames. Great, so we now have our five background layers. I'm going to spread them out as we did before. Remember with thinking about these as sandwiches, so I've got the top and bottom layers of bread as we call them and then I'm going to be doing those middle layers next. We've always completed your image changing GIF. In part 2 of this lesson, I'll show you how to complete it, as well as show you a couple of ways to work around problems you might encounter in your gift making process. See you in part 2. [MUSIC]
12. Image Changing GIF: Part 2: So, I quite like to start, at the bottom and work my way up. Okay. So, we're going to start with the animal first. So, you go on your line layer, remember, we're going to go to the magic ones. We are going to select outside of your animal, and then remember we're going to go to select inverse. This one has got a finer line on it. I'm just going to zoom in because we are going to still use the contractor selection option. We need to just keep an eye on that to make sure that it's not going too small. So, go to select, modify, and contract. Let's try two pixels. That seemed absolutely fine It's not going to be too much because, so I can see my color palette. So, I need to make a new layer for my sandwich filling, Command Shift and N for a new layer. Then edit, Fill Color. I was going to use this pink for the inside. There we go. So, that's first frame done. I'm going to repeat this to my other frames. Now, next, we are going to look at this hairy letter. It's going to turn off my animals. Now if you remember when we were drawing this one, this is the one where I said it could be a bit of a challenge using the magic wand to be selecting outside the letter. I'm filling on the inside. I have made a line around the outside, so as you can see, that will work for us. But I did mention the fact that I will show you another way around if there's no way that you can possibly create a line all the way around the outside. So, we'll make our new layer Command Shift and new. Okay, so, there's a couple of ways that you can go about this and you can use the selection tool or you could use a paintbrush. So, I'll show you an example of the selection tool. We've got a polygon [inaudible] two here above the magic one. If you basically just treated a bit like a dot to dot. So, you're creating a magic wand path. You can do this as well if you find that one of your selections, if you got a blind gap somewhere and say the magic wand is not working for you. It's actually not slept in the inside and outside of the letter. So, you're just clicking once a time. Don't double-click until you finish your selection because it will make your selection disappear like this. Then we can go to Edit, Fill Color, and we've got the pink already, okay, I'll just deselect. Actually because it's covered in the drawing around the outside, it does look absolutely fine. Another way that you can do this is to use the paintbrush. Double-click on your foreground color here, select your pink and then you can just basically paint in the areas on that layer that you want to be that color. I'm just going to undo that commands it. So, I'm happy with my H now. I'm just going to go up, the other ones are fairly straightforward to be filling in pink. So, I'm just going to quickly do that. Okay, so I've got my H laid down now as a three color image. I'm going to create my folders again, like we did in the color changing gift, because I am going to be introducing sometimes another color. So, I'm just going to go through highlight each set of three, and just put it into a folder, okay. So, I've made my groups. So you can see now the general effect, it's a bit like the wand effect gimp and I'm just going to bring my color palette back. So, I've got this dark purple that I haven't yet used. I'm just going to use this in not very many areas, just a few very small areas. Because I think it can be quite nice just to add a little extra. Always like just a little detail in some of my illustration. So, in this one, for example, I am going to just color in the rappers. So, I'm on my line layer. I'm going to select here and hold down the Shift key, so I can select two at the same time and now in this case, because I'm inside the line work, I'm just going to make that selection tiny bit larger so that I don't get the wrong kind of pixels. Actually, before I do that, I might also create this middle section in this darker purple. So, I'm going to pick that up as well. Go to select, modify, and expand the selection. Let's try two pixels. There we are. So, I'm going to go and create a new layer and then go to Edit, Fill Color, dark purple. Maybe go, just gives it something a bit different I think. So, very happy with that one. So, this one here, I think can definitely add some dark purple on the inside of my letters. So, I'm on my line layer, is going to click inside with my magic wand, going to create a new layer underneath Command Shift and new okay, going to expand that selection to make it a bit bigger. So, select, modify, expand, okay, and then edit, fill color, purple. So, you can see my magic wand hasn't been fantastic in some areas, because this is very small, I can just use the paintbrush to touch those bits up. So I'll just select my purple color and just color those bits in. Okay, so I've used my paintbrush there and I'm fairly happy with that one now. So, we're going to move on to the next one and this one I think is impossible to have another color on it, so, I'm going to leave that one as it is and this one is while I'm going to leave that one as it is. So, because, this little animal and the hairy one, are the only frames in my gift, the three colors, whereas the others have got the purple in as well. I'm just going to actually spread them out. So, I'm just going to put this hairy H just between groups one and two up here just say it gives us that kind of variety. This point, I'm going to delete my color palette. Let's just double-check that our illustrations look okay. So, we can now flatten them. So, each one, if you just do Command E, stand I, on highlight and go Command E, just flux them into one layer exactly as we've done before. Now, we have our frames, now we can create our animations. So, it's all, exactly as we've already done. Go to Window and timeline, create frame animation. Over here. Make frames from layers. You can see it's gone to 0 seconds already. I know I'm not going to want it like that, so let's try and not point one, see how that looks. Click play. It's really fast, but I think it works really fast. I'll try at 0.2 and just see what the difference is. I actually think I like this one very fast. Sometimes I like the image changing gift to be 0.1 sometimes I like it 0.2, I think when it's really fast, it's easier to see the letter because there's less time for you to take in each image. So, the letter becomes more prominent. So, I'm happy with this. I'm going to export it in exactly the same way as I've done before. So, let's go to File, Export, Safer Web. We've got gift 1, 2, 8. Just have a little preview. Looks perfect to me. Then we will click save. Congratulations on making your gifts. Wow, I can't wait to see what you've made, whether you created one of the gifts styles or all three, please upload whatever you've made to your class projects. I'm so looking forward to seeing what you've done.
13. Bonus: Exporting as .MP4: So now you've got one or more fantastic GIFs to show for your class project. I'm sure you absolutely dying to be sharing them with the world. In this lesson, I'm just going to show you how to export those GIFs as MP4 files. The reason why this is really useful is because currently Instagram does not support GIFs. So if you want to upload a file to Instagram, is it a moving image, it has to be an MP4 file, which is a video file. It's really easy to do this, but I'm just going to walk you through the process so that you can share your fantastic GIFs on that platform. So there are some apps available that will enable you to convert your GIF into what's required for Instagram, which it's a video file. It needs to be an MP4 file. Apps, for example, include GIF flap, GIPHY, GIF Maker for Instagram. They'll probably be all new ones coming out all the time. Just have a look in your app store and it is possible to find apps that would do that job for you. I'm just going to show you how to do it manually because it's not very difficult. It's just a few steps and a different way of exporting your GIF. So just check first of all, your image size and in your and GIF up here, image size. So we created this GIF, 1080 by 1080 pixels. Now, if you remember that's the optimum size for Instagram, but it really does prefer something above 720 pixels. So if you've created your GIF lower than that, you can force it up here and make it 720 by 720. It's not really the ideal way to do it, but you can do little cheats method like that. Then we can say, " Okay, that's all fine." So the thing with Instagram is it needs to create a video file rather than a GIF. So that means that it can't loop automatically. So we've already got our frames down here on the timeline. So all you need to do is highlight your frames here and then there's a little plus sign here if you just click that, it's going to duplicate all our frames again. So that's going to give us two loops with our animation. You can now highlight all 10 of our frames and duplicate them again, which is going give us 20 frames and so on. You can do this again and again and until we've got lots and lots of frames. So something to bear in mind is, well, how long is this animation going to be? For Instagram it needs to be at least three seconds and I would suggest you want it to be more than three seconds because that's quite sure for somebody to notice on Instagram. It can't be any longer than 60 seconds. I'm just going to keep adding a few more frames. You can't scroll along the timeline. See, we've now got this bar along the bottom. So I'm just going to duplicate all once more and I'm pretty sure that's going to give us enough. So we can preview in the same way by pressing the play button. You notice it was a bit slow to get started there. That's just buffering, but once it's exported, it will play a bit more seamlessly. So that's definitely longer than three seconds and it's not as long as 60 seconds. So I'm fairly happy with that. I would suggest that you probably want at least five seconds, otherwise, it's going to seem quite abrupt and now, we can export it as a video file. So to do that, let's go to file and export. So we have been clicking save for web, but this time we are going to say render the video. So it's called untitled one, we can give it a new name, call it image changing.mp4 is the right file type. You don't need to change any of this, it's already in the right settings and then you can say render. So that might take a few seconds to do that. So you can see on my desktop here image changing.mp4. If you double-click it, it's going to show you that as a preview. So it's become 16 seconds long and that's fine. You can see it's nice and fast now that is rendered and it's getting super quick. So that's going to be a file that's suitable for Instagram so you can email it to yourself or get it onto your phone some other way into your videos folder and then you can upload it from there straight into Instagram. If you do share any GIFs on Instagram that you've created as a result of this class, please remember to tag me. I'd love to see your GIFs. So just use #melryesskillshares, so I can see what you've posted.
14. Final Thoughts: Congratulations on completing the class, learning some new skills, and making an amazing class project. If you get stuck or have questions, please post them in the discussion board, I do check there regularly and I'll do my very best to help you if I can. Please post your GIFs anywhere you can. Of course, I'd love to see them in the class project gallery, but maybe you want to upload them to social media, put them on your website, your blog, in your emails, anywhere you'd like to share away. I hope you've really enjoyed learning these three different approaches to making quite different GIF effects, and that now you've got all sorts of ideas facing away from what you might animate next. If there's one thing that you take away from this class, I hope it's the joy of seeing your illustrations come to life through being animated. I have loads of more Skillshare classes in the planning, so if you have any requests or suggestions for new class topics, please let me know, I'd always love to hear if there's anything in particular that you'd like to see. I really hope you've enjoyed the class. If you have, I'd be so grateful if you'd leave a review, it really means a lot to hear your feedback. Don't forget to follow me so that you'll be notified when I release new classes and I hope to see you in another one of my classes really soon. Bye for now.
