Transcripts
1. Introduction: Drawing is such a great outlet using your imagination, creating those stories, and specifically telling your stories is great and letting people in. Sorry, I looked at you. My name's Karen. I go by okaykaren on TikTok. I'm an animator and I make quick, short, 15-second animations on TikTok. Today I'll be teaching you guys how to animate specifically for TikTok 15 seconds, and I'll be teaching you how to make your own character designs, so that way you can draw them as many times as you'd like. When I first started drawing on TikTok, I didn't really know much. If you scroll all the way down to the beginning, I was just drawing on paper. It wasn't real animation. It was until I met people on TikTok that I actually learned how to animate and how to do frame by frame and how to do smears and shrink and stretch and things like that. Now, I want to be there for you. I want to help you come onto the platform, it's an awesome community and I would love to see you there. By the end of this class, you will have a complete character design, a full storyboard, and a complete 15-second animation. To follow along, all you need is an iPad, procreate, and I'll be using an Apple pencil, if you don't have that, of course, you can always use your fingers. I'd love to see you guys' videos, please upload them in the Project Gallery and I can comment and give you guys feedback and any advice you guys need. I'm so sorry to get started. Let's go.
2. Understand TikTok: TikTok is a fast-paced video app and you can go from 15 seconds to 60 seconds videos, and the videos on there can go viral. I would say that it's a lot easier to gain a platform on TikTok than any other social media app and everyone is on it. My experience at TikTok algorithm loves the more that you post. For animation, I'll post once a week to once every two weeks, this because animation takes a while. But popular creators can post sometimes up to five times a day. As far as I'm aware when you post a video on TikTok, that one video has a 90-day shelf-life, meaning that that video can go viral at any point within those 90 days. Trending sounds are super important. In fact, when you click on a sound, it will tell you how many people have used that sound, whether it's 1,000 or 3 million. It's incredibly important to use those trending sounds because it's more likely that you'll end up on the For You page. Now, with trending hashtags, it's important that you use those hashtags wisely and you make sure that your video relates to that hashtag. With hashtags, it's very important that you specify them with your videos, things like For You page and FYP, those things aren't going to work. Everyone uses them, which means that your video's going to get drowned out in that hashtag. It's better if you do hashtag drawing, hashtag animation, hashtag doodles. The Creator Marketplace is where you as a creator can sign up once you turn 18 and sponsors and companies can reach out to you for jobs. Now, I have used this platform multiple times and I think it's great. It's a great way to meet other people and other companies. It's great insight to see how you can make animation into an actual job. In the animation world, we use personas. A persona is just an extension of yourself, an animated version of yourself. I personally use them just because I love to draw and I love to tell my stories through animation. My friends, such as tootymcnooty, king.science, paco.peace, zobybob colordogde, alexrabbit, abnormalchaos, all of them have great persona's, but some of them also just have characters. You don't have to have a persona. For example, I have river and Clover. River is a lizard and clover is a beetle who likes to wear a leaf. When creating a character of the most important thing is that the audience is able to build a relationship with them and a great way to do that is to reuse a character multiple times and give them a personality. Maybe they're sassy, maybe they're overly cheerful, create a life for that character. Now, let's come up with some character designs.
3. Come Up With Ideas: When I first started creating my characters, the most important thing was to make the character like me, so big curls, sweatshirts because that's what I wear on the daily, and just making the character me, a persona. What characteristics are special to you? Do you have big eyes? Do you have big hair? What clothes do you like to wear? For me I have big hair but when animating that it takes a lot so I stopped a beanie on top. One thing is to exaggerate, exaggerate, exaggerate. If you have big eyes, make them huge. If you have crazy hair, make it super crazy and messy. So this is one of my first ever animations involving my persona. There's a lot of colors going on here, and there's nothing really special about her, she has big curly hair and a red sweatshirt, that's it. She even has the okay on her shirt. Now, I wanted to redesign her, give her a little upgrade. I have several versions here of when I was drawing her. Number one was how I all ready had her, number two I was testing out different eyes and different beanies, number three I was giving her more slanted more soft eyes, and number four I got rid of the eyes completely, and number five I just had them peeking out a little bit, and over to the right, I have my characteristics that are important to me, such as my beanie, my curly hair, my lips, my hoodie, my crop top, and my tucked-in shirts. Those are some characters that I believe are important to creating my persona. Now take five minutes and write down some important characteristics for you. Do you have a small nose? A big nose? Big ears? Crazy hair? What do you like to wear? What are your body proportions? Are you really short? Are you tall? Are you buff? Take five minutes, come up with at least three, go. So here I took the ones that I enjoyed, which were number four and number five. I took those character designs and I play with them some more. I tried giving her different expression, such as sad, confused, angry. Something that I really liked was the beanie covering her eyes. Eyebrows is the strongest way to show emotion eyes being number two. Now, with my beanie I covered both of those, so that was my challenge. To fix that I took the fold of the beanie and she did it as if it was her eyebrow. Now, if it was swerved and wiggled she had one eyebrow up and one eyebrow down and she was looking at you like, huh. If she had them both down she was angry. If she had a huge upside-down neutral face that sad like a frown. So I'm playing with even more expressions seeing what I can do differently, playing with the hair and color palettes. All right, TikTok is very fast pace, so you don't want to spend all your time coloring and drawing, you're going to get those videos out as quick as possible. So when choosing your colors make sure to keep them simple, I would say max three to five. There's no need for any shadows, you can do that if that's your personal style but for me, I personally do not put shadows on my actual characters I leave that for the backgrounds. The easiest way to simplify your characters is to break them up into shapes so you can redraw them as many times as you need. For me, I like to use circles and rectangles that's it very simple shapes. A great thing about TikTok, the way that the screen is set up most of the time we're only going to animate from the torso up. A great way to keep the shape simple yet still interesting is it perhaps give actions to those shapes. For example, on my beanie, it's a simple rectangle but when that rectangle moves up and down it gives her emotion, which then creates interest to the character. Create your own style on TikTok and make sure you stand out. The way I did that is I looked at other animators that are on the platform and I saw what they were doing and I either took inspiration from that or I shied away from it. I wanted to make sure that I wasn't necessarily doing what everyone else was doing, I wanted to do characteristics that are different from everybody else's. For example, King has his crown, Tootymcnooty her eyes, she draws them slanted, for me it's my beanie. Those things are important to our characters and they're able to stand out on their own as our designs. S after you are able to figure out what face you want your character, I should go into the full body sketches and this is the fun part because you get to pick out what outfit you want to wear. For me, it was choosing between a hoodie, a baggy shirt, or a crop top. Now you guys know I obviously choose a sweatshirt. Now if you compare my first character design to my now character design, you can see how it's much more simpler it got even with the colors. Colors, creating your palette, creating a full 360 of your character. From my character, she has big lips. I want to show that for her side profile. When you've drawn that character so many times and you're realizing that you're having fun drawing that character and drawing their different emotions and giving them a personality, giving them a life, that's when you know you're ready to do a full 360. So this is my final character design. This is her back when I first draw her nowadays, she has a lot thicker line, which I will show you why that's important. For me, I like to use the monoline brush in procreate and that allows you to have thick lines without any pen pressure. So when I first started drawing her, I was using a the studio pen brush and that brush does have pressure sensitivity, so you're able to get thin and thick lines. This is my first animation with my character. Now you're going to be able to see her using her eyebrow, her brim, beanie, you're going to see her being able to use her beanie to show off her emotions. So the more you draw your character, the more you're going to learn about your character and ways to fix her or make her better. For me the line art was very important and I noticed she was blending into the background. Now to fix this, I gave her much thicker lines later on in my videos and it gave the background thinner lines so then she could stand out on her own. Example of this is SpongeBob, everyone knows SpongeBob and when you compare the drawing from the early 2000s to 2021, those drawings are completely different. Now for me drawing the beanie and showing off her emotions with the brim was exciting and challenging for me. Have fun, drawing is supposed to be fun and relaxing don't stress out about it. Don't worry about redefining your character later, I still think about changing my character and her color palette. I just don't.
4. Your Design in Action: Now, we've talked about how to create a character. Now, let me show you. Go ahead and open up your Procreate app. Once you open it, it's going to look like this. You're going to go ahead and click on the plus sign. We're going to click on the canvas named screen size. The first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and open up my brushes, go to sketching, and I like to use a 6B pencil. Now, when sketching for character designs, a lot of people tend to stick with this shape; circle for the head, neck, shoulders, torso, legs, feet, and arms. You give him a little happy face. A lot of people tend to stick with this shape, but you don't have to. I often think about changing it. You can have fun with it. Play with the proportions. If you want her have a circle head, but like a really small little torso, why not? If you want her to have a square or even a diamond shaped head, with a little belly, get her legs in here, just have fun with it. It doesn't have to be a person. A persona could be anything. It's a representation of you. When drawing my character, I like to start off with her head because with TikTok, the thing you're going to see the most and the thing that's going to catch their eye first, is the face. People want to see what expression that character has before they watch the video. Now, my character, she's happy, she's goofy, but she can also be at her best. I'm not going to lie. I'm going to take away her neck. No neck for her. Give her shoulders. Maybe she has one arm up, she's waving at you guys. She has one hip out. Remember like I said, she can be sassy. She has even one hand on the hip. Give her sweatshirt and her sweatshirt is baggy. Give her a little okay. Now, we're going to give her legs. I like to draw the legs a little bent, not so straight just because it's a lot more natural. Now, let's go ahead and draw her beanie, my favorite part. Now, we're actually going to draw her beanie up because she's excited to see you guys. If she was cranky today and woke up on the wrong side of the bed, she would have her beanie down. That's when you don't want to mess with her. Other than that, I'm sure she's happy to see you. With her hair, you want to be loose with your wrist because when you're loose with your wrist, you're able to create a lot more motion. With the hair, that's what I like to do. Just be loose, have fun. Her little nose, big smile, teeth, tongue, signature lip. Go ahead and draw her eyes, eyebrows, and there she is. Now, we're going to go in to the inking. Now to ink my character, I like to create a new layer. Go back to the sketching layer. We can actually name these two. We'll name this one sketching, and we'll name this one ink. Now with our sketching layer, we're going to click on the N, and you're to get the opacity. We're going to lower the opacity as much as you want, just so then we can see the ink layer a lot better. We're going to open up our pen brushes, go into calligraphy. Now, this is when I was talking about how I changed my character before. In inking, I was using this studio pen brush, which you can start off with very thin lines, and then you can get a lot thicker and thinner. But I was noticing that my character wasn't standing out when compared to her backgrounds, so I changed it. I now go into calligraphy and I use something called the monoline brush. I put the monoline brush on size 0. No pen pressure so you get super clean lines just like that. Let's go ahead and ink her, and don't feel afraid to mess up because I know I will in this lesson. Go ahead and draw her sleeve. Now, I like to draw her sleeves really baggy. When I first started drawing, my character took me way longer than what it does now. It comes naturally nowadays just because I know what parts of her are the easiest and what parts of her will be the most difficult. Don't worry about erasing a little bit or fixing your line art. Don't worry about it. It's all part of drawing. Don't stress out. Nothing is perfect. Especially when we start animating here, I'll show you how nothing is perfect. Draw her neck just a little one. Now with my character, her head is a circle. But I like to give her a little cheek. Let's go like that. Now, a great thing about Procreate is that if you hold down, it actually creates perfect lines for you. For example, if I want to draw straight line, that's not straight. But if I hold it down, it becomes straight. I've made a perfect vertical line. All I have to do is put one finger down, and it creates that perfect vertical line for me. Same thing with circles or arches. I'm going to need a perfect arch for the top of her beanie. Hold it down. Perfect. I can also hit Edit Shape that's right above, and I can edit the arch as much as necessary. Also, angle your paper. If you need to draw upside-down, draw upside-down. For me, it's a lot easier to make downward motions than it is to upward motion. If I need to flip her, I will. But you see how she's also just that simple shape of that everyone has like head, torso, and legs? A big reason why I've chosen not to redo my character design is because people already have fallen in love with her and I have fallen in love with her. Now, for example, a SpongeBob all of a sudden came out, and he was purple, you'd be confused. Even if you ask people who used to watch SpongeBob back in the early 2000s, they'll probably look at his new design from 2021 and be like, the old one was a way better. If I want to do a big change on my character, for example, her personality, I wanted to show her being grumpy, but she's not a grumpy character and I can't just change a personality like that. I created River. River is an over-dramatic, very rude, and very much a loner. He's complete opposite of Clover. Clover is exciting, nerdy, playful, and cheerful. Give her collar. Now, the monoline is very thick, and I don't want to use thick lines on her face just because it seems like it's too much. What I do is I go back to my studio paint brush, which is an inking, click on Studio Pen, and I do her face. You see how that's thinner? Give her some eyebrows. You don't have to stick directly to your sketch. If you notice something that's wrong, change it. For example, I drew her nose way too far to the right, so I'm going to move it to the left when I'm inking and boom, our line art is done. Now it's time to go into the coloring. Now the thing with Procreate is, all you have to do is click the circle in the upper right corner. When you click on that, you're given all these little squares at the bottom, which is great because you can add your characters colors in there for a quick grab and drop. Now, I already have my characters colors in there, so all I have to do is click on them. Since she's white, I'm actually going to go ahead and change our background color to a nice blue just so then I can see it a lot better. Click on Inking and slide it to the left. When you do that, you get Lock, Duplicate, and Delete. We're going to click on Duplicate. We're going to go to the bottom layer of ink. Now, what we're going to do is, we're going to drop our color. The reason why I do that is, I'll show you in a second, it's just so that while I'm coloring, I can still drop in the colors just fine, but I cannot draw over the lines. Color in her shirt, give her the signature, okay. Which all I have to do is draw an oval and hold, and it will give me a perfect O and then the okay. Go ahead and draw her mouth. Now, for her eyes, I like to do a little blue shadow on top just because if I don't, it's a lot of white, and it washes her eyes out. I like to add a little shadow on top. While I'm doing this, since we're drawing on the layer right underneath, it doesn't allow me to draw over my inking layer. Now, if I were to turn that layer off, you could see how it goes over. Put shadow under the nose. Again, this is just to give her face more definition since she is all white. Go ahead and draw her hair, get in these tiny spaces, now her beanie. Just quick add ink, color, and drop. Quick fill buckets. That is okay. Karen, that is how you draw my character. Go ahead and take this time, and to redefine your drawings. Now, if you want, please upload them in the project gallery and I can give you guys feedback, and any advice. I'm sure they came out amazing.
5. Sketch and Storyboard: Now, we're going to storyboard. The storyboard is quick and its messy. It's a great way to figure out what you want to do for your animation. Figure out whether or not you want to shrink or stretch and figure out script. Now, if you're new to storyboarding, do not make it perfect. It's supposed to be messy. No else can see it but you, it's meant to be a guide. Now, we're going to animate my character, breaking the fourth wall, excited and caught off guard to see you guys. In our Procreate app, we're going to go ahead and open up a TikTok canvas. Now, to do that, I'm going to click on the plus sign. I'm going to scroll down. I already have this canvas made, but to make a canvas because it does not come with a TikTok size, all you have to do is click on this plus sign and put in the dimensions. Then the dimensions for TikTok is 1,080 by 1,920 and it's in pixels. Now, this canvas size gives you 249 layers or 249 frames, we're talking animation. Now, I'm going to go ahead and open up the canvas that I've already made is right here, 1,080 by 1,920 pixels. Is a vertical canvas because TikTok as a vertical platform. To create a storyboard, all I do first we're going to change the color to black. We're going to pull out our sketching pencils, any sketching you want. Now, we're going to create our new layer. We're going to title it Storyboard, and we are going to create our first box. Storyboarding, you can use as many boxes as you want, and for TikTok, I like to use vertical boxes just so that I can get the framing correct. Now, we're going to start our storyboard layer to the left and we're going to hit "Duplicate." We're going to take it and we're going to slide it to the right. Now, to merge layers, all you have to do is either tap the layer and hit "Merge Down" or a quicker way is you can take your two fingers, put them on both layers and pinch. Now, we're going to duplicate them again, and just put it down. Merge, duplicate, put it down. It doesn't matter if they don't fit. Now, we're going to create new layers. This layer is going to be background. Another layer that we're going to enqueue title Character. This makes it a lot easier that way you can go back and make changes without having to erase the entire board. Now, I'm going to start off with the background. My idea is that she's sitting in her living room doing what she does best, which is art. Now, I'm creating storyboards, I tend to have an idea already set in mind. I play it out in my head, and then once I move the paper, it makes it a lot faster and figure out what exactly I want. For the backgrounds, all we have to do is duplicate them into every box. For this animation, we only need one background. We'll go ahead and draw just of what it would look like. There's like a little archway here and some nice paneling, I don't know how she wants to decorate her house. Some nice paintings. Personally, I always like to add a little hitting goodies in the background, whether it's pictures of my characters or river and clover or complete suns, little, inside joke [inaudible] my followers. Now, we're going to duplicate the background, put them in every frame. For you, if you're using multiple, just put them in the frame that you want them to be in. What's great is that we're keeping them on a different layer. At the end if you want to change it is simple, that emerge together. Right now we have our background. Now, we're going to go ahead and put in our characters. Now, to draw the characters and easier way so you can see them is I like to go to the background, click on the "N" and lower the opacity. That way when we draw our characters, is lot more clear. Let's go ahead and draw her. Now she's going to be painting, so some facing away from us. That's why you should always draw your full 360 so you know what she looks like from the back. Even sometimes only even draw the full character. I'll just draw a stick figure because I know that that's my character. No one else is going to see it but me. I don't need to get the full illustration in I just want to get the idea of what she's doing. For the next frame, we're going to have her looking over her shoulder. Remember, keep it loose. It doesn't really matter that she looks like her actual character or not. I want her to be surprised when she sees you guys and a caught off guard. Maybe her beanie is down. She's relaxed, she's in her natural state. She's painting. I forgot her beanie on the first one. See is always okay to go back and fix your mistakes. Even I still forget her beanie the most important part. Then she looks over behind her shoulder completely, she gets surprised by you guys. She is like, oh my God, these people watching me right now. Well, let me draw her eyes nice and big. Draw her beanie, and also you can choose whether or not you want to give a certain frame. I give as an important frame, you can choose whether or not to give it extra detail. Now, since she's excited to see you, I'm going to go ahead and do a shrink and stretch. Now, to do that, all I have to do is duplicate this layer or this frame, and I'm going to click on the arrow, and that allows you to move your character. I'm going to click "Freeform". I'm going to stretch her to make her eyes closed. I'm going to duplicate it again. Moving down to the next frame. I'm going to shrink her. What this does is it gives her a nice [inaudible] Those really exaggerates the fact that she's excited and caught off guard to see you guys. Go ahead and merge those layers. Duplicate this one again. You can also write notes on your storyboards, just quick reminders. When you look back on them, when you make your final animation, you remember little things that you wanted to add. For example, I'm going to go ahead and write stretch, and I'm going to write shrink, like surprise. Now, notice I'm running out of frames. All I have to do is turn off the character frames, create a new layer and name it Character 2. Now, she's going to be foil looking at us. Go to her full front-facing, shoulders up because she's excited and we're actually going to draw her hand waving at you guys. Now, the lines that I just drew across her hand are called action lines. It's a great way to suggest motion without actually animating that motion. Super excited to see you, and that's our last frame. Now, let's take our storyboards and start animating.
6. Start Your Animation: Now let's go ahead and start animating and Procreate. We're going to go ahead and open up our layers, and we're going to create a new layer. We're going to title it Sketching Animation. Turn off all the other layers. We're just going to use those as a reference. I might go back to those every now and again. Our background. For backgrounds, I tend to keep things very simple. Get out our sketching tool, we're going to draw same exact thing as our storyboards, just a little bit more clean. Again, it doesn't have to be perfect. Give some dimension to the Canvas. Maybe she even has some paint tubes up here. This is the part where you can start going into more detail. Maybe you want to animate your bedroom. You can look around your room for different decorations that you want to add into your actual animation. Now, let's work on the further background. Maybe there's an archway here that can even make the space bigger. Details I enjoy adding is wall trim, some carpet, fun. Maybe she has some papers over here with some doodles on them. Now she's erasing little carpet marks, maybe she's doodling over here too. There's crayons on the floor. Maybe there's pictures on the wall. Make this space theirs, it's their home. They're going to have pictures of themselves, maybe pictures of their friends or other characters you want to design. I like to put posters and when I do posters, I like to make them cricket. Just to add imperfections and a little bit of human in there, and after you are done sketching out your background, we are going to move on to the actual frame of animation. You're going to take your sketching animation, we're actually you're going to rename this. We're going to rename it Background Sketch final because it's for our final animation. We're going to take it and we're going to move it to the very bottom of the layers. All I have to do is click and drag. Now we're going to go ahead and click on the wrench tool in the upper left corner, and then once you click on that you're going to click on Canvas and you're going to turn on Animation Assist. Once you turn on the Animation Assist, you're going to get this bar down below it says play, Settings, and add frame. Now, when I click on settings, you get loop, ping pong, and one-shot, we're going to be doing loop. You also got your frames per second. The way I work is in loops. Every couple of layers or frames, those will all have different frames per second depending on what the action is. We're going to keep it on eight or nine, and we're going to take our onion frames and we're going to set it to one. In opacity will set it to maybe 35 is good. Once you click on the first frame, you will click ''Background'' and that automatically sets that as the background, so watch. When I go into my layers and I create a new frame, has it as a background, even though this is a blank frame. Let's go ahead and draw the first frame of many. When you're animating in the different positions that you have to do, don't feel pressure to have them be perfect. You can always go back and fix them. Once you go into the inking phase, that's when you're kind of not able to transform, just because we are working with pixels, and if you try and transform and stretch a pixel, it gets blurry. In the sketching phase, this is where you want to just manipulate her like a puppet. Now at this time, if you want to look back at your storyboards and just double-check and make sure that you're drawing the correct frame, you can. I'm going to give her an apron just because I think it would be so cute if she was painting with one and maybe the front of it, it's also covered in paint. That's our first frame. Now we're going to move on to the next one. All the way up to do is click "Add frame", and it automatically does it for us. I want to animate her painting. We'll probably do maybe three or four frames of her painting with her arm. All we have to do is hit ''Duplicate''. Then we can just erase the part that we want to move, and we draw. Slight movement, there's even some paint here now or something. Now actually we're going to fix her legs and then there's the same as the last frame just so that it looks like she's in place but just leaning forward a little bit. If you have a steel frame that's longer than a second, I recommend redrawing that frame. Just that then there's a little bounce or like a little shape that kind of adds interests to a still frame. We're going to duplicate that layer again, and we're going to stretch just a little bit. I like to do shrink and stretches, you can either exaggerate them a lot, have a big stretch and a big shrink to exaggerate an emotion of her being surprised, or you can just do a little bounce, and basically, what that does, it just makes something look more alive. All I did to do that is click the ''Transform'' button, go to free form, and you can simply just stretch and drag her, as you please we're just going to do a little bit. We just want a little bounce, give a little life to her. After the stretch is a shrink, so we're going to duplicate that layer and then shrink. She will pop up and be back to normal. Do click at ''Normal layer'' and pull it up. We'll even label it. This is the stretch. This is a shrink and this is normal. Now I like to animate things in segments. I'll animate the head first and then go back and work on the arms. For example, right now I animated her whole body and I'm going Back in order to animate that paintbrush. Right now the paintbrush is going down and then it gets pushed in here, which goes up. We're actually going to flip it around. We erase this one and redraw it so it makes sense with her motion, she's going up. We're going to have the paintbrush bottom. See how that looks. That was the paintbrush that's going to animate her arm. Use the lasso tool, which is this S up in the left-hand corner. I have it on freehand, and you can simply just drag the elbow, press the transform button, and just rotate it, like it's a puppet. Right here I'm actually going to move her whole arm just back, and we're going to lower the frames per second just so that I can get a chance to see what it looks like on loop. That looks fine to me. We got our first loop done. Now it's time to have her slowly rotate around and say hi to us.
7. Finish Your Animation: We've got the first loop done, now we're going to do the turn around. So we'll go ahead and start off with her head like I always do. Hold down, get a perfect circle. Sometimes I like to draw where her face would be, just because that back join can get a little distracting when drawing. Go ahead and draw her belly and her belly is going to be down on the first frame, then it's going to pop up really quick when she notices us. Give her a neck, now remember this is her side profile and you want to follow this back. We call it an onion layer, and that's going to be the layer that's behind it that's how the lower opacity. You're going to want to look at that and use that as a guide or as a tracker for your next frame. If her arm is there, she's starting to move towards the side. We're going to squish this shoulder here and extend that shoulder there, because now you're starting to see more of the front of her. As you enlisted, her hand up off of the canvas yet she still not really noticing us. Don't forget any accessories such as apron also her hair tough my God, very important. One of my favorite things to animate is her hair tuft, and I'll get further into that later on. Now, we're going to do the full front drawing and at first she's just going to notice us and then we're going to go into the shrink. Stretch where we're really going to be able to exaggerate it, so beanie goes up, she started a peek out of it. She's like, "What's going on here? Who are you?" Hair tuft, nose, shoulders, remember you use the onion layer as a guide and for her mouth since she hasn't really noticed this yet. She's not going to be too excited, just going to be confused so we just have, what is that? Who are you? She's just been spotted creating her new masterpiece. What is this? What are you doing? She has caught us spying on her. Maybe even she moves her hand like dour as if she's done painting. "She's like, Oh, they copy." Now her beanie goes up with that motion in mind that her beanie going up her hair, a little hair tuft is going to bounce. Just add some life to it, so we're actually going to duplicate this frame. Go to the first frame that we were on, move her hair tuft down to create this first layer again and have her hair tough go up. Now I'm going to replay that, look at the hair bounce. In fact, I even want this little apron ties to bounce. Since she's stretching up or bouncing up, everything like clothes and hair is going to be pushed down. So for her apron, the strings and the last of the rounded are going to be pushed down. Then again, she is playing with it and then going back and watching it and seeing how it looks it's all just playing around. It's little things like that that keep the viewer's attention long enough to watch the full 15 seconds. Now we're going to break the fourth wall and she is seeing us for the very first time and she's like, "Whoa, what?" We're going to stretch her up super high, and we're going to duplicate it again. We're going to shrink her down very low and then we'll go back to the normal frame and when we do labeling we'll do a stretch and we'll name this one shrink. So let's go to our stretch and things like her paint brush, she's going up, everything is going down so this is going to stretch. Things like her hair so we're going to flop it down and for her eyes, lets go ahead and close them. Maybe even her armed go up, like her shoulders and when you're surprised your shoulders they go up. If there's ever a movement that you're struggling with, I would recommend either recording yourself and doing that movement or just looking at yourself in the mirror, whether that's waving your hand or acting surprise. Little movements like that are going to add a lot more interest to your drawings. This is who raise up her shoulders, that also means her arms need to be raised as well. I will go into the shrink, we're going to close the eyes again. Raise her when erasing that eye because when she shrink on her eyes it closed super tight so hair tuft. Now for the last regular frame I'm actually going to add since it's such an extreme bounce. For example, if I had a bouncy ball and I bounced it really hard, it's going to bounce within those bounces are going to get smaller and smaller and smaller until it stops, so we already did one really big bounce with her hair. Now we have to do little balances just until it goes back to normal. We'll just do a slight downwards motion with her hair and then is it becomes backup, so let's go ahead and watch that for review. See something as simple as just the hair bouncing adds so much more to it, now she's happy to see us. I'm actually going to animate a little head till super easy just grab your Lasso Tool. Going to bring one shoulder up, because she's about to wave at us and see for her left arm is been in a position for way too long. So we're going to mix it up, turn our onion skin back on and we're actually going to just have a bend here. Give her a nice smile, squint up her eyes a bit because her cheeks looking good to me since she tills off her head her bang went up, has to come down. It's like her bang is her own character to be honest, let's go ahead and watch the full thing. See that little apron browns it makes my heart a little more happy. Now that she has noticed us, now we're going to animate the wave. What I think could be fun is if when she goes to wave her hand, maybe she still has paint on her paint brush and when she goes to wave it paint everywhere. Right now I want her to flip this paint brush all the way around, so what we're going to do is we're going to duplicate it. First we'll move it and then we'll duplicate it, we're going to make a counter clockwise motion with the paint brush. You just a little bit by little bit, fix her hand up. Now we can go into things like smears, I usually like to do smears in-between frames. So if I'm doing a wave for example, I'll do keyframe. A keyframe is a still frame and is usually the most important frame, so keyframe would be the beginning, another keyframe at the end. Everything in between should be blurred out, so we're going to duplicate this brush. Since we are in animation mode, when I duplicate this is going to make it a new frame, but we can always just merge it down, so we'll edit it how we want. It doesn't have to be too clean because we are going to blur it, and the way you do that is you can go and select just the parts that you want to blur, which right now is just the paint brushes get the action lines in there. Once that is selected, you click on the Magic Wand Tool, which is again up in the left-hand corner Click on it, and we're going to do motion blur. When you click on "Motion blur," we're going to do layer. You drag your pencil from the left to the right as much as you want and that is what makes it blurry. We're just going to do a little bit, I'm doing about 10 percent. We're just going to do that again until it's fully vertical in her hand. For the paintbrush bristles, they're being stretched out right now. When that motion stops, the bristles are going to be stretched out, and then they're going to bounce back. That's what we're going to animate. Remember to use your onion layer as well. I'll do a squish, duplicate that layer again, and have it just rotate back up. Now let's go ahead and go back and watch it again. Go and press "Play", painting. Now, this is us and flips our paint brush back up. Wow, beautiful. Now that we've animated the paintbrush, if we go back and look, the rest of her is pretty still. We can go back and just make some slight changes. Again, we're not going to do a lot and you want the viewers eyes to stay on the paintbrush because that's going to be the focal point of where she goes to wave. Let us make some slight changes. So she does like a little arm bounce. Bounces are my favorite. Can you tell, may be just a little shrink. It won't even do a stretch. Just a little shrink. Oh, that's beautiful. Now let's animate her hand waving hello. We're going to grab her by the elbow. Like I said before, remember key frames are the most important frames. Beginning and end, everything in between it's going to be a motion blur. Go ahead and select it and transform, rotate. Remember, because her arms are moving to the right, that means the paintbrush bristles have to move to the left. That's going to be our first key frame. Now we're going to do our last key frame, and then we'll go back and do everything in the middle. Since she's moving her arm to the left, the paintbrush bristles go to the right. Now if I were to just do these two key frames, you see how stiff that is. This is how I used to animate actually before I even knew what blur and smear and things like that was. Now we're going to go back to our first key frame and we're going to duplicate it by sliding to the left, hitting "Duplicate." We're going to do all the smears that are in-between. It's the same idea with the paint brush like we did earlier. Just drag it, move it towards the middle, duplicate it. Again, when you duplicate, takes it to another layer, no worries. Change it and then just merge it down, then erase the unnecessary bits in between. If you want, you can even go ahead and add some of those action lines. With action lines, you want to get smaller and smaller until you get to your last key frame. See how the action lines are really big. Then they get smaller and fade out. Right now we're going to select her arms or anything you want to be blurred. We can go to our Magic Wand Tool. Go to Motion Blur layer and just drag it to the left. Let's see what that looks like on a loop. We're actually going to go back and turn off all of the other layers. If you don't want a frame to play, you just simply turn it off. Now that we've got our four frames, we are going to press play. Since her arm is moving, the rest of her body is not going to just sit still so we'll go back and animate the rest. Now remember this is going to be on a loop. The amount of frames that we have is okay. It's only four. It's on a loop, you can play it as much as you want. Let's do some paint splatter. Fun. We're going to turn some of those layers back on whenever she goes to spin it. Draw some drops there, small drops, some more. They're really stretching here because the force of gravity, then they'll shrink up here. When the paint brushes at a full almost up, the droplets of the paint are going to get more and more squash and not so stretched out. Around here we'll just have them be like almost circles. Have them going down. You can even erase them on a slight lower opacity just so then it looks like it's fading away from the animation. Let's go ahead and watch that. Perfect. Now this is the fun part where we get to actually have her wave and I want to have the paint actually splatter on her face. Paint brush is going this way to the left so have the drops go that way too. For the smear, I'm not going to worry about the smear because it's going by so fast and I'm going to be able to see the paint drops. Since the paint brush is almost at a full stop, have them just be circles. Right now I'm just playing around. I'm testing something out that I haven't done before and that's perfectly okay. Then we'll have her shrink because she's like, "Oh, paint all my face. Oh no." Have her close her eyes. That's one thing too, I always forget. Now my characters need to blink. If you just have your characters staring into the screen the entire time, that can get a little freaky so you want to make sure they're alive and that they are a little bit more human and not just a drawing. Make sure they blink, make sure there's a little bit of movement to them. Now for blinks, I like to squish the eyes just a little bit. Since she's going down, she's shrinking. That means that her her hair is going to go up so we'll give it a little flop. Let's go a head watch that back now. Go ahead and press "Play." That's cute, I love that. Now with Procreate, it only allows you to use a certain amount of layers depending on what Canvas size you are using. For example, the Tik Tok on that we are using it only allows us to use up to 200 layers or frames. Instead of duplicating that layer, you can simply just go to your animation bar, click on the layer that you want to duplicate and where it says Hold Duration, I'm going to do four. It will hold that duration forming without using frames or layers that I don't want to waste. Let's go ahead and press "Play" again and we're going to speed it up to 10. Maybe when she gets hit, like when you get hit by something, you get hit by it and then you bounce back, and you bounce back just to position. What we're going to do, we're going to have her head just bounce back just a little bit, tilt it up and back. We're going to see what that looks like. Perfect. It's a little things like that that I love. She's going to look back at the camera and smile at us. This is going to be our last frame. Perfect. I'm going to go ahead and ink and color. I hope you do the same and take this time to do it yourself. Also feel free to upload them into the project gallery. I would love to see what you got.
8. Developing Your Unique Style: You made an animation. Now, let's go ahead and start talking about style. Now, animating on TikTok, it takes time. Learning how to do smears and shrink and stretches, are all things that I've learned over the past two years of being on TikTok. I have a lot of learning to go. When I first started TikTok, I was just drawing on paper. I wasn't concerned about how I was drawing or how it even looked. I was just having fun, and that's the most important thing, is just have fun. Don't even worry about your style, it will come naturally as you learn how to draw and what you like to draw. There are a lot of animators on TikTok and I still even get intimidated by some of my friends, and they're crazy talent, but then you can't let that stop you because your unique style that you will learn to grasp will make you stand out on any platform. Also, another thing that will keep it unique to you, even though there's a lot of different animators, is your stories, the things that you want to tell and things that you want to share, are unique to you and no one else can replace that or duplicate it. Don't let doubt or fear of an audience watching and seeing your artwork stop you from doing what you love.
9. Final Thoughts: Congratulations, you've made it to the end of the SkillShare class. Make sure to share it with your friends, I'd love to see what you've created. Make sure to upload it into the project gallery. Don't stress about posting it onto Tiktok. It's super easy and super fun. See you on the For You page.
Karen Jordan, Lets doodle
