Animate Illustrated Text Stickers using Procreate and Adobe After Effects

1. Introduction: Would you like to know how to animate your text illustrations? Create some funky stickers to use on your stories? What would you say to learning three easy techniques to do so? Hi, my name is Kay Leathers, and I'm a designer and illustrator from London, England. I've been working over six years now as a designer, working on everything from children's books to videos to animated GIFs Most recently, I've been working a lot on social media marketing with a few brands. And these stickers are an absolute must if you want to engage people with your brand, especially when sharing user-generated content. Learning these simple animation techniques has been super helpful for me. Not only to add another string to my illustration bow, but it's given me extra pull when applying for illustration projects. Lots of clients want animation experience now. And these are particularly useful for social media marketing. If it's not for other clients. It's also a super cute way of advertising your own brand. I'm always happy to share these skills. As I know, it's not easy stepping into the world of animation. And I love to share my knowledge so you can have an easy ride rather than the roller coaster of frustrations I had. I recommend this course to anyone who wants some simple tips on how to animate your illustrations. I'll show you three awesome and easy ways to animate your text in a matter of minutes. I'll also be going step by step. So whether you're a seasoned pro or just a beginner, all are welcome in this class, I'll be using procreate to design my text. But you can use Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator or just simply pen and paper. Secondly, you'll need Adobe After Effects to animate your text. In this class, I'm going to show you how I decide on a design, Share a few tricks I used to illustrate a text, take this into After effects, where I'll use three different techniques to animate three different text stickers If you want, You can design just one on which you can experiment to find your favorite way to animate. My files are also in the resources if you need them. At the end of the class, you'll have learnt three different ways, maybe more, that you can animate text and a final design, which you can upload right here to the project gallery. I'd recommend you show off your new skills on your own portfolio. And I'll even show you how to get your design on Instagram stories. If you're ready and raring to go, let's get started. 2. Project: For this class project, you'll have a choice of the three different animation techniques. Applying one to your illustration, Export it as a GIF and upload it here to the project gallery! That way I'll be able to see your new animation skills and offer any advice or tips uniquely tailored to your work. Once you've followed along with the class, simply choose one animation technique shown in the class to apply to your text illustration. Apply and export the illustration as a GIF, I'll show you how to do this in the export lesson. Upload it here to the project gallery to the class project. Posting your own project can help others to do the same. Ask for help and ultimately improve our skillshare community here in a cycle of feedback and improvement. It also helps me to gauge how helpful the class has been for you. Remember to post your project as soon as you can. If you're feeling particularly like sharing, I'd love to see your process too. So feel free to upload your illustration stills and sketches here too. The first thing you'll need to get started is your drawing tool, drawing app or sketch pad. So let's get those now and I'll see you in our first lesson. 3. Sketch your text: In this lesson, we're going to look at sketching out our sticker designs. This is going to be our guide sketch for later refinement so I want you to feel good about getting something down. Just as a first design, you can use whichever method you're comfortable with, Whether it's pen and paper first before you go digital, or if you're more of a vector person, use Illustrator. I like to use procreate because it's so flexible, quick and it saves out to a PSD file, which is really good for animating later. So I'll be showing you how I work there. Feel free to follow along in whatever method you choose. Now I'm going to do text-based stickers. So I recommend you follow along with me. And I'll be giving lots of hints and tips for illustrating text, specifically using guidelines and layers. I enjoy free handing this part, but feel free to use references for how you want your letters to look, if you fancy. Before we decide what to draw, let's just set up our canvas. To create our canvas, we are going to click the plus symbol up here. Now we're going to create a brand new sizing template. We'll add it there and for the dimensions We're going to look at GIPHY's guidelines. Eventually, we're going to set up our GIFs in GIPHY to go onto Instagram. We need to follow their guidelines as we do it. Now GIPHY has a few sticker best practices. And if best practices that we're going to look at, the things that I want to highlight is the cropping the canvas to fit the sticker. Stickers exported with too much empty space will appear very small. Actually, what we're going to do is we're going to create stickers which fill that space. Secondly, we need to have the source file as a GIF. If we're going to follow the GIF best practices as well, they recommend no more than 6 seconds, which we'll think about in animation. And also that they'll loop forever. We're going to really focus on that in our animation lesson. That we can use whatever resolution makes our sticker look best. They recommend using multiples of four for width and height. That's what we're going to think about for our canvas. Great. As GIPHY said said we're going to do a multiple of four, but we're going to keep it in video style. We do 1080 by 1080, then I'm going to keep it at 300 pixels per inch. You can go down to 72 if you want. I just like to keep stuff in 300 just in case they need it in a higher pixel rating later on. Then for your color profile, I recommend going for RGB. If you're going to just keep the stuff online, if you think there might be a chance that you're going to print it at some point, go for CMYK, because it's easier to go from CMYK to RGB than the other way round. So make sure you give that template a name, so I'm going to call it Instagram sticker, then Create, and that will come up with our nice blank canvas here. There are two things you can think about to get you started. The first is the theme of the design. If you want something very usable or popular, why not do some research on Instagram? Just go to make a story, then add a GIF, See what popular stickers are there, or you can just do whatever feels good for you and hopefully people will like it. I would think about a word or two, or even a very short phrase that means something to you. Something that will show off your personality to your audience. I guarantee there will be loads of people who love it too. The second thing is the size of your design. Here you can see two stickers that I've created for Teach your Monster that I'm trying to use on a story. One started as this design small and in the center of our 1080 by 1080 canvas. The other filled much more of the canvas. Can you guess which made the better GIF? Yeah, one that filled the canvas. When you're planning your phrase or illustration, you'll need to consider how you're going to fill that canvas. For my first sticker, I've decided to do Happy Birthday. I know it's going to be popular, lots of people have birthdays and it's going to appeal to a wide audience. First of all, I'm going to set up some guidelines. Now Procreate does come with its own guidelines built in. I'm going to use those. If you go into the spanner and then Canvas, then click Drawing Guide. Then we're going to edit that drawing guide. At the moment, my grid size is 34 pixels. We're going to hoik it all the way up and make sure it's on something you can see. I've just gone for some nice dark guidelines here, but you can go for red if you want to. I'll stick down here and then click Done. I've decided that I'm going to make my letters like super boxy, super punchy, and happy birthday is going to be really happy. What I'm going to do is because happy birthday is quite a long phrase, if I put it across the center, it's going to end up very small when we put it into GIPHY. And eventually our sticker. I'm going to split that into two happy birthday. And I'm going to use my guidelines here to do it, but I'm also going to create my own guidelines. Now to create guidelines, I like to use my sketching Narinder pencil. It's just really nice and dark, so I like that one. Now on a fresh layer, what you're going to do is just set up those guidelines. If you want to follow along and be boxy like me, I'm just going to draw a straight line across and hold my finger on to make it really straight. I'll draw the second one for the bottom of the letters, and that's looking good. Then using my free form transform button, I'm going to extend those across and make sure that's fitting the width of the canvas. Then I'm going to duplicate that layer and drag I need to make sure my snapping is on with the magnetics, which it is. And that's just going to help me drag it down in a really nice straight line. I'm going to leave a little gap there for the space between the two words. Good. Once that's done, I'm going to merge it down and then rename that layer guides. You just rename my tapping and selecting, Rename. Now we're going to move on to sketching our letters. I always do a rough sketch guide before moving onto my color just to make sure that spacing is okay with all the letters and the phrase is looking good generally in the canvas. To start us off, let's create a new layer and call that ART. I'm going to share a couple of techniques with you as I go because I'm doing these really boxy letters for happy birthday, I'm going to count how many letters are in each and I'm going to work out from the center. In 'Happy', we've got five letters. I'm going to start with the P and I'm going to use this center line to help me draw that with my pen selected. Just going to draw that P in, I can always hold for a straight line. It doesn't have to be perfect, but it's good to get the first letter right. Just as a rule. Then we can work out from that one. Now, because I'm happy with this, I'm just going to draw in my x height. That's just the height of this crossing bit. Just to make sure that's in the right place, I'm going to use my selection tool to just pick that up and pull it under the P. Now that's my guide. All set for the top one. Now very fortunately, we have another P, so I can just duplicate that layer and then drag it across there. We have our second P. just going to merge that down. I'm just going to make sure that P is really centralized there. Good. Now I'm going to work out from there for the rest of my letters. There's the A and the H. This bit can be like super quick. You can do it really sketchy if you like. It doesn't have to be boxy like this. Obviously, you're going to work out the style of your own letters. if you want to copy along with me and just do the boxy style for now, I'm happy with that too. Here we've got a style established for our lettering. Now, I'm just going to make a couple of adjustments to make sure we've got more of a consistent width here. And that's fine. Onto my second word, birthday. For birthday, we've got eight letters in birthday, but I'm going to add that exclamation mark. Now, we've got nine, leaving us that important middle letter H. Again, I'm going to work out from the center. H is a nice symmetrical letter that's helpful, helpful for H. Then I'm going to continue with my letters out from there. Now you might find it really annoying and difficult to do it this way. This is just the way that I've come up with to help me balance and keep my letters even. But you might find it really easy to go from one side to the other. You can always use the transform tool to make the adjustments anyway. So find whatever way works for you, just keep working on your phrase here. It might be a good time as well to try out different styles, get some cursive going, but generally this is birthday, and I'm really happy with how that's looking, that's my guide layer, all done. Now obviously this is a really structured way to do it. Sometimes I do it really sketchy, for example, just like this. I'll get that in nice and hand drawn in my own style, then I'll reduce the opacity on that. I'll neaten that style up and work in that way. You might find it really fun to just do your own handwriting and then go over the top of that. But I'm going to show you this in one of my other sticker designs. Let's turn the guide layer off and have a look at that. Yeah, I think that's looking really nice. So with my guide layer done, I'm ready to move on to the next step. Coloring. Do take as long as you need on this initial sketch stage until you're happy with it. It took me a few attempts too, but I will say, don't worry about getting it perfect. We'll refine our sketch together in the next lesson. I'll see you there. 4. Colour your text: In this lesson, we're going to use our guide layer as a base to illustrate our design. I'm going to go straight into introducing color. So I'm going to be super speedy in this lesson, using a lot of straight lines and quick decisions throughout. Feel free to pause at any point and take your time. You may even wish to do an extra step of refinement to your design here. But I recommend that with text based gifts, I think that practice is key. So the more you can work on, the better. Let's just get these first ones done and out in the world. And remember that often perfection is the enemy of progress. Again, I'll give you some tips for refining your work as you go. So if you are ready, let's get going. So I want my happy birthday ticket to be super happy. It's going to be rainbow colors and we all know ROYGBIV, right? We're going to start with red. So I'm going to select my color from my color palette. I'm going to pick a new pen. So I'm going to go for my studio pen. Studio pen 1. Now this is just regular studio pen, but it's got the streamlining up to 66% instead of 47%. So that's all I changed about it. So I'm going to create a new layer, this which I'm going to call art. And then my sketch layer, I'm going to rename Sketch. On the art layer, I'm going to do my colors. And then I'm going to reduce the opacity on the sketch layer, so I can just use it as a guide zooming in, let's make sure my pen is the right size. I'm going to select size 4 here, then I'm going to start inking using those guidelines, because I'm going for super boxy This should be quick. Obviously I can just hold the lines to make sure they're nice and straight and it's like a quick style. You might want to take some extra time if you went for cursive or something like that. But I would say that you don't have to be super neat. Please take it from me. If you're new or starting out with illustration the human touch, the perfectly flawed design of your hand is going to be more than good enough. Please don't spend too much time agonizing over a little mark somewhere that's really not going to affect the design of your work, especially with these stickers. You can get these out really, really quick and you know people are going to use them on your stories. They're going to be quick passing things. You really don't need to spend hours getting it right like you would maybe with a print or something like that. Just use your talent, use your perfect mistakes to just fix those up. Good. Now you can see that I'm getting along well with my coloring here. Just going to go in and use that trick again, where I can use the selection tool to cut out my P copy and paste it, drag that across, and then I don't need to do it again. It's just things to speed up your workflow. Now I'm doing a color fill here and you can see that I'm dragging to get the threshold up and down. Now this is just the amount it will fill up the pixels, so you want to go as high as possible on this one. One nice trick I can do with this as well because I particularly like my Ps here, just going to duplicate that. Just use it as a bit of a width guide for my next letter. If you're struggling to keep the width and consistency between your letters, this is a really good trick for that. On my art layer again now, I can just use that as a bit of a width guide and use it to continue the style of my letters. It's even more helpful if you have it underneath your art layer. Now this is my regular piece, so I'm just going to merge that down. We've got happy all done here. I can see that my H is a little bit wide as compared to the other letters. I'm just going to squidge that down and then move on to birthday. I've got a couple of letters which are common between birthday and happy. Again, I can use that trick just to speed up my workflow. It's going to help me keep the letters consistent as well. Let's do the same for the A, making sure that your letter is selected. If you just click and hold, that will select the same one and you can copy and paste and then move it down. Good. Then you can just merge that down onto the same layer as well. Let's just do that for the Y and move it. Here we go, and merge down. So now I'm just going to get on with the rest of my letters and I'll speed up the video. Now, you might have noticed that I have made a lot of birthday red, which is definitely not rainbow order. Now this was intentional because I thought it would give me another opportunity to show you trick and speed up workflow. You can actually just build everything in one color and then go through and just fill with the other colors. Once you've got it all figured out, I just finish off my exclamation mark here and show you what I mean. I do want my B to be red. That's all good. Then I want the orange in the I. So I can just color-drop that. Now I can really show you here. If you go too high with this one, it's going to color all of them. You just want to color it enough to color that one letter. Let's do the same with the R yellow and the T and the green. I'm also going to color the exclamation mark there because they know it's going to be green too. Then we've got the purple, the H, then we're back, then we've got red orange. And then we need yellow for this Y. That's my happy birthday. All colored. Let's have a look without the sketch. Cool, It's looking pretty good. I can see that. Maybe I need to do some little fixes. Okay, I'm pretty happy with this. I really like the letters. They made some adjustments to the general width of them, but we're ready to move on. I like it, but I feel like it's going to be difficult for it to stand out against photos and complex images that you would have on Instagram stories. We're going to give it a drop shadow. Now my favorite way to do that is to just duplicate that art layer. Then rename the bottom one shadow. Make sure everything else is named. We don't have anything extra that we don't need that looks good. And then I'm going to turn the art layer off. Now before I add the shadow color to this, I'm going to just take out all the color from here. I'm going to go up to the adjustments here and in hue, saturation, and brightness. Then I'm going to take all the brightness out, so it's just this deep black. Then if we go to select our shadow color mine is my nice navy here, and just drag that in the threshold needs to be all the way up to make sure all the letters are full. That's my shadow color. Then we can turn on the art layer and you can just see a little outline of the shadow there. With that selected, you can now move that to whichever position you want. Your drop shadow now I like bottom left, so I'm just going to give it enough distance away so that perhaps when it's small, you can still see that shadow there because our sticker is going to be quite small. Maybe I'll even move it out a little more. That looks good now. It looks like a shadow cast on a wall, but I want it to be like a boxy letter. I'm actually going to join this, so it looks like a solid letter. I'll show you how to do that with my shadow layer still selected. Just going to join it with some little triangles in there to give it the illusion that is actually 3D If we compare the H and the a now, rather than being a cast shadow, just looks like it's a whole one piece. It's got dark sides, a nice colorful front, which is what I want. I'm just going to continue with this, just coloring those bits in and while I'm here. I can also just double check my artwork is looking how I want it to by going back and forth between the layers. Just don't forget that you can select a different color with the eye dropper. Pick your shadow color when you go back to your shadow layer. So here, I'm just finishing up those boxy letters, and it's inspection time. So make sure that you're really zooming in, Just checking all of your letters and matching up nicely that you want. Don't worry about leaving some little human errors here and there. But here I've spotted a missing join. so I'm going to fill that in. Let's make sure we haven't missed any others. No, that looks good. At this point, we're going to take it into Photoshop. Now, usually with animation, I would suggest to have everything that you're going to animate on different layers. But in this one, because our artwork is in Procreate, what we're actually going to do is take it into Photoshop and start to separate it. Because annoyingly, in Procreate for some reason when you take it into After Effects or Photoshop, all of these pixels which aren't meant to be there, there are no pixels. They come in as pesky invisible pixels. So we're going to take it into Photoshop where we're going to cut those out and make it really ready for animation. We're also going to label it and do some other things in there. So we're going to take it into Photoshop anyway, All I'm saying is you don't really need to separate them here because we're going to do it later. Now I'm going to take this opportunity to show you my other stickers, which are my 'love you' sticker. Now this started off life as a simple, really simple sketch on a black background, simple lettering, super quick. And then over the top of that I did this kind of bubble writing, which I really like doing, it's really easy. Just quick loops over at the top and then you just fill it in. Then I started to build my filled in shapes over the top. And you can see that there. Now, because I decided to overlap them, I moved them around a little bit. Therefore, I needed to build them on separate layers to do that. It's still going to have those pesky invisible pixels around each letter. We're still going to have to cut those out, but I'm going to show you a different way to do that in Photoshop later. I also added my water here, Because you know love is gushy, it's cute, you know, they're all cuddling up. Then my final sticker is my 'nice one' sticker. It started off life with just this pigeon sketch, then I added in the nice one. Again, super quick, really quick sketch, and then I decided to do quite boxy letters over the top. Those are my three illustrations. Again, this one is going to have those pixels. I'm going to show you how to cut that one out in After Effects as another technique. Once I've shown you all three, you can decide which works best for you. But that's it. I've illustrated these three different text designs to animate throughout the class. By now, you should have at least one design to play with. At this point, you can feel free to have more practice creating different styles of text, overlapping fonts, ones with small illustrations. But as long as you just have one, you'll be able to do everything I do in the rest of the class. I've also put my files in the resources folder. If you'd like to go ahead and just use mine for the next step. Just to mention that you will eventually need at least five GIFs if you want to upload to GIPHY and make stickers which are accessible through Instagram. But you can always create those once you've got to grips with this first one, if you like. So now we can move on prepping our file for animation in the next lesson. See you there. 5. Export and import: In this lesson, we'll learn how to export our files from procreate to the computer. If you use Photoshop or Illustrator, just skip to the time code below for how to structure your folders and divide your layers. It'll be really important to pick a place for your files that won't move and mess up your animations later. Let's get to it. Procreate is very handy and easy to export. If you click Select up here, you can export a number of files together. I want my happy birthday sticker, my lovely sticker, and my nice sticker. I'm going to share those. Click Share. Then we want to select Photoshop files PSD. It's going to come up with a menu. I'm just going to airdrop it to my Mac right here. Let's click Air Drop. You can see my phone and my Mac, it's just going to pop up on the screen. Then if we go to our downloads and then opening finder, I can see those in the top there. I need to create a good place for those now. My good place for those is going to be on the desktop and I'm going to create a new folder with command shift. I'm going to call that Instagram sticker project. Inside that I'm going to create a working files folder. And I'm going to create an export folder in all capitals because that's my thing. Okay, Inside working files, create a new folder called Photoshop, PSD. Then I'll create a second folder called because we need after effects. And also in that folder going to create images file. Okay, so let's just drag those into the PSD folder. We're going to look at each of these in turn to check the layers and make sure that they've come in nicely. Okay, let's tidy up those diggers. If we double click that, it should open Photoshop. Here we have the sticker that I worked on. I'm going to get rid of any extra layers I don't need, I no longer need sketch layer. Don't really need the background layer either. We've just got these two. Now at this point, because I know I'm going to be using this for the positioning lesson. I need everything separate, especially with procreates, all the layers come in with invisible pixels, which is the nightmare in after effects. You would see if I drag this in like this, it would give me a bounding box as the entire square rather than the bounding box of the letter. It's better to just bring it into Photoshop and cut those out here, matching to merge these two layers so I can merge down. Then I'm going to save this as a different copy. I can call it for A because it's been edited. We always have that backup file to work on with my last selected, which is this one over here. We're just going to draw around the H. It doesn't have to be super neat at all, but make sure that whole H is luge. And then right click layer via cut. Now you have layer one with that H on it. We can rename it here. Now if I transform it, the bounding box will be around the letter, which is exactly what we need. No pesky invisible pixels. You want to just continue to do that with all of your letters here? I'm just going to switch to the polygonal lasso tool because I can just tap and it's much, much quicker to cut out the letters and then obviously making sure you're on the right layer. Just layer via cut in exactly the same way. You're actually going to want to do this with all of your stickers if you took them from procreates. If you did it straight in Photoshop, you might need to do this because it doesn't have the same issue with the invisible pixel situation. Also going to show you a way of how to do it later on in after effects. If you don't get round to this stage with your process, I'm just going to go through and just label all of these letters. It can be a bit of a FA in procreate because you have to tap and you have to rename. And where is this? It's just a double, quick quick letter in. I just find this much easier for labeling, speed work around for your workflow. Okay, with that label, let's just save that again. Obviously in the new file name. And then we can check that's in the folder. Yeah, so we could make a separate folder if you wanted for particularly the after effects ones, But we need to make sure that this stays here now. So when we take it into ar effects, it's going to have a place to always refer to that file. So now we've divided our illustration into usable layers. In the next lesson, we'll import it to after effects and install the most important tool of your animation career. See you there. 6. Installing Motion Tools: In this lesson, we'll import our PSD file into after effects and install motion tools. An amazing free to download plug in, which speeds up your workflow just generally makes animation so much easier. I'm certain it'll help you out. Let's get started. So first, let's reset to our default workspace by clicking here. Hopefully it looks like something like this, but we're going to fiddle with this anyway. It doesn't really matter if it doesn't, when you import something to after effects, it's going to remember the last composition that you did when importing. You can write click here and click Import. You can also click Command, which is the most popular shortcut that I use. You can also go up here to file and import as well. We want to find that in our recent folders. Here, we've got the four sticker. Now to import this, what we would want to do is import it as layers. We want to select composition, Retain layer sizes. And we're going to just open that. This is fine. Just click okay. Then we're going to open up that composition. Okay, let's put that on. 100% nice. That's looking good. Here we can check our composition settings. We can see that the width and the height have come in correctly, which is great. Then we've got frame rate. Now it's remembering what I lasted. I lasted one of these stickers. I put it on a frame rate of 12. This is typically sort of half the frame rate of kind of the old Disney animations. So the character animations, I put it on 12 just to make it easier for the gifts. You can even go down to eight, and obviously you'll only need to animate sort of those eight frames per second. 12 recommend 12, and Giffe actually recommends just fewer than 200 frames. So we're well within that. We also want to keep it under 6 seconds. In my project, I think I'm going to do 4 seconds because that's what I work with. Normally, I'm going to change my background color, which is this color here, to a 50% gray. 50% gray generally is a really good rule because you can see all the other colors, like white, stark on it. Click okay, and that's your composition all set. Okay, now what we need to do is install a really important plug in for after effects, which is going to help us complete all of our animations and really improve your workflow in after effects. We're just going to save this project in the same place. Let's find that PSD file this time. We're going to go to the folder and we're going to call this gram sticker set one, just in case we make more sets later on. I'm going to put that one as well, just in case we have more versions. If the sticker set one click save, and that's going to be its permanent living place. Now I'm just going to quit after effects. I'm going to go to my browser. I'm going to search for motion tools. Motion tools is a plug in from motion design school. If you find that, click on it, you'll see there's lots of information here. You can watch video about the tools, which I really recommend because it just runs through everything. I'm going to focus on a few things in these lessons. I'm going to teach you how to use it with our text animations. But if you want to know more, obviously you can scroll through the site. Now to download it, just click on free download on the Screen button that should download to your computer. I'm going to show it in my finder. Let's open that up by double clicking. Let's open that. Then what they've done, which is really super handy, is give you an installation guide. This is actually a two step process. You will need to, first of all, download XP installer. If you click on that as well, you can download your Windows or your Mac there. Let's open that up then. What you will need to do is you'll just need to drag the XP to your Applications folder. Now, I already have one, I'm not going to do that, but that's just going to run you through how to install that. Then after you've done that, open up your Zx installer. Just drag that motion tools file into it. It tells you you're about to install it, let's install. And then it tells you where you'll find it. Window extensions in the compatible applications as the instructional window said. We're going to open up window, find extensions and then we're going to open up motion tools panel one. Don't worry about the other three for now, we're just going to use one. If it's your first time using motion tools, you'll need to register so that we'll just take you to the website and you fill in the details. Don't worry, you don't have to pay anything. If you already have an account, just log in here. After you register, just come back and log in here. Once you've logged in, your motion tools panel should be all ready. I like to dock it over here on the right And then just adjust the panel, it fits nicely. That's our motion tools in place. We also have the composition window here. Effect controls. This is our project panel, and this is our timeline. Now we've got everything we need to start animating. Join me in the next lesson to find out how 7. Animating position: In this lesson, we're going to animate our sticker design using position animation. Animating the position of a text can lead to all sorts of wacky wavy bouncy fun. So I think you're going to enjoy this one. Let's just double check our composition. If we click on each layer, it will show us a nice bounding box around the letter itself, around the big composition. If we go into Composition Settings, let's just check those. It will remember the last ones you did yet. The width and the height are at the correct amount of pixels. The frame rate is 12 and then duration of 4 seconds. And my background color is 50% gray. That's all good if your anchor point is not in the correct place. If you select all of them and click this handy middle button on Motion Tools, that will center it all for you. Another great reason to have motion tools. Just a note here that you can change the anchor point position after it's been animated. So we don't need to worry too much about that right now. What I want to achieve in this lesson is a nice crowd wave with the happy birthday letters. To do that, I'll need to animate the position of each layer. If I select all of those layers and click P, that will reveal the position property for each layer. If I just make an adjustment to that, you can see that those are all selected. Now what we want to do at the very beginning of a Jeff animation, or any looped animation, is we want to set this position that they're already in. If we click the stopwatch with the playhead at the beginning of the time line, that will set a key frame with this exact position. In order to make it loop, we'll need to also set this as our end frame. If we move that ahead to eight frames, then click this little diamond here, that will put another key frame exactly the same as the first one. Because we haven't adjusted anything yet. All we've done is put the position, the starting and ending position, in for our happy birthday here. This is really good practice to form a loop. Always start by setting the beginning and end frames, and then make your adjustments in the middle. Let's go to four frames, the middle of the two. Now we can decide on the behavior or movement of the letters. Are they going to go up or down, or side to side? I think for mine I'm going to make them go up. Let's readjust that back down so we can see the full composition. Then with them all selected, I'm going to click on one of the letters and just start dragging it up. If I hold Shift, that's going to do that in exactly a straight line. There we go. I think that's up enough. Let's see what we've got. If we click the space bar, that will play the animation. Obviously at the moment, my time line is far too long and we have to wait too long for us to see it. Let's just drag that all the way down to 1 second and press play again. There we go. We can see very simple movement up and back to the original starting position. Don't worry at this point that the movement is quite sharp. We're going to ease it in a little bit later. For now, I'm going to show you a cool trick to make it look more fun. We're going to add the elastic expression from motion tools. Before I add the elastic expression, I'm just going to extend the work area to 3 seconds. To add the elastic expression, we need to select the key frames first. To select them all, you just click and drag over all of the key frames on the time line. If you go up to the motion tools panel and hover over the elastic button, you'll see that a few different things come up. What we want to do is create a control layer. Whilst we click the button, we're going to hold Alt and then click it. What that's done is it's added an expression to all of the layers and a control layer at the top here. Inside that control layer, we have these three controls. We've got amplitude, frequency, and decay. Let's click play and have a look at what that's doing in contrast to the previous very sharp movement that we had like this, we now have a little bit of spring and a little bit of bounce to our happy birthday. It's working, but we can definitely adjust this to have a look at what this piece of magic can do. What happens if we double the amplitude to 40? We can see that the elastic bounce or overshoot gets much bigger. Let's add 100 to really check it out. It's good to go a bit extra on these expressions because we want our gift to be super punchy. If I make it very small, we're going to see a lot of movement there at the moment. The elastic expression is affecting all of the key frames, but generally, I like to just have it on the last keyframe. So you've spring to do that, I will easy ease the first two. Easy easing is just the slowing of the move as we enter or exit the key frame. The elastic expression works well when there's a lot of speed going into the movement. Ideally, we'd have the elastic expression on a keyframe without easing or a linear key frame. The way to easy ease is that you can select them and right click and go to keyframe assistant and then easy ease. Or you can use the handy shortcut, which is nine. You see now that when I play it, the elastic is only working on that last key frame. It gives it that really natural bouncy, playful effect with your sticker. Make sure you add easy ease to any key frames that you don't want the elastic effect on. Now we've had a play with the amplitude. The frequency is how quickly it bounces. I'm going to put that to 100 just to demonstrate. Now we can see it's doing that boy motion, which is pretty fun. We'll just reset that to 45. The decay is how quickly that spring dies off. If you want the spring to go on for longer, you want a lower number in the decay. For example, if I put zero, it would infinitely bounce and probably wouldn't make a very good loop. I generally keep the decay 30-60 Let's put that to 30 here. You can choose obviously based on your own, if how bouncy and how much decay you'd want it to have, I'm just going to put my amplitude on 30. This is the look that I'm going for. Our next step to make it more interesting is to stagger this animation. Here in the motion tools panel, we have a section all about staggering or sequencing. This is going to stagger the key frames or layers. Depending on what you have selected. This button will sequence to the beginning of the time line. This one top to bottom, bottom to top, and then randomly the section above. This is the amount of offset and the steps, If we select those layers and see it as an offset of one, you'll see that when I click it, it has moved one frame, every layer. If I put those back to the beginning and then put the offset as two, and the steps two, and then we sequence, you'll see that we've two here all moving at two frame jumps. You can manipulate this really beautifully and easily and get really different effects. I'm going to do the offset as one and the steps one, and I'm going to sequence from the top player. Let's play that. That's looking really nice. I really like the wavy crowd wave movement of that one. It's really happy, real jolly. The only trouble is I feel like the birthday should be in front of the happy, because it comes second. It's not quite working the way that I'd like it to. Fortunately, there's a really easy way to change this. My quick and easy trick without changing anything, none of the key frames, is to select from the bottom layer all the way up to the top player. Leave the elastic control layer. We command X to cut it and then command V and it will come back in the order that you selected it. Really cool trick. I don't have any other program that does this. It will automatically sequence it from the exclamation mark. I selected it first to the H and Happy. Let's move the elastic control layer back up to the top so we know exactly where it is. Let's play that again. Yeah, now the birth date is in front of Happy and it's looking really good. Perhaps now we see it altogether though. We would like to make some additional changes to the elasticity. It's fine. You can art direct as you go. I'm just going to adjust the frequency of the bounce here to 40, just down a little bit Nice. I must say though, for me it's looking a little bit slow for a jiff, usually Instagram stories pretty quick. It's a celebration. We want it to be more punchy than this. We can make adjustments. Let's select all the layers and open up the position property again by clicking. If we now click this button click, and it's all arranged back with the key frames at the beginning. This is really good because that's going to help us adjust our speed evenly. Now if I just open this up so we can see them all at the same time. And then select all of the key frames holding Alt again, we click and drag those, squeeze in that time a little bit. I'm going to adjust the final frame to six frames. Let's adjust the time line and let's check the animation on that. Let's just adjust that again. We can see it all. We can adjust them altogether as I just did. Or we can select just the final frame. Just the middle frame. We can move those. I'm just going to push the end frame closer to that middle frame to get more of a more speed into the final frame. I'll show you some speed graphs in the next lesson. So you will understand a little bit more about this, but don't worry about it for now. All I'm doing is increasing the speed into that bounce and making it a bit more punchy. All right, let's see that with the sequencing on, with them all selected, this time we're going to sequence because we flicked it, we'll need to sequence from the bottom layer instead. Important to remember. Sequence, then play. It's looking pretty good. Let's make some final speed adjustments. Because if I look from far away, if I just scroll up, you'll see the size of sticker you'll be dealing with. It's really useful in a sticker to be a bit more exaggerated with the movements. Go a bit extra and you'll get more of an effect from it. Let's crank up the amplitude to 55, frequency to 66, and then 55 on the decay as well. I like that. Doing doing good. Doing doing good, yes. Let's check. Yeah, it's probably very small for you, but these stickers, as I say, go a bit extra, go over the top more than you would in a regular animation. And you'll find that it works really well. I'm really happy with this. Now I'm going to save it. Command S, whether you've made yours bounce up and down or side to side. We're going to leave this here for now. And I'll show you how to export the jiff. In the exports lesson, all of the stickers will be animated in this file. So join me in the next lesson for animating the scale of our next sticker. I'll see you there. 8. Animating scale: Now we're going to do some scaling animations on our next sticker. Feel free to use your first design again for this, if you only managed to create the one or use my files from the resources folder. I'm also going to show different method of removing those pesky invisible procreate pixels in Photoshop So that you can animate these files nicely. For this one I'm going to it, I could write click here command and then the sticker which is the one I'll be using for scaling. And then create composition, press open and okay. Now if I open this one, you'll really see the effects of those invisible pixels. If I click the L here, you can see that the L has the entire bounding box rather than one just around the letter and the anchor point in the center, the other letters follow this as well. We'll need to take this back into Photoshop. I'll just show you that again. Let's undo the input. Let's have a look at it in Photoshop. Here, if I look at the L, it looks fairly normal, except if I press transform, you can see that bounding box. Let's not transform it, let's duplicate it. You can duplicate by either going here to duplicate layer L, copy, doesn't matter what it's called, and then we merge it down. Now if I try and transform that letter again, you can see that the bounding box is around the letter rather than around the whole square. I'm not really sure why that works, but it does. Hz. Save it. Let's save as four like we did for the birth, day one, click Ok. Now if we import that one which is essentially the same file and open it. If I look at the L again, click it there. It's now got a bounding box which is just around the L. I'm going to have to repeat that for all of the other letters. Another way you can really easily create a new copy of that letter is to hold Alt, and click and drag and merge it down. I'll just quickly do that for all of the letters. Okay, let's save that. We'll need to reload it because it will mess it up. Let's import that. Remember, we want to click Composition Open, Okay, and then double click that. Let's just go through the layers. We can highlight them all at the same time to see if those are all present and correct which they are. Remember, if the anchor points are not centralized, you can always click on this Button In Motion tool. I'm just going to drag this water layer to the back and I'm going to hide it and lock it because I'm not going to be animating that one. But I am going to animate the rest of the layers. Let's select all of them. And click the for scale. That will open up the scale property. Just as we did before. We want to create that endless loop. So let's click the stopwatch over here this time, because I know we wanted a quicker animation last time. I'm going to go to six frames instead of eight. Let's click the little diamond over here to create that. Now let's go to the halfway point and try out some changes because we have all of the layers here. If I adjust the scale on the top layer, it's going to affect the rest of them as well. Let's set this x axis to 110. You'll see that all values change to 110, including on the y axis here. Let's just shorten that time line to 1 second and play. Nice. It's looking good. It's like a little heartbeat motion, which is what I wanted to achieve with this love sticker. Let's try out some other values. Let's go smaller, let's go for 80. This time it has the opposite effect. It looks like it's going in and out, going smaller, and then bigger. Let's try something a little more extreme. Let's go for 30. It goes really, really tiny and then really big. This probably will be quite good fristica because it's got lots of impact. I'm going to go for 110 for now though, because I liked the heart pumping style. But if we watch it, it's a little bit stiff. So we're going to use that lovely motion tool, elastic expression again. Let's bring the playhead back to that starting frame and give those first two key frames an easy ease. Remember the shortcut for this is nine with everything selected. Now let's click the elastic expression holding Alt. Click that will create the elastic control layer at the top there, you'll see that it's just giving that little bounce to the end frame there. Now as I said in the previous lesson, I wanted to show you a bit more of this effect. If I just click away and go to my exclamation mark layer here, we can start to view the graph on this. Which is going to be really exciting for some of you. Technical buffs, for others of you don't need to do this at all. I just want to show you visually what the expression looks like. If I toggle the drop down on scale, then you'll see the expression. Then I can open up the graph by clicking this button and viewing the graph editor. Now you can really see that the easing on these first two is coming out very smoothly. And then because we've got no easing on that one, it's going to overshoot, allow that expression to happen. Now I can see that actually we're not getting the full expression here. So I can make my time line a little bit longer so we can see the full expression happening in the animation here. If we go back to the elastic control layer and adjust the amplitude, let's say go up to 90. We can now see that that overshoot or the elastic effect is much more pronounced within the graph. We can watch the graph as a change, some of the other values as well like the frequency, if I crank that up to 90 as well, you'll see that the number of bounces after our ending key frame here is increased. If I put the decay, remember that's the death of the wave to one that will shorten this space between sh, the space here, if I put it on zero, you'll see that, that decay just never stops. It would keep going in the same loop forever. I like seeing the graph and seeing how the expression works, but you definitely don't need to know anything about it. Although I'm pretty happy with this animation, I want to show you guys some other cool effects using scaling on one axis. Let's bring our playhead back to that middle key frame, this time with them all selected the box here, that's our constrain proportion box that links both the x and the y value and scales everything proportionally. If I uncheck that and then change one of the values, let's take the y down to 100. Let's see what that does if we play now we can see it's like sidging in from the side like, or if I want to do say, the x axis. Instead it's going to squid up and down from the top. Which is really cute too. Actually, I quite like that one. But what happens now if we change the anchor point because it's squidging from the top and the bottom. Let's try an anchor point at the bottom. If I click here, it will align the anchor point with the bottom of the letter. Now we can see that it's growing from that bottom point, getting taller and returning, which is also quite cute. Let's try it with a left hand anchor point. Now it looks the same as it was scaling from the side because we're doing it from the middle. But if we change just the file use, we can see that it's growing out from that left hand anchor point and then squidging back to the center. I think I'm going to adjust the scaling a little bit more, making sure all those layers are selected. Just so it's got that bit more of an impact there. I'm just going to adjust the water a little bit. I'm just going to rotate it just slightly so it fits better when it's scaling. Nice. Yeah, I'm pretty happy with that now. That's my second sticker done, all done with the same effects as the happy birthday sticker, but on scaling this time, don't forget. You can also experiment with staggering here using motion tools. Again, here, I'm just going to stagger it from bottom to top. Let's have a look at what that does. Another cool effect. You can also put it back to the beginning and try out some different types of staggering, For example, it's random staggering. And see what effect that has. Have an experiment with staggering. You might get some cool stuff. That's our scaling animated. If all done. Remember, you can use these techniques on all the other properties too. Capacity rotation. Why not try these out on some other designs? So make sure this one is saved. And let's move on to our last sticker animation, animating the color. I'll see you there. 9. Animating colour: In this lesson, we'll be animating the color of our text. This can be used for so many cool effects and I can't wait to show you how to do it. I'm also going to show you one final method of cutting out those letters for easy animation, masking in after effects. Once you know this one, you can pick whichever method works for you in your future work. Here we have my final sticker that I'm going to animate in this. It's my nice one sticker with my little pigeon guy giving the thumbs up. You can see all the layers that I imported from procreate here. First of all, a little bit of cleanup. Let's take away those two. We're only left with the nice one and the pigeon. And I'm going to label them here because it's much easier to label in Photoshop. Now I could split these out right now using the polygonal lasso tool, but I'm going to show you one other way to do it in after effects itself, which is very, very similar to this lasso tool. I'm just going to save that as once again. Let's call it for E and click, okay. Import your file, right click or command I, and find your four AE sticker. Let's make that composition and then press open. Okay? And then double click that composition. You'll see I've got exactly the same layers in here as I had in Photoshop. Let's just check my composition settings as always, same width and height. Good frame rate, 12, duration, four, then I'm going to change my background color to my 50% gray. Okay, cool. So I'm going to show you how to separate the layers, just like this one. What we'll need to do with this is we'll have to create masks. In order to do this, we need to duplicate that layer as many times as we have letters. So we've got 12345678 with my accents there to duplicate that layer. Press Command D. So we've got 12345678, and we can label them if I click Enter and then put Enter. Enter. Enter. Enter. Great. Now what I'll do is I'll go through and cut those out. Firstly, I'm not going to animate the pigeon. We can put them at the back and we can also lock them. Then we can go through and select. Now if I'm selecting, that's rather nice because I can pick that one up. However, if I wanted to say pick the C as you can see, it's going to pick everything up at the moment. We need to cut those out and mask them. This is my eye layer. I'm just going to zoom in and then use the hand to move the canvas around. Then just as we did in Photoshop, cut these out really low poly and mask them. If you want to move them, you can move certain points you've got selected. Now if I solo that one, you'll see that the eye is on its own. I'm going to go right through. Just select the other letters on the correct layers. Remember to just zoom in if any letters is super close and move around with their hand tool. You can always undo the last point that you did with command said as well. Great, that's all done. If I now go through and solo each of those in turn, you'll see that they're on their own layers, which is great. Now if I wanted to say select the C, my anchor point here is over here. Perhaps if I wanted to animate like some rotation or position, it would rotate around that point, which isn't very useful. What we can do is we can center all of those anchor points. You'll see that they're all congregated in the middle except for the, that's the exception. We can go over to Motion Tools and click the center anchor button there. That will just go through the layers and adjust it. Now obviously we don't want to rotate the position here, I'm just changing the color. But for future use, I might want to go back in and change it. It's always good to just like keep this housekeeping as part of your practice. And what's really great is we can go through and we can select each letter. We'll accept this bottom line, which is just going to see the top one as the bounding box is over it. So we'd just have to go to this one to select that. Now we're going to work on the colors. If I select and go over to effects and presets, I can search for the effect, Phil. You'll see Phil here under generate number 32. If I double click that one, it will automatically fill it with its default color, which is this very bright, lurid red. In order to change that to match my other colors, because I want to start off with this nice soft red, I can just click the eye dropper here and then eye drop from the C or one of the other letters. Then we've got my regular color in there. Now what I can do is I can copy that fill effect, select all of the layers, and paste. Now if I go through and select any of the layers, you'll see that has been pasted on exactly the same. Now, we don't have a keyboard shortcut to reveal the color, but we do have this search bar here. If I start typing color, you'll see that in all my layers, the color will start to appear. Now if we key frame that first layer and we click and drag down, it will key frame all of those, each of these color layers will have a key frame. Now if I click the drop down, we can see that nice and clearly in the value bar. And I can click that drop down on the rest of the layers as well. Now when we're using color, it starts to get a little bit more complex. We're going to change our workspace in order to see that. Let's move our layers panel up to where the effect controls are. We'll move the effect controls down here. We'll make the composition bar a bit smaller, just so we can see the type there. Cool. We can squidged motion tools in a little bit too. Okay, then I'm going to zoom in a little bit. What we want to do to create that nice loop is copy that key frame over. I'm just going to move that to 1 second. Rather than copy and pasting, I can use this handy tool in motion tools called clone. And that will just make a copy of those that are selected in the time line. Okay, now for the fun part, let's add some color in. So I'm just going to put it to five frames and we're going to select a different color. If I take the eyedropper here, I can pick from my illustration or I can pick from the colors panel or the libraries perhaps if I eyedrop that color, you'll see that that now appears in that bars. This is really like handy visual tool for seeing the colors in real time. Now let's just move that to the mid Or and press Play. You'll see that it's doing this lovely faded gradient here. Let's just shorten that time line so we can see it a bit quicker. Yeah, we can see that nice sunset happening now. This is good and perhaps what we need, but I would like a short choppy change. I'm just going to select all the existing key frames and come over here again to our handy motion tools. Here you've got the different types of key frames. So we've got bezier, Lina, and hold frame. We want a hold frame now you can see that very visually. Again, that choppy change is going to happen. Yeah. Nice and flashy. Okay, let's just move that closer and get some more colors in here. With that selected, again, let's pick another color from our pigeon. Nice blue. Let's go over again. Pick another color here with the green. Think I'm done with colors. Let's see, they're changing. Nice. We can see a bit of a long pause that makes sense because that one's not quite even. I like it when it's even. Of course you don't have to have it even at Tool, maybe you like one color more than the other. I like it quite speedy as well. If we make that nice, small, let's have a look at it. Yeah, it's looking cool. This is a really handy tool for creating all sorts of color effects. You can make rainbows for pride, or you could make flags, whatever you wish. This is a really nice effect, but we can use our motion tools again to stagger this animation. Let's just see what the effect it has on that. We're going to sequence from top to bottom. Yeah, sequence. You'll see that all adjusts. Yeah, that's cool too. I like that effect. I think I'm going to go back though to where it's all changing at once because I think that just more punchy for me. One thing I noticed that you may have noticed is that the styling of my pigeon is very different to the styling of my nice one. It's just a real like FA to try and change the color and change the stroke at the same time. Let's add it afterwards in after effects. I'm just going to zoom in here and select my letter at one so we can see it nice and close to the pigeon. What we're going to do is just create a layer style go down to stroke and we'll see that stroke is there. If we click down, we can see that that stroke has been added to the E again in this very lurid red. Let's eye drop the black from there. Now the position I'm going to put it on the inside, it keeps my nice shape. I'm going to ike up the size of the stroke to match my pigeon over here. Share like it better on the center. Let's try that out. We can always adjust it later. Now I can copy command C and paste command V, that effect on all the letters. Now if we zoom out and press play, we can see that that stroke is happening nicely. Let's actually change that position to the inside again. We'll copy that to all the layers. Yeah, it looks better now because it's not touching so much, so it's not as close. Remember, you can always go through and just adjust any letters that you feel too close with V. I'm just going to move this over. Just a touch and breast play. Yeah, that's looking good. I like my little nice one pigeon. Let's view him nice and big. Nice and small. Yeah, I think he's gonna stand out. So there we go. You've just learned how to animate the color of your letters and add a non color changing outline if you need one. I've also used this technique for flashy backgrounds in the past, so it's a great skill to know. In the next lesson, I'll show you how to explore all your lovely animations to It files 0. 10. Export and upload: In this lesson, I'll show you how to export your animations to gifts and upload them to our project gallery. Once you have your gifts, in the next lesson, I'll show you how you can upload them to Goff and get them as usable stickers on Instagram. So stay tuned for that one. Now that we've animated all of our stickers, we are ready to render them, to render them as gifts. What we're going to do is a bit of a two step process. We're going to export them as a mob file from after effects and then we're going to take them into Photoshop to export them as a Jeff. This is the best way that I found to do it. You can also use media encoder to export gifts, but I found that the quality isn't quite as good. I do it this way and I recommend you follow along to start to render these stickers that we have here. Here's my nice one sticker, lovely sticker and happy birthday sticker. We can just click the one that we want, then go to Composition and then add to render Q. On here you'll have some settings. The settings that you'll need to choose in order to get a transparent mode is 44 plus alpha. To get that setting, if you don't have it already, just click on that output module there, select Quick time from the drop down list. Then go to Format Options and find Apple Prores 4444 on this list. This is the only one that allows you to export with Alpha. Make sure that's on your list. And then when you get to the channels RGB might be selected, you just want RG plus alpha. Then we click okay. Once you've chosen the output module, you also need to choose where it's going to output two. If you click on that label and then find your folder, mine on my desktop, Instagram sticker Project Exports. In that exports folder, I'm going to create a new folder so I can click here or Command shift. Then I'm going to create my first folder, which is the mob file, click create. Let's just save that without four. A nice sticker. One click save. Once you've selected where it's going to click Render. That should be super quick because it's a very small file. Let's check our finder and go to Exports. Then your folder should be in there and you can check your nice sticker. If you press the Spacebar to play it, it should just run through the animation. The second step is to put it into Photoshop. If you write, click on the mob file. Should open up this pop up menu. If you go to open with and then go down to other, you'll need to find Photoshop in this list of applications. Once you've found Photoshop, just click open and that should open up Photoshop for you. It should open it up on this time line. If you don't have this time line open, you can always find it in Window and then time line on that list. Now when you click Spacebar in Photoshop, you should be able to check that animation. You can make a little adjustments to how long it is in here if you wish. I'm going to leave it just as it is, and then go up to file export. And then save for Web. This is what we'll need for our Fs. Click Save for Web. Then this pop up window will come up. Now in here, you have quite a few settings which you can fiddle with if you wish to. Generally, what I would say for these files is they need to be small. Now Jiffy recommends 8 megabytes or less our if here is 136 kilobytes, so it's very, very small. If we want to preview that, we can preview it in the browser. Just a word of warning here that it's obviously very big. So you can see some grittiness around the edges. Also, it's white, so you have to be very careful. There might be some artifacting around it that you can't necessarily see. Back in Photoshop here, you can make adjustments if you want to reduce that file size. Let's say you want to use it on a website and it's too big, you can adjust the number of colors here. Obviously, a less colors the lighter the file sizes. Looking at the file size, it's 136 kilobytes. If they go down to 64, it's going to reduce that number of kilobytes. It might also reduce the quality of your if though just word of warning for that doesn't seem to have here. It looks pretty much the same as the first example. That's good. We can go down to 64 with confidence. The other thing that you'll definitely need here is your transparency ticked. This is the transparency that shows all around the edges of my jif. And we'll need that to create a nice sticker for Instagram. I don't generally go for any dithers here. If you want to, you can click a dither again. You can preview it. You can see the artifacting that leaves on the outside compared to this one. It's just a little bit more fuzzy. That's another setting that you can fiddle with. I'm going to leave this as it was. I'm going to take the transparency dither off. It's not a large file size at this point. I'm just going to click Save. If we go again to our folder, I'll find the folder this time I'm going to create a new folder with command shift. I'm going to call it number two, Jeff. Let's create that. We've got nice sticker, Jeff. Perfect. Click Save. Now the nice one sticker is done. We're going to want to repeat that with our other stickers just in the folder. Again, Composition, Add to render. Go through the whole process with your other stickers. Now that's done, let's just check those files in the folder. Here we go. Our sticker on super large and looking at more of a reasonable size, you can see it in the preview there as well. And then the love you sticker and the nice sticker, and I'm really pleased with all of those. We are ready to upload them. Now the first place we're going to want to upload is obviously our portfolio. The second place that we want to upload is to Skillshare. If you click on the Projects and Resources panel and then click Submit Project, it will come up with this window. You'll want to choose a cover image. Let's upload that image and navigate to your folder. We can select just one of those gifts to go in there, and that works nicely. Now, we can call it Instagram sticker, Project K, and use a hyphen there. First stickers, if you want to, you can add some questions and comments here. The most important part though, is to add all of your gifts to this main part of the folder. Once you've done that, just click Publish at the top, and I will be able to see all of your lovely stickers. The final thing to mention is that I always like to save these also as a PSD file, just in case I want to go in later and adjust those so you can just file save As then, because we've already got PSD files here. I'm going to make a little new folder and just say it then in there I can label that gift edits to just because it's always nice to have a save of those things. I'll do that for the other stickers as well. You should do well done for uploading your gifts to the project gallery. In the next lesson, I'll show you how to create a gift account and get the search plan. Instagram. I'll see you there. 11. Make them searchable: In this lesson, I'll show you how to upload your gifts to Goff and create an artist's account. This will make your stickers searchable and usable on Ingram. So if you go to Jiffy.com that will open up this website. Firstly, you will need to make an account. You can click the sign up button and just confirm everything on there. I already have an account, so I'll just log in. Then here you can see my channel. Now I have quite a few here, but we're ready to upload those new ones to it as well. To upload your gifts, click Upload, then you can choose File. Here, we can see all of those lovely gifts that I just made. Let's start with the happy birthday sticker and click open. Then this window will open, and it's really important that you allow it to be public unless you don't want it to be published yet. In which case you'd put private, then you want to add some tags. These tags are going to be super important to find your stickers. Later on Instagram, make sure that you have quite a few tags on there. Here you'll see that your is uploaded. You can decide whether that's private or public. Obviously, if you want it to be found by other people, click public. The next step is to add some tags. Now, these are pretty important when you search for them on Instagram. This is what's going to come up. Firstly, I always put my brand name, which is my own name, so K. Leathers. Then we can put what it is, so happy birthday. Then we can break down the word, we can put associated words. Just to put the full thing in, I'm going to put my name and I'm going to put happy birthday as all one word. When I go to search this on Scram, I'm probably going to search Leathers as the first one. The third section here is Sol. For this, I would add your own website if you have one, that means that anyone searching jiffy and really liking this Jeff can find you as an artist and maybe commission you in the future, which is always a big bonus here. Also, you've got Add to collection. I've just set up this Instagram sticker selection one. I'm going to add this to this folder, the collections just make it easier to find things I recommend. I've selected that one and then click Upload to Jiffy. It will tell you when it's complete. Then there you can see your Jeff working on the website. Now it does compress it in a way. Don't worry too much if it looks a bit unusual in Jiffy when it's uploaded and you've had your account approved as an artist, then you'll be able to see your stickers looking perfect in scrap. Don't worry too much at this point. Now, as I just said, once you have five stickers on your page here, I've got seven stickers. I'm now able to apply for an artist's account. If you go to the three dots here and then FAQ, you can find for brands, creators and artists. Then you can look at Apply for an Artist channel. Now this will give you a bit of a guideline on how to apply for it, which is the next step that you will need to do in order for your stickers to show up on Instagram. If you go to this, you can click here, then you can apply via the form here. The best one is a creator. If you're working with a client who wants the Instagram stickers, then they would apply for brand. They will need to do that first before you can upload for them as a creator. Click Select Creator, and then you're going to fill out your account details here. Here you're going to check the box to confirm that your work belongs to you. That's very important. All of your work that you share must belong to you. If you've used one of my illustrations for animating, just make sure that you don't upload that as your own because that will get you kicked off. Make sure you have your own artworks that you're submitting. Once you've checked that box, submit the application, then it will say congratulations. So this could take 24 to 48 hours to approve. So make sure you're patient and just look out for that very important e mail. Once you've been approved, you'll get a lovely E mail from Gif telling you that you've been approved. And then when you log into your account, again, you will get this sort of congratulations message. So you can just go through that, find out about tagging practices, find out about content strategy. And you get different tools and things like that. So when you go to your channel, you will get a different looking channel like this. So once you've got this, you can add as many gifts as you like and these will be accessible on Instagram. To find your new stickers, just go to your stories and a relevant video, very relevant. And then go to your stickers and search your tags For me, it's my name, just type in my name. And then all of your stickers should come up. Let's put one on that we tried in the class. Let's go for a nice love sticker. Yeah, that looks great. Test out the others, they're looking really good. So that's how you get your stickers on Instagram. Now you have everything you need to create more gifts and stickers. I can't wait to see them on the project gallery and out there in the world of social media. Do tag me if you share your stickers and I'll make a big effort to use your stickers in my stories too. Stay tuned for the final wrapping up of this class. 12. Well done!: Well done for completing this class. You have learned how to sketch out and color a text based sticker design. How to import into Photoshop and after effects in animation ready layers. How to animate the position, scale, and color. Using motion tools to make those animations cute and fun. How to export those gifts ready for your portfolio. And how to create an artist channel and use your stickers on social media. Don't forget, you can apply these techniques to a whole world of illustrations. So get animating, I can't wait to see you uploaded projects in the project gallery and do pop any questions or ideas in there too. I check each of my classes regularly to offer help where I can do tag me if you put any work online. I always make an effort to share students' work on my stories and highlights. Finally, I really hope we had fun creating these stickers. I've gone through this so many times, marketing for different companies, and it always brings me great joy when someone uses one of my stickers. I hope it does the same for you too. Thanks again for taking this class and I hope to see you in a future one, all the best and happy animating.