Animate Your Illustrations: Bring Your Artwork to Life with Procreate Dreams

1. Introduction: Have you been wanting to take your illustrations to the next level and bring them to life through animation? If you're like me, the answer is yes, of course. But for many of us, animation can seem overwhelming or intimidating. Will Procreate Dreams opens up a whole new world of possibilities. To finally animate your illustrations, all from the comfort of your ipad. Procreate Dreams is an incredible new app that combines the power of procreate, a popular digital painting app with animation features to create stunning animated artwork. And while of course it takes time, I promise it's not as scary as it seems. My name is Mimi and I'm the owner and artist of an independent studio called Mimochai, making it books, products, and classes. I've always wanted to add animation to my digital illustrations, but generally found it way too tedious. Procreate Dreams has finally put animation within reach for me. Through its streamlined design and unique features such as performing. I meet this class to share what I've learned and be an approachable introduction to other illustrators who are also not traditional animators. In this class, I'll show you how to use Procreate Dreams through a fun and approachable class demo that builds upon each step to make a final, beautiful looping animation. Together we'll explore the three powerful methods of animation in procreatee dreams, frame by frame animation, framing, and performing. I'll provide everything that you need and also cover tips and workarounds for common issues that beginners face with the app. By the end of this class, you'll have the fundamental skills and knowledge to start creating your own looping animated illustrations. There are so many ways that you can use these skills. Here your work on social media platforms, send them as gifts. Expand your portfolio and much more. Just imagine your artwork coming to life, telling stories and captivating your audience. If that's what you've been looking for, let's get started. 2. What We'll Learn: I'm so glad that you've joined this class. Let's go over what we'll create in this class together and what tools you'll need. We're going to start with an illustration and turn it into a looping animation that will export as a video and a jiff. I've designed the class demo to be based on the four count breeding loop to give us an easy structure to work with because there's a clear pattern of going in for accounts and then coming back out for accounts. I think this is a great structure for a beginner to time their illustrations to and it's a meaningful way to create an animated illustration. I'll provide all of my working files in the class material so that you can follow along step by step. But of course, you're also welcome to work on your own illustration files. My approach by this class is to focus on the basics and most helpful tools and tips that I found as I was learning Procreate Dreams. As an illustrator, that is not an animator, this is not an advanced technical animation class. But rather how you can use the power of this new application to really breathe life into your illustrations in an approachable and manageable way. All you'll need is your ipad, of course, and your pencil. Procreate and Procreate Dreams. As for the working files, I've provided them in the class materials. And all you have to do is save it to your ipad in case you're unfamiliar with that process. Let's go over it together. So I'm going to be providing you this procreate file, An illustration that I created that will call peace. Pull that file up on your computer and airdrop it to yourself. And this should pop up on your ipad screen. Later on the class demonstration, I'll show you how we'll work with that in our Procreate Dreams app. For now, you don't have to worry about it. We're just going to dive right in with the app as it comes. Last thing I want to highlight is that I recommend keeping the link to the Procreate Dreams official handbook handy. It has all of the main terminology in there and is constantly being updated as the app has new versions released. Once you have all of your tools and materials collected, let's continue by talking a little bit about the difference between procreate and procreate. Dreams 3. Procreate vs Procreate Dreams: Because this class is designed for illustrators who are already pretty familiar with procreate. I want to spend some time talking about the difference between procreate and procreate dreams. Because I'm sure many of you have questions on whether you really need both apps or what exactly one is for compared to the other. Procreate is perfect for digital painting and illustration. I've used it for about ten years now, created entire books with it. I absolutely love the program, and I assume you do too if you're watching this class. Procreate is best for drawing and painting. You're able to do a lot more transformations and adjustments to your drawings. We selection tool, you have a lot of really powerful adjustments. And you have the brush studio. I really think of them as working hand in hand together, creating a lot of your more advanced illustrations and detailed work that you need to do a lot of adjustments and selections to in procreate and then importing them into Procreate Dreams. Now Procreate's intention is for Procreate Dreams to be a fully functioning all in one animation app. And you can do a lot of drawing and painting within that app itself. But as of now, at least for me, I'm just so used to doing my work and my digital painting in procreate that I find using both of them together to be the best for me. Procreate Dreams, on the other hand, has very powerful animation features that cannot be found in procreate. Now I just want to give a high level overview of how you can animate in procreate dreams and how that's different from procreate. There are three main ways that you can animate in procreate dreams. Frame by frame animation, which is like the traditional type of animation you have in mind when you think of classic Disney movies, is drawing one frame by one frame. And when you put them all together and play them back at a fast frame rate, it looks like it's moving. There are a lot of helpful features in the Procreate Dreams apps such as onion skins that will allow you to experience this in a much smoother way. Now Procreate does have some level of this through their animation assist feature, but it is a much more robust and seamless experience in procreate dreams. The two other ways of animating and procreate dreams are related and totally different from how you can animate and procreate. Procreate dreams introduces performing, which is this totally unique feature I've never seen anywhere else. And it's really exciting, especially for somebody like me who is not really an animator. Performing uses the technology of key frames, which exists in apps such as after effects. If you've ever used a program like that, if you have never touched anything like that, don't worry. I will cover all of it in this class demo together. For now, it's just helpful to know that Procreate Dreams brings in this technology that used to require a desktop computer, all of these different apps, and now it brings all of it to your ipad in one simple application with key frames and performing. You're able to do all of these different types of animation to your illustration that do not require drawing your work over and over again. But there is a learning curve when it comes to figuring out how to apply it and make it work for you. And that's where this class is going to come in handy. Don't be intimidated, overwhelmed, or frustrated by any of this. I know it can feel like a lot when you're just getting started, but this class is going to go step by step. Little baby steps through an illustration that is already provided so that you can see how it all comes together. And really do hands on exercise yourself so that you can get familiar with all of these different types of animation. You'll see what I mean as we get into the demo together. Another note is that this class is filmed using the 1.07 version of Procreate Dreams. They are constantly releasing new updates and features. I know they're working furiously on it. Just keep in mind that if you're watching this class a few months from now or even a few years from now, your interface might have a lot more robust functions. For now, you have everything you need between procreate and procreate dreams to join this class. With that, why don't we open up procreate dreams and get started. 4. Interface: Let's open up Procreate Dreams on our ipads and take a look around. The app is going to open up into what's called the theater. This is where you're going to see all of your procreate Dreams files. You'll notice the sidebar here which allows you to select where the files are located. Mine are currently all located on my ipad, but there's also the option to save your files to your icloud drive. The benefit of this is that you can work on the same file across different devices if they all share the same icloud drive, and you can free up storage from your ipad onto the cloud. The app is going to come with some existing animations, which procreate has commissioned professional animators to create so that they can show and demonstrate what the app is capable of. They're really fun to see and can be helpful to study. But keep in mind that these demo animations are really advanced. On the one hand, don't be intimidated by thinking that this is what you're expected to create right away. On the other hand, don't think that these are super easy. And this is a magical app that's going to allow you to create animations at this level right away. They're really here to show you what the app can do and provide inspiration and good reference. This still takes a lot of time and animation skill to create. But what Procreate Dreams offers as an app is a way to do all of this on the ipad, which is really amazing. So if you want, just take some time right now to click on this little play button so that you can watch all of the animations if you would like. And then we'll continue on. Of course, you can also start a brand new file by clicking this plus sign up here. Now you'll see that Procreate Dreams comes with a few helpful preset options. But keep in mind that you're not committed to these. Within each file, you'll be able to customize the dimensions. Again, you're not tied to anything at the beginning. These are just there to help you get started. Let's open up the preset for vertical video sharing. There's two options at the bottom, and they're not honestly that different. Clicking on draw just helps open it up immediately into the drawing mode. Which can be helpful just to get started right away. Whereas clicking on empty opens up a totally blank slate that you can decide how you want to get started. Maybe you want to start by importing a video, or a photo, or a file that you already have. But you'll be able to get to the exact same place at the draw mode just by clicking on Draw and Paint, and starting on your first frame. Now going back to our theater, we'll just click on this little mosaic icon here. The next thing I want to show you is that you can easily rename your files by just clicking and holding. And then these options will come up. You can rename your file, you can duplicate your file, share your file, copy it to your icloud drive, and delete your file. Let's go ahead and rename it just to see how that is. And so that's very simple. Now let's open up one of the existing animations on the app so that we can all be on the same page as diving. Now to get started, I recommend creating a duplicate of the one you want to open. Now you have a project file open, and you'll see that there's two main workspaces. This top part is called the Stage, and this is where you will draw and paint and perform, which is a unique Procreate Dreams feature that will get into a lot more later. Then on the bottom half is what we call the time line. This is where you can compose and keyframe and edit all of your content. All of the content that lives down here is being shown up here. If you've ever used any movie editing program or animation platform such as after effects, this will look familiar to you. But for purposes of this class, I'm going to assume that you've never seen anything like this. You've only used procreate. We'll all be on the same page. As we go through each feature and function the timeline, you can really think of as the layers in a digital painting file with the difference, of course, that you can audio and can add video and everything that makes this different from digital painting versus animation. Now let's take a look at these right here inside icons, which are going to be your go to functions. By clicking on the plus sign, you can add different tracks. You can add photos, videos, text, and existing files. Adding track really just opens up a new layer. Whereas adding these content pieces will open up these particular items on their own individual tracks. All of this is going to make a lot more sense as we get into the class demo. For now, I just want to give you a high level overview so you can get an understanding of the lay of the land. Now the next icon is going to be your draw and paint mode. You'll notice that once I clicked on that, the stage transformed into draw and paint mode. Which means bringing up these icons up here which are going to look familiar. If you've used procreate before, you have your brushes here and they're organized to the default brushes that Procree Dreams comes with all of the different categories that you can explore. You have your smudge tool right here, the eraser tool, the layers. If you click on the layers, you might get this message that says, cannot open layers when nothing is selected. If that happens to you, you'll just go down to your timeline and make sure that you have a drawing selected. Next to the drawing paint mode is the timeline edit mode. And what this does is turns on the function where your pen turns into this magic wand of sorts. And it looks like this light saper thing, but just makes it really easy to select items and you'll be able to manipulate them and basically selecting more than one track at a time. It's super easy, you just draw on what you want to select. If you want to select anything, you literally just draw a line through it and you want to select them again, you just draw on top of them again. Next to the timeline edit icon is the performing icon, which is a record button. When you click on that again, you'll notice that the stage shifted in mode. It has this ready recording button blinking. And that means it's ready to record any movements that you make onto the stage. And of course, this playhead button is how you're going to preview whatever animations that you're working on. That's pretty intuitive, but one thing I want to show is that when you hit play, it's going to play only the portion of your content that is showing on your timeline screen. Right now, I can see the entire time line and all of my content. So it's going to play the full animation. But if I were to zoom all the way in on this animation, it will just play this particular portion of the clip. You'll see didn't go all the way to the end, it just looped back to the beginning. That's really helpful if you just want to focus on a particular part of the animation that you're working on. And replay only that section instead of having to watch your entire animation over and over again. Those are the functions of the five right hand side icons. A couple other more hidden areas that I want to show you are some settings. The settings for each project are actually in this title. You click on the title and you'll have all of these different options to adjust the settings under properties. You can adjust the frames per second, the duration, the width, and height. If frames per second is totally new to you, I'm going to link you to a Youtube video which explains it really well. But basically if you click on it, you can decide how many frames per second your file is going to have. That basically means how smoothly versus choppy the animation style is going to be. This one is on cinema 24 frames per second, which is a nice default to use. Duration is also really important because that is going to affect how long the timeline is. Width, and height is where you can adjust the dimensions. If you are not constrained by the presets that you select, you can always adjust them here at any time during the project. That is a great place to customize some work. And of course, it can put your ownership there as well. There are a few other options that you can go through and explore on your own. I think one really important one to highlight here is under preferences. First of all, you have your pressure and smoothing options for your pencil here. If you're familiar with procreate, you will be familiar with these curves. You do stabilization motion filtering and apply app pressure sensitivity. I'm going to be using a default just to keep things simple, but one thing I do want to highlight is this comes usually with enable painting with finger turned on, I'd like to turn it off because with so many gestures in procreate dreams, if you have it on, it's easy to accidentally make little marks with your finger on your drawing. These little marks might be invisible in aesthetic illustration, but can become really obvious in a moving animation, while at the same time being hard to hunt down and erase. So just to avoid that, and I honestly don't ever paint with my finger anyway, just with the pencil I have that turned off. And I also increase this rapid undue delay timing for a similar reason. I believe it comes default pretty low, which means it will quickly assume that you want to do a rapid undue delay. The issue with that is that with so many two finger gesture movements within procreate dreams, I was finding that a lot of times when I meant to just pan around the app, thought I wanted to undo, I would undo work that I wanted to keep just by increasing this to say a second. It just takes longer to register and make sure that I intended to do a rapid undue delay so that there isn't that mistake that happens. Lastly, down here under history, you can decide how many stored undue steps that you want to keep. You can go all the way to infinity, which is crazy. I personally keep it around 100 or 250 because this does mean a bigger file size. And I find that 102, 50 is enough. Another area that I want to show you is just under the stage. If you click on the time code here, you'll be able to show onion skins. This is a very important feature in animation programs because you'll be able to see what's before and in front of the current frame you're drawing on. That way, you'll be able to tell where you need to fit in certain drawings to complete a motion sequence. If you've ever seen two D animators work, you'll notice that they're constantly flipping back and forth on their pages to see if their drawings are animating smoothly. And that's the same idea with these onion skins. And it's really helpful to have them turn on. You can go backwards and forwards in terms of what to show. And you can change the colors so that the ones that were in the back are clearly distinct from the ones in the front. And can decide how many frames you want to show. And even the capacity under here is also you can change the background color of your entire animation. I don't use this that much, I keep it white or keep it too transparent. Because if there is a color that's truly the background of my animation, I'd rather keep it as a track so that I can manipulate it later, which I'll explain more as we get into the demo. The last thing I want to mention, just about this whole interface, is that your stage is really unique to procreate dreams compared to procreate because it extends past the frame that you see here. You'll notice that there is a lower capacity drawing here and that's just the entire drawing. Procreate Dreams is supporting 1 million by million pixel canvas. You can imagine having a huge drawing and your entire animation is just panning around this single drawing. This is really different from procreate, because in procreate, when you have any pixels that go off the canvas, those pixels get deleted. And this is a really important aspect of procreate dreams that I want to make sure we're familiar with. So that's the basics of the interface and the settings of procreate dreams. Now let's get a little deeper into the timeline and talk about how we navigate around, manipulate our content, and get things organized. 5. Timeline Navigation: Now that we have a lay of the land, let's get to know the timeline a little bit better. Because I know it can be a little intimidating when you're totally new to this format. The first thing to know is that the timeline is made up of tracks. Each of these long bars is called a track. Like I mentioned, you can think of them as layers in your drawing with the ability to edit actions and animations. Now there are many different gestures and ways to manipulate the timeline that are maybe not very obvious at first. But once you get into it, you'll really get the hang of it and you'll be amazed how this really simple interface can have so many powerful adjustments. The first thing we'll talk about our content options. When we click and hold on a content in a track, either with our finger or with a pencil, you'll see that these different options come up. You can rename your track. You can highlight your track with an assigned color. You'll see these colors correspond with this color right here. The way that these highlight colors help is just allow you to quickly identify where your pieces are. You can imagine that these are all gray. It'd be hard to tell where, say, your character is versus your background versus all of your other elements. By having certain tracks assigned to different colors, it becomes a lot easier. I highly recommend that for organization. There are also blend modes. Just like in procreate, you have all of your blend modes here, From multiply to lighten, color, Dodge, overlay. These function just like in procreate, it will affect all of the tracks below it. Next we have our mask options. You can use clipping masks and layer masks. Here you'll have the option to group and ungroup different tracks. Right now I have a group selected, the option is to ungroup. I'll show you what fill duration does in a second, but basically when you start a drawing, it'll just create one frame. If you want to extend it all the way across, you'll hit Fill Duration. Then you have these track options as well, which is to show hide all and delete the track if you would like. Instead of coming here, I recommend just using this check mark right here to show and hide. I find that much quicker and easier. And those are the track options. The next thing I want to highlight is that there's content thumbnail for every track. You'll see where your content exists. And you'll notice that a track can also have empty content over here. When I click on it, I'll have track options. You'll notice that when I click and hold on content, I get different options. That makes sense, because now there's actually things to manipulate. If you're ever not seeing the options that you are expecting, make sure that you're clicking on the right area of your track. Another helpful thing to know about the tracks and the content thumbnails is that by using three fingers and scrubbing up and down and also left and right, you're able to manipulate how much you're able to see, how tall these bars are or how wide you're able to see. And that's really helpful. You have a lot of tracks going on and you need to see where all of your content is. Once you have them open, you just have a finger to pan around. So that's really helpful and you can have the two pinch zoom to zoom in and out. The main thing to keep in mind about content versus tracks is that tracks are this entire bar. Content are these pieces that live on your tracks. They can be drawings, they can be audio, they can be photos, they can be videos. A content is not necessarily a track. A track holds your content. Now going back to the content pieces, there are several ways to work with your content. By clicking on content within a track, you'll find that there's this bounding box that opens up. This allows you to make simple transformations, such as making it bigger, and then you click on it. This little handle shows up on any corner. This allows you to rotate, you're drawing. Then as you're rotating, you'll notice that this crosshair comes up and that I'm rotating the wheel around that crosshair if I wanted to make him rotate around his fins. Instead, I click on these three little dots and another menu appears. I can move this anchor point. I just move these crosshairs over here. Hit Done. Now when I go back to my little rotate handle, he's being rotated around that anchor point. The next thing you can do is to tap and hold and drag your content around. So this is going to move the timing of that piece. That's going to be really important as you time your animation or watch free order layers. I can also tap and hold and drag it up and down, Just like with layers to change the order of things. And what other tap, hold and drag you can do is actually on the edge. If you tap and hold on the left or right side, you'll see that the red box disappeared in others just in line. Now, I'm actually moving the start and finish of this particular content frame. Okay, the next thing to note is this playhead right here, which I'm sure you've seen. Throughout this demo. And it's basically your selector, but has many powerful functions hidden within this little red icon. First of all, just by clicking and moving it around, I'm selecting different tracks. Here is how you can select individual tracks. Earlier when I showed you this time line edit. And we want to select multiple tracks to group or organize. Say I want to manipulate just one particular track, I move this playhead around. This playhead is also going to determine where your playback will start. Say I move it over here. When I hit play, it's going to start from there, move it over here, hit play, It's going to start from that point. This playhead is also where you're going to find your action menu by clicking on it. You'll see this little action box here is where a lot of the animation magic happens. You have these three overall categories, move, filter and edit. Edit has a split frame option. Say you want to cut this in half and you want to manipulate them separately. You can add a split and now you'll see that there's two content sections here. Now these two move and filter what you might be familiar with in the transform section in procreate as of the time of this filming, when you click on Draw and Paint, you'll notice that compared to procreate, you're missing the options here of adjustments and transformations. Those things are not done at the drawn paint level in procreate dreams, they're done on the track level. You can do moving scale, you can do warp distort. You can do all of these different filters such as opacity, Gaussian blur, sharpen noise, and adjust your hue, saturation and brightness. All of that lives in this playhead. When you select any of these, you'll notice that now there's this new icon and you smaller track underneath your content track. These are your key frame tracks. Just think of them as the manipulations that you are causing to your content piece. All of these are non destructive so that you can always go in and delete these key frames. The key frame track has its own manipulations and options. When you click and hold on the key frame tracks, you'll see different options which we will dive into more when we get into the key framing section of our demo. For now, just know that that's there. Now that you have a general sense of how the timeline works, just remember that whenever you want to do something to multiple tracks or content, you want to be in this timeline edit mode. So that you can move your playhead around, bring up all of the different options, movings individual tracks around, and look at your content. So whenever something isn't quite working the way you want or you're not being able to pull the right options, make sure you're in the mode that you need to be in, okay? Now that we have a good sense of how to get around our timeline, let's focus on gestures. 6. Gestures: That we've touched on many of the gestures in previous sections, but I want to have one dedicated class on all the main gestures that you should know. We'll be going over these again and again in the demo, so don't feel like you need to memorize everything right now. It'll just be nice to have one video that you can refer back to later on. First is just navigating around. The obvious ones are the two finger slides. So you can pan all around in different directions, both on the timeline as well as on the stage. You can zoom in and zoom out by pinching your two fingers. Another helpful gesture on the timeline is when you want to quickly flick the playhead back to the front to play from the beginning, you do a quick flick and it'll go to the beginning and start playing right away. Now on the stage, you can use quick pinch, which is a quick pinch like this, to get it back to the full frame. Similarly, on the time line, when you're really zoomed in, you do a quick two finger pitch to show the full time line. The three finger scrub is also really helpful. As you'll remember, for navigating the time line, you can adjust the height of each track by scrubbing up and down. Then how much of the timeline. You see how expand it is by scrubbing left and right. Zooming in, you want to go up and now I can get really detailed into Humpback friend. When I zoom all the way out, I'll see the color coded bars as we talked about in the highlighting color section. Two finger tap and three finger tap also have undo and redo functions. Just like in procreate, tapping anywhere will undo actions both on the stage, say withdrawing and painting, as well as on the timeline, such as adding key frames or moving things around. Remember to keep an eye out for accidentally undoing where you're doing two finger gestures or redoing when you're doing three finger gestures, when you're scribing up and down, that might cause a redo with the three fingers. Or when you're pinching and zooming, it might cause a two finger undo. That's why I recommended under preferences to increase the rapid undue delay to 1 second so that you can prevent any accidental undoes and redoes. Now for timeline maneuvering, you can double tap anywhere to zoom in closer on the timeline. On maximum zooming, you can focus on just that key frame. Of course, we have tap, hold and drag, so we can select a content piece and drag it around, moving it, reorganizing it. And then by tap hold and dragging the edge, we can move that particular frame back and forth. Now, a really helpful trick to know is that the other finger comes in handy. And this is one of the hardest to discover on your own, yet really useful once you know that it's there. Just now when I was moving this back and forth. You'll notice that there's a gap in between these two frames. And maybe that's what you want. But many times you'll want actually these two to move together. And to do that, all you have to do is after you get this bar to show up, put your other finger on an empty part of the time line, and then move it back and forth. And now you'll see all of the other key frames are moving along with it. And it goes the same for backwards and forwards, that's really handy. This other finger also helps when you are working on the stage. Say I have this whale selected and I want to move him in a straight line. That can be really hard when you're free handing it. But say select it and then put your other finger on the screen. On the stage part, you notice it announces snapping on and you have cross hairs, and now it's going to snap straight across, up and down, or in smaller increments. And it's much easier to get a straight move this way in terms of grouping your time line tracks together. Remember you want to go into the edit mode. Timeline, Edit, so that you can circle multiple tracks together. De select just by crossing it out. The last thing I want to show you is that on the stage, you can use a four finger tap to have a preview. Full screen. Let me show you how that looks. Normally when you're working on your timeline and drawing, and painting and animation, you have the stage and the timeline. But say you want to see the full screen preview. All you have to do is tap with four fingers. Brings that up to full screen. Tap again to exit out of that. Now you know all of the basic gestures for navigating around procreate dreams. 7. Prepping & Importing Files: Now that we have an understanding of the basic layer of procreate dreams, we're ready to turn to the demo portion of this class. Now the first thing I want to show you is actually how I prepare my illustration files for animation. I've gone into procreate and I have our class demo illustration file here. This is the main file that I used to create the illustration. And I'm going to show you the considerations that I did and how differently they are set up between the illustration file versus the procreate dreams file that I provided. Just for clarity's sake, let's first call them illustration file. And then I tend to create a copy because I still want to keep my illustration version. Then I'll add the Dreams Cut label to it. To go to the illustration file, I tend to be pretty organized in how I set up my digital files. I'll have them grouped and labeled and have a general sense of where everything is. Now you'll see that I organize my illustration by textures and object. I'm just going to turn on and off some layers so that you can see what I'm working with. I keep these textures on separate layers because sometimes I still like to manipulate the color or the amount of the opacity, and having them on separate layers is really important for my illustration purposes. The character in the middle is all on one layer. I just have two copies because I was experimenting with the smaller person versus the larger person, and I want to go with this slightly larger version here. I have this little signature logo that I add to my illustrations when I post them on social media, for example. Finally, I have this texture layer set to an overlay adjustment. I just want to go for a few things that I'm thinking about in terms of storytelling as I'm going through my illustrations and thinking about how animation might be able to bring it to life, but in a really simple yet effective way. So looking at this particular illustration, I could have chosen to have her get up and move around, for example, and do more frame by frame animation around the character. But I really felt like the light orbs just going across the screen, would one be quite simple to both do and to teach? And also just be really effective as you go along and go through these Procreate Dreams tutorials. I recommend making a reference list of easy animations and think about how to incorporate them into your illustrations. As you're working more with Procreate Dreams, you'll get the hang of which animations are really easy to do and which ones are a lot more time consuming and can design your illustrations around that plan. I'll include a list to start you off with in the class hair and book. Now when I'm finished with the illustration and ready to start on the animation, there are a few things that I like to do. So first of all, I just start by taking some notes, whether mentally or on a new layer on top of my illustration to start to go through what possible animations I can make. I have an idea of what I want to do with the animation. So now I can start to organize and cut the illustration file accordingly with this character right here. I know I want to have their head moving up and down, just like looking up gently and then looking back down. So I just need the head to move, not the entire body. A very simple thing to do for that is just to select the head cut and paste. And now they're on separate layers. Now with the rock for example, there's not really any animation that I have in mind where I want to manipulate these textures separately. I might add just a little bit of subtle ambient movement just to add some interest there that might be not very noticeable. But as atmosphere, that's the only thing I'm thinking about animating for the rocks. Similarly for the moss, I can imagine maybe keeping some of the texture layers separate if I wanted to have a little subtle movement there. But overall, it's the ground and I just want to have a very gentle manipulation of it, almost like breathing with the character. So I'm also going to put that all together and I would just flatten it. Now with these leaves, I, of course, can separate out every single stem and every single leaf to have individual stems. Moving for purposes of this demonstration, I want to keep things simple. We'll get to learn all the tools that you need to understand by keeping them together. And I think it'll still have a really cool like sea grass feeling. If they all move together, maybe technically a little bit unnatural. But we'll be able to still manipulate some of the leaves separately. And I think that's a good balance with these animations for illustration, you also want to think about the balance of the payoff of the effect. You can go crazy and im every single little thing as much as you want. Or you can think about out of all the effects that you're working on, which is going to have the most impact. The leaves aren't meant to have a very noticeable presence in my illustration. The focus is really on these light orbs. Right now, for illustration purposes, I have all the light orbs on one layer, which makes sense. For animation purposes. I'll want to separate out every single one of these to be able to manipulate them separately. Now while I can do that here and procreate, this is actually something that I feel is easier to do within procreate Dreams. I'll just draw them directly in the Procreate Dreams app and manipulate them from there. I'm just going to leave that there for reference right now and not cut that up. The last thing I want to point out is that I have background color here. Now, of course, I can have this dark green colors in my background color section here on every single illustration file we have in procreate. However, when you import that into procreate dreams, that is not transferred over. So what you do want to do is pull whichever color you've used back there and create its own layer for that. That way when you import the file, it'll all be there. Okay, so let's go into our dreams cut file and take a look on how that turns out. I have my texture layer here still separate. I have my animation notes that I showed you earlier and I have the lights. The character, I tried a few different versions. I was considering having them look up and look back. But most importantly, I just need to have the head separated out. I'm going to delete some of these extraneous files and you'll see that this is actually all we need. I have the rock here in its own flattened layer, If you would like, you can separate out the other rock. This is something that you currently can't do in procreate dreams. If you do want to separate out with a lasso tool, you want to do that here in procreate. And the moss is on its own layer and you'll see that I have merged part of the leaves. For now, I've kept this leaves translucent layer on separate areas so that I can manipulate those separately. Actually, you can go into the adjustments here and already get a preview of what that might look like. I'm imagining that the stems will back and forth, and then if there's a little bit of a delay with the background leaves, that might create a nice parallax effect. Lastly, I have the back texture and like I mentioned, the background color, everything nicely labeled because all of that is going to drop in very cleanly to procreatee dreams. The more organization that you can have here, the easier your life will be. When you import it into procreatee dreams, the last thing I did was just shrink the illustration a little bit so that have more space around the illustration. Like I mentioned, procreatee dreams, you can go off frame and still save some of that space. I wanted to give myself the space to maybe pan back and forth across the illustration if I wanted to. Now, let's save this into our files so that we can open and procreate Dreams. We're just going to hit Share. We're going to save it as a procreate file. Once it's exporting, hit the Save to Files option and you'll see that I already have it saved here in my files. As I was doing my preparation now it's saved into our files on our ipad and we can go into Procreate Dreams and import it into our animation file. Let's navigate to Procreate Dreams and under my projects, let's start a new file. I'm navigating down to four K Social. And I'm going to start with empty. Because I have a file I want to import, this is our blank canvas. I'm just going to go in and hit the plus button on the right hand side here. Hit Files, and you'll be able to find your files in the same folder you stated into earlier. Let's open that together. You'll see that our drawings imported very nicely. If I go to the draw and paint mode and open up the layers, you'll see that all of my layers and groupings and naming systems all transferred over very cleanly. Now if you just wanted to have a flat drawing that maybe you created in procreate and want to import into procreate dreams, this is fine. Now that's not what we want to do because we want to be able to manipulate the animations for all of these different things separately. To do that, all you have to do is click and hold and then hit Convert Layers to tracks. You'll notice that this drawing just turned into group and now when I hit this little arrow here, it drops down and all of my layers are now very well organized tracks. My character is still grouped together with the head and the body. My rock still has its front and back section. That's a really nice feature of being able to work seamlessly across procreate and procreate dreams. A few other things I want to get set up here are just in the properties that we talked about, one, let's keep the frames for a second at 24. Just keep in mind that you can always change it to 15 or 12 if you're finding that you want that choppier frame by frame animation look. Duration is important because it affects how long our timeline is when you're just starting out. I highly recommend starting with a shorter time frame. Let's start with 8 seconds. And you can go ahead and put in your name if you would like. Just make sure that the preferences are set up. As I mentioned in the interface class, the last thing that we can touch on is just starting to think about audio. Now, many beginning animators don't think about the music or audio until the very end, which is just like what I did. However, if you've ever created an Instagram real or Tiktok, you'll know that can be really effective to time your animations to your song or audio. You might want to consider picking the audio for your animation upfront. That's an option for you to consider. I have provided two free to use music files. Send that to your ipad. You can go ahead and select those and just go ahead and open them on a new track. And you'll see that the audio track has now been added because it's a two minute or so long song, it goes all the way across. I'm just going to bring that all the way over. If you want to have the other one as an option, just add another track, add file, select that one. Now you have both audio files ready to go. You can just turn these on and off. As I've mentioned, by hitting this check mark, you can have both to experiment with. We're ready to get started with our animation demo. 8. Draw & Paint Frame by Frame: Now I'm going to walk through each type of animation step by step and dive a little deeper into the modes within the app. We're going to start with a draw and paint mode doing frame by frame animation. We're in the Procreate Dreams file and we're going to click on this squiggle line to turn on drawn and paint mode. Now even though you might be familiar with these icons and functions up here, let's go over them in a little bit more detail really quickly. There are some things that you'll want to know that is different between procreate and procreate dreams. First of all, there isn't a brush studio within procreate dreams. You aren't able to customize the brushes the same way that you are in procreate. However, it's super easy to import your brushes from procreate itself. Now I have all of these brush packs that I've purchased before. Say I wanted to import my paves folder, I can just go ahead, hold onto that, drop that anywhere onto the stage and it will import into the brush set. Now when I go into my brushes, you'll see that my phase folder has been imported. Everything is exactly the same, Same orders, same names, everything is there. Very easy. You can do the brush studio in here and then just move over the brushes as you need. If you move over individual brushes, it will go to its imported folder right here. Just as a demonstration, I pulled one over. Let me just do this one as well. You see how easily that got added to the imported file. Now, if I did the same thing and dropped it onto the stage, you'll see that it does the same thing. What I recommend is having your brushes organized in procreate, and then dropping that whole folder over so that it's imported really nicely in Procreate dreams. For purposes of our demo, I'm just going to be using the default brushes so you don't have to worry about any of that. I just wanted you to know how you can import your favorite brushes from procreatee in the future. A few other features that do carry over from procree are if you have the brush that you are working on selected, then when you click on the eraser, click in hole, then it'll automatically switch to that same brush. You'll also be able to use your finger as a color picker. That is another function that carries over from procreate. Now let's go into color. It has the same basic interface as in procreate. You have your basic color settings. You can use these different modes depending on how you like to have your color picker. And of course, you can create your own color palette if this is too big for you. You can also always click on this little handle up here, drag it, and then you'll have your color companion on your stage. That could be really handy if you're using a lot of different color adjustments. For my purposes, I tend to not work with that. I just have to it clean. It's totally up to you, just know that that feature is there. Now let's go within our group and click on one of the drawing layers so that we can open up our layers within layers. Procreate Dreams is constantly releasing updates around the functionalities of this area. Your version might be more advanced than what I'm able to do at the time of this filming, but currently you are able to add new layers. You're able to reorganize the layers by clicking and holding. And you're able to do adjustments by clicking on the little icon letter here. Just keep in mind that all of these adjustments only affect this particular drawing, not all of the other tracks. If you want to have adjustments that affect the other tracks, you do that at the track level as I showed you earlier. As of right now, you cannot do clipping or layer masks within the drawing layers. You're only able to do that within the tracks. That's how you'll want to plan any masks that you need to do. Finally, if you're looking for the transform tools that you're able to use in procreate, Procreate dreams does have more limited functionality around that at the current moment. I know they are adding some features in the near future. But for example, a lot of the Warp and Transform are done at the track level as I showed you. Then also certain adjustments such as lasso and selection are currently not available. If you need to do something that's more advanced, I recommend doing that in procreate. And I'll show you also just how easy it is to drop in those layers. I created this stems warped file, but say I wanted to do some selection and moving it around, I can do that edit in procreate, have my two apps side by side, and then just simply grab this layer and drop it in here. You'll see that it came in really nicely. It's going to drop in where your playhead is. If you want it to be really clean, move your playhead over. But you can always just click and hold and drag it over. You'll see how easy it is to work side by side with the two apps and be able to do more advanced drawing functionalities in procreate. And move that over up until the time all of your needs are met with all the various updates that procreate is releasing. Four dreams. A couple other things that you want to keep in mind as we get into our frame by frame animation, is that within the settings you might find that you want to start with 12 frames per second. I think it's a little easier for. Someone who's beginning an animation. You'll notice that if you change the frames per second, the duration will automatically adjust proportionally. So you might have to go ahead and change that again manually. I'm going to save that. Another thing that you'll want to keep in mind is just the onion skin features. Remember that's under the time code here. As we do our frame by frames, we can hide and show our onion skins and edit the amount of frames that we see and the opacity. We'll get to that in just a second. Another really important feature for frame by frame animation is the flip book that is only available in the draw and paint mode. First of all, you're going to want to make sure you're on a drawing layer. You'll see that if you're on a group, say I'm on a group right now, the way that you pull up the flip book is by holding this little gray bar right here and then pulling up. You'll see this cannot open flip book in a group. If you get the air message, you'll just know that you've accidentally selected a group. I'm going to start with a totally new track and go in from there. You'll see that just pulling up it turns into this little handy flip book guide. And you'll see how helpful that is as we do our frame by frame animation. Let's get started with that. I'm going to turn this light layer off because it might be a little distracting. And then pull up my flip book. The first really simple, yet effective, and impressive looking frame by frame demo that I want to show you is just the light beam that's going across. You're going to go into brushes here, go into the luminous group here, and just click light pen. This is a really fun effect brush that I like to use for any light ambience and you can use any yellow. I'm in the vibrant section, I'm just going to hit this yellow that's provided right here. So if you want to follow along exactly, you can use that. I'm literally just imagining a light streak going across and you can experiment with how long or short the streak is. That's part of the fun. But I'm going to keep it super basic and imagine it going up and down. I'm just going to go ahead and get started. Let's go start off with this little short light streak here. You'll see that my first frame is in place to go to the next one. I'll just click on the next gray one, and you'll see that my previous one turned purple. That's because under my onion skins I have frames that are behind my current frame set as purple. And then I have the one set going forward, set as yellow. If you don't like those colors, you can always adjust that here. Now, going to my next one, I just start moving it across. Let's just go through it quickly so you can see how it is. I'm just going to go and bring it over. Start to extend some of them to have interesting effect. Start to shorten it on the way up and then have it trailing off. Let's see how that looks. You can do a quick scrub through just through the frames that you've created here. And you can see how having different longer and shorter lines does have a different effect with the animation. And this is something that you're going to play with and you can watch different animation tutorials to think about like squash and stretch and different techniques they use to create more of a bounce and sense of movement. But it's a fun way to just get started. Great, so that is our first frame by frame animation it out of the flip book mode. All I do is just flick it back down and then we're back into timeline mode. And let's take a look at how that came out. It's kind of fun. One of my audio is on in the background and I thought that was quite effective. Now I want to show you a couple other things that have to do with the timeline edit when it comes to say, duplicating and animation or moving them around. First of all, say I have this group of frames now, I just want to have exact same thing repeated a few times throughout my breathing loop. And I don't want to animate that again and again. The next thing I can do in timeline edit is select all of them and hit Group. Then I can duplicate this group. Now I have two of them. If I go to my playhead here, you'll see that it just goes twice, like two fish following each other, maybe. I think that feels a little bit too close together. I can move an entire group. Let me go ahead and grab and hold and move that to say the four second mark. Nice. You can imagine repeating that a few times, depending on your animation, is you can have them repeat over and over again. The possibilities are really endless here. The last thing I want to show you in our frame by frame demo. It is just how to turn the simple light animation that we just created together into a lettering animation. Say under here, let's create a new track, draw on paint. I'm actually not going to be showing this in the animation. It's just a reference layer for me to know where my animation is going. You can use another pencil. Let's just use this peppermint one right here. I'm going to use a different color, It sticks out. I just wanted to say breathe just like that. When I created that drawing, you'll see that it created just a small frame. And when I play it, it goes away because the rest of the track is empty. For my purposes, I want to go all the way across. I'm going to click and hold to get the content options up and hit Fill Duration. And now it's there throughout the entire sequence. It's a little bit off center to move it. Remember, we're not working in our drawing paint mode when we have those types of adjustments. We exit out of the drawn paint mode. Click on that content with a single tap. Now you have the bounding box and you can move it. Then if I want to do a little bit of a rotation, doesn't get centered, that looks pretty good. So that's how I would adjust my drawing. Okay, great. I have my lettering there. I'm going to go back up to the track where I do want to show the animation. And let's go back to our flip book. Now you'll notice that the little gray handle is gone. That's because we're not in draw and paint mode. We have to go back into draw and paint mode. Flick up the little flip book, get our light pen out that can be under recent. If you don't want to dig back down into Luminant, click our yellow color. Let's get started. I'm going to start really simple and actually have the little streak come in first as if a little writing wand is coming out. Then starting here, I want the whole breathe word to keep showing, which means that this needs to stay an easy way to keep that going. Of course, I could just go to the next one and then continue to draw it over and over again. But another way that you can approach it and just see which way you like better, because it's going to have a slightly different look, is go back here, Click and hold, and you're going to get an individual frame option menu come up so you can cut, copy, duplicate, and clear this individual frame. If I go ahead and duplicate it, it's just going to create another frame with the exact same mark. And now I'm just going to continue it. You'll see how helpful that underlying guide layer is to be able to track where I'm going. Now I'm just going to keep duplicating my line. You'll also notice that when you click on an individual frame, say when you play it back, you're like, oh, I feel like I should add a little bit of an in between. You can always click on any individual frame and get this little plus sign to add a frame in between. You'll see as I'm getting into this writing, the other animation that we did is starting to show up. Now that's distracting to you or it's getting in the way. You can always turn that off. But I think that's also really interesting to see how they might interact together. This is also where the frames per second that you set in your settings is going to come into effect because the more frames you have, the more that you'll need to show to get a smooth effect. Now we have our pre lettering sequence. Let's see how that turned out. We'll see that it turned out right here. I'm going to turn off this drawing layer here. The reference layer that I created earlier. Let's see how that looks cool. Now, I'm not sure if I'm going to keep this lettering, but I recommend that whenever you're working on an animation, keep all of your tests and experiments until the end, until you're sure that you don't need them anymore. And then you can clean things up and delete them. You never know when it might come in handy. For now, let's go ahead and rename them so it's easy to see what is what. And like I mentioned, I can go and hit a high light. So that is really easy to keep track of what I have. Okay, now that we have a taste of frame by frame animation, let's get into a second method of animation within Procreate Dreams performing. 9. Performing: Now let's get into performing, which I think is the coolest and most unique feature of procreate dreams. Performing records keyframes in real time using gestures. Any action you perform to a piece of your content is recorded and appears underneath your content on a key frame track. Now, performing is really related to key frames, which will cover in much more detail in the next section. But I think that especially for beginners, it's good to start with performing so that you can see something really intuitive and exciting. And then learn the underlying structure through key frames. You can also learn it the other way around by starting with the next lesson first and then coming back here. But in general, I recommend just watching both of them together. As you'll recall, performing happens in this mode right here by hitting the record button. When you hit it, it'll tell you that it's ready to start recording any actions that you do. Just keep in mind that if a motion doesn't quite turn out the way you like, especially if you're doing something quite fast, make sure you check your modify settings and see if you want to adjust that filtering. By default it says to 30% so there's a little bit of a smoothing. But say you want something really quick and jittery, then you want to move that down. All right? So I think the best way to go ahead and get a sense of what performing can do is yes, to make a drawing and perform it. So we're going to go back into our drawing paint mode and we're going to create those light orbs floating around that I mentioned earlier. So I just have an empty track. I have my light pen selected, the yellow color, ready to go. And I'm just going to add a ball of light right there. Okay. And this is how easy performing is. I'm going to turn on record and I'm just going to move this across in an organic fashion. I'm just going to do it kind of randomly and see how it comes together. Let's see what happened. Amazing. That actually feels pretty good. And that's just one simple way that we can manipulate using perform. I was just moving it across the screen. That is the most basic way. So now you'll see all these little keyframes on my key frame track underneath the piece of content. And if you go into each one, you can manipulate those still they're non. Destructive. Say I didn't love how part of that performance turned out. I can actually go in here, go to expand, move and scale and just change the x and y coordinates. You can just see that once you know the basics of keyframes, that performing can really come in handy and speeding up certain workflows. Now what can you perform? Remember that when we're on the key frame track, if I click on it, I'll get keyframe track playhead. I want to go back to the drawings, so that little playhead icon comes up. You can perform anything under Move and filter. So you can move and scale. So I can make them bigger and smaller. You can warp, you can distort. And then going to filter, you can change the opacity, which we're going to use. You can blur things, you can't sharpen, you can play with the noise, and you even play it with a hue, saturation and brightness. So you can perform an entire scene changing color without doing any additional drawing. It's really powerful and really fun to experiment with. I definitely think it's the most innovative and amazing feature within the app. If you've ever had to use key frames before in an app like Adobe after Effects, you'll know how incredible it is that we had this capability now on our ipads. So another cool thing about performing is that you can perform more than once on a single piece of content. It just needs to be a different kind of action or else it course is just going to re record over it. Now say I want to make this ball get bigger and smaller as it's moving across. Now instead of recording over it, it will add it to it. So let me just show you what that means. Let me come here so you can see it a little bit better. The bounding boxes around my content. So I can go in and make it bigger and smaller. All right, I think that worked, so let's play that. Yeah, you can see the ball getting bigger and smaller now, so fast and easy. And you can imagine adding many different kinds of performs. Once this or goes off screen, I can just create another drawing here, then go into my drawing paint mode and start performing this drawing. So you'll see that there's a split. Let me go ahead and record that. Okay. And now it's created another or that just helps me manage my tracks a little bit more. Instead of creating this on yet another layer, I can just keep that all together and avoid too many tracks or unnecessary tracks. But if there is a ball that I want to have showing up at the same time as this one, but manipulated differently, then I am going to need a separate track again, starting here, hitting that record button and then just going in. Let's say I'm going to do a little loop. All right, let's take a look at how that turned out fun. I couldn't do that. Make that extra little loop on the same drawing layer because it's a different movement, a different key frame is being applied to make that happen. That's how you're going to want to think about whether you need a separate track to create the animation effect you like, or if you can keep them altogether, I'm going to keep going and create a few more orbs moving across my space. I like having them move in different paces, going in different paths. It feels really organic and magical and I want all of them to be off screen by the end, so that has a clean loop going back. I want most of the action and density to be happening towards the first half, so that can naturally trail out. I want a pretty nice bright group happening around two to 3 seconds. As you're working on your animation, you see like, okay, right around there. I want it to feel really dense. It seems like it's 1-3 seconds. And can plan your tracks and layers around that as well. Okay, You can of course, continue to play with that as much as you like, make as many orbs as you want, play with the move and scale. But for our purposes, I want to take a pause there and move on to performing the waving of the stems so that you can get a sense of how that feels. Before we move on to key framing, my plan with the plants was to have them animating, just gently swinging from left to right and ending up in a perfect loop. Four counts going this way to the right, and four counts going back to end up at the exact same starting point. Now a really important factor to keep in mind when you're trying to create seamless loops and animation is that with key frames, you want to make sure it starts and end on the same key frame we're going to be using, Warp. Now you'll notice that the playhead icon turned into the Warp icon. If I click on it, it'll set a little key frame. You need to have this little keyframe on your key frame track in order for it to count. Don't get confused with the actual playhead. Sometimes it gets covered up, you'll want to move it over. Now the trick is to duplicate this keyframe. In order to do that, actually when you have this open, just click on it again. And now I've created two. We know that nothing has changed. So these two are exactly the same. There's currently no way to duplicate it directly from the keyframe. Perhaps procreate dreams will add that in the future, but at the time of filming you cannot do that. What I do instead is just create another one and then move it all the way across. Okay, so I have that at the very end here. Now I know that it's going to start and end at the same place. Okay, now I'm going to flick to the beginning. Let's perform the warp. So let's turn our performing back on and warp, if you've never used it before, is what it sounds like. So you'll see that I'm able to just gently move it over here, then gently move it back. Now this is the tricky part worth performing. I wanted to have a perfect sway of four counts over and four counts back. But I just did it and I'm only at 6 seconds when I play that back. It's a mess. Like that was too fast, this parts too slow. Now I'm trying to get back to the original key frame in a weird way. And this is where performing can get really tricky and key framing is sometimes easier. Now that you have a good sense of what performing can look and feel like, let's get into key frames. 10. Keyframes: All right, let's talk about the third and final way to animate and procreate dreams, which is keyframing. Now like I mentioned earlier, key framing and performing are really interrelated. You might be wondering, why would I want to key frame when I can just perform for me. The reason usually comes down to the fact that key framing is really precise, accurate, and honestly sometimes more efficient. You'll see what I mean in just a second. It's also just really important to know so that you have the knowledge to manipulate and adjust your performing keyframes to suit your needs. Just as a refresher, here are the different key frames that you can do. Clicking on the playhead, under move you have moving scale, warp distort, and under filter you have opacity, Gaussian blur, sharpen noise, hue, saturation, brightness. In terms of placing the key frame, you go ahead and hit any one of the adjustments you would like to make. Your playhead will turn into the key framing playhead and you need start placing them. Wherever you move this, you'll be able to place them accordingly. You'll see that I'm placing these manually. And when I did the performing, all of these sold in automatically. But they are the same types of keyframes and same types of keyframe tracks. Say I want to change the color of these leaves as we move along, I'm just going to go and hit hue saturation balance. Now I have some key frames there. Now some key frames have more advanced placements than others. If you click on hue saturation brightness, you can expand. And you can see you can individually adjust hue saturation and brightness. So you can remove just one particular item if you wanted. The last thing to note really quickly about the functionalities for keyframes is just that when you click in between two keyframes, you're able to set easings. If you're not familiar with easings, there are four different kinds. Linear just means it moves very consistently back and forth. Easing in means that it eases in and it speeds up. And then easing out is the opposite of that. Easing in and out means that it both slowly goes in and it slowly goes out like a wave almost. We'll get into that more later, but that's just important to know there. And that you have to click in between keyframes to get that menu. Now just a quick refresher on key frame functionality. Remember that you can tap and hold individual keyframes. You can tap and hold in between the keyframes to delete the entire keyframe track. You can tap and hold and push and drag to move the individual keyframes to change the timing basically. And you're going to want to make sure that you're not just moving the playhead around. It's tricky because sometimes you'll try to grab that individual keyframe to move, but if you just gently tap it, just moves that keyframe playhead over. So you want to move that aside and then just tap and hold the delete key frame option is going to come up, but you're going to be able to drag it side to side. Okay, let's apply what we've learned to our demo. I think the easiest thing to show you is actually the character movement. So let's go there. Now you'll remember that under character, I had separated out the head from the body. Now all I want this character to do, let me zoom in, is just gently look up and then gently return their gaze forward following the movement of the breast, may be looking up as they inhale. Returning their gaze as they exhale. I am going to start adding some key frames now. I'm going to add the first one here, moving scale, because I just want to rotate her head up, you'll remember that. To make sure it's a seamless loop, I want to duplicate this one, because I can't have an option right now to duplicate it. We're going to just go ahead and create another key frame, since I haven't done anything yet, if you end up manipulating it before, you remember to duplicate your initial keyframe to make it endlessly, the best way to do that is actually to just move your first one over to the right and then click on the beginning and create another one. Nothing should be happening before this. That's an easy way to duplicate that if you need. Now, I'm going to take this one that I created, click and hold and drag it all the way to the end. Okay? Now I know that I wanted to be a really balanced movement up and then down. I know that I'm going to need one just at the four second mark. That's part of the reason why I designed this looping animation to be an eight count breadth and have pretty clear defined movements between the first 4 seconds and the last 4 seconds to keep our timing really balanced and really straightforward. So I'm just going to move that playhead over, make sure I'm on the head track, go to the key framing track, and just hit that playhead again. Now I've added another key frame, Now I have all these keyframes set up, but nothing is happening because I haven't animated it yet right now. I want to go in here and I just want to rotate it up so that it looks like she's looking up. Super simple, But there is a trick that I want to show you here. Now if I just grab and step here and move it, that looks totally weird. That's not the right place for her to be looking up. You'll remember that by clicking on these three dots here. You can go to edit anchor, and our little cross hairs will come up. That's the anchor and I can just click and move it around. Now a head pivots on its neck, so we want to move it to where her neck would naturally be and then hit. Done. Let's try that again. Much more natural, it's up to you how much she's looking up. I feel like that looks nice. Looks like she's looking up at the lettering. You go all the way back. I feel like that doesn't look very peaceful. Maybe right here, right here is nice. We can always adjust it, but let's see how that looks. Just like a saw moving in a linear consistent movement. Now let's see how it looks like. If we set it to ease in, you'll see that in the beginning it's a lot slower. It's not quite like a saw consistently going back and forth, but it's almost like she's pausing and then bringing her head back down. I like that for this particular effect. But let's see what ease out looks like. That's nice because it gives this long pause of when she's looking up and down that she's holding the position. That's also really nice. Let's try the last one where we have both ease in and ease out that has a gentle movement, But I felt like either ease in or ease out felt a little more natural. I'm going to pick one of those. It's totally up to you. I think this is the fun way to see the differences. And also note that currently cannot have different easings between different keyframes on the same track. It has to be the same kind of easing throughout that entire key frame track. That might be an update in the future, but for now you'll want to pick one that applies to all of them. All right, now let's move onto the plants. We're going to go back to the stems. Worked key frame, track, layer, the same ones at the beginning and the end, so that I know that it will loop seamlessly. And then for now, one in the middle and let's just see how that feels. Depending on where you drag it on this warp net, it's going to have a different effect. So if I pull on the right hand side, it's going to be mostly targeted here, over here, it's going to be mostly targeted on the left side. I'm trying to make it pretty even and just pull from the middle, you'll notice that these top leaves are bending and maybe that's an effect that you like. But if not, you can always go ahead and adjust each section a little bit differently. Let's see how that looks. See that it's just much more precise and easier to control than when we were trying to perform it together. I'll just go back to the exact same place that it started. Let's see how that looks altogether actually feels really nice. Just want a little bit more movement in the middle of the branch that feels nice to me. Remember way earlier in the class, I was talking about those little marks that you might make with your fingers if you have paint with finger on. Here's a good example of where a tiny little mark isn't very obvious when it's still illustration, but when it's animating, it can seem really off. Now imagine you had a ton of different layers all animating and you had no idea where that mark was. It's hard to hunt that down. That's why I try to avoid that as much as possible. Now I want to animate this leaves translucent layer that I have. I'm going to experiment with what looks best. I wanted to be slightly off the timing, but overall matching it. So I'm going to go ahead and put in key frames Again, same thing, warp, and one at the end, boops seamlessly, and then one in the middle. So let me just move that over and see how that feels. Yeah, it's not moving exactly like the ones in the front, but it's giving a slight parallax effect which just means when things move in slightly different speeds and has this dimensional feeling to it. It's very subtle, but that's not the star animation. I actually think that's nice. One more thing that I want to show you that might be interesting to you is that you can stack the key frames. As I mentioned earlier, here's just a really quick way to show you what that looks like. I'm going to say that I would like the colors of these leaves to change. Go ahead and put in my three starting sets. Let's just change it to any other color so that we can see what's going on. Maybe this purple. Let's see what that looks like. I think that's really interesting. I would say go ahead and play with that and see if you like it. If you don't, you can always turn it off by deleting it for now. I am going to leave it just because it's interesting. I can play with it later. Let's move on to the bottom here, because it's quite simple. But adding a little bit of subtle effect can be really nice right now, you can see that. The ground is really static, even though everything has this nice movement to it. And because it's a little island, I can imagine it floating and almost following her breath. So let's try doing that. Let's start with the rock. And remember I have the back rock and the front rock separated, but I'm going to move them together. And since they're in a group, I can just apply the key frames to the group. And for the move, see, you can actually make it super exact. And that's what's really nice about the manual key frames. All I did was tap on it and I can do something very precise. But I don't need to be that precise. I just need to move it maybe like up a little bit like that. Let me see how that looks. Super subtle. You wouldn't even know that it's moving and yet compared to when it's still, it definitely has some effect. I think that that's really cool, just to show you what's possible. Say for some reason I wanted this front rock to rock back and forth compared to the back one. I'll show you how you can stack the animation. Okay, for this one, all I'm going to do is go ahead and rotate it a little bit. Now when I play it back, the whole thing is both moving up and down as a group of rocks. And the front rock is also rocking back and forth. For now, I'm going to delete that. Let's move on to our moss. With the moss, I can do the same thing, move it up and down, but I actually want to try having it breathe with her. I really like the breathing lobe as a starting example for beginners because it starts to make sense right away of how you want to time all of your movements by having a start and end the same and a change in the middle. Let me go in and adjust this warp. Really subtle. That's too much, actually. Just like that. You can imagine it breathing. Now let me go back into the character because there's a few things that I want to show you that will be also fun to add to this atmosphere. One thing I want to do is make sure, first of all, that she's moving up and down with the ground beneath her. Right now it looks funny because the ground is moving and the little divot that I drew for the hill overlap is not matching. That's an easy fix. All I have to do is go to the character I'm on the group now. I'm not manipulating the head or the body by itself, but I want the whole thing to move that little hill again, super easy. I know that she just needs to get to the same place. I'm just going to move her up that, but her seat still matches the top of the hill. With just a few little clicks, I've fixed that issue. And now she's moving along with the moss. And it's all of her. She's still having her head rotate, but her head is, of course, moving with her body. Now the last thing I want to do is add a glowing ball that expands as she's inhaling, and then contracts and disappears as she's exhaling. It's like a guide to show people how to breathe in and then breathe out. Let's just start with the soft brush. I'm going to do a nice glowy color. We can use the same yellow that we've been using throughout. Let me start by just drawing the ball. You can play with how exactly it looks, right? Maybe I want to do more of a ball like this. I'm feeling pretty good about that. One last thing that I want to show you is that you can also have a mask. Let me just add a say, as this glow is coming in and out, I don't want to show on the top of the hill, I only want it to show on her. But to mask out this part, I can go in here and create a mask. Okay, I'm going to have to go all the way across and then I'm going to go and hit mask and do a layer mask. I'm going to invert it. You'll see the last thing I need to do is make sure that it follows the movement of the breath. That's feeling pretty nice. One cool thing about having this expanded canvas behind the frame is that you can do a sort of panning camera movement if you want to zoom in and out. You can actually apply a key frame to the entire group of drawings that we have. All I actually really want is that it's zooming in and zooming out very subtly. Let me do that by going in, here it is, holding onto the screen so that it goes and moves in on its center. Let's see how that looks. It's very subtly zooming in and zooming out. I think that's just interesting to know that you have that camera zoom pantying capability, so if you have a larger background, can move it all the way around and have things look like it's going up and down or just zooming in and zooming out. Now I'm just going to go in and finish up my final detailing and cleanups. I welcome you to continue to experiment and play around with everything. You don't have to animate it the exact same way that I did. For example. You can change different colors. Maybe try a different type of warping. Maybe change how the balls of light are moving around. It's really up to you. Now's your chance to play and when you're ready to export. We'll meet in the next section. 11. Exporting: I hope you had fun playing with the animation and just trying and experimenting with different things. I, myself did some tweaking as well, and here's how my final animation turned out. With music, I think I worked out really great with this audio that I provided, so feel free to use that one. It has a great loop. And I also did a whole second version of the lights animation just to play around with different ideas. So let me show you how that turned out. I also tried it with some lettering, but instead of frame by frame animation, just a simple opacity keyframe. You'll see that I use all the same techniques just applied in a different way so that I can experiment with a different kind of animation. I was curious to see how it would look with all of the light balls coming in and surrounding her and then leaving with the exhale. I hope that this just gives you some ideas of how you can apply what you've learned in different ways. And then once I was ready, I organized all of my layers and tracks, color coded everything, so things are nicely organized. This is the file that you should be getting, so this will be what it looks like. Okay, now we are ready to export. I'm going to go ahead and export the class version first. And it's super easy. All you do is click here on the title to get into our settings Again, make sure you navigate down to Share, and then you can hit Video. There are some other options as well, but for now, for our purposes, we'll be exporting ends video and then once it can save that into your files, your photos, wherever you like. For now, I'm going to hit Save Video. Now. Should be there. Now there may be instances that you want to upload this as a F instead of a video file. And I learned a really easy way that you can do that. All you have to do is go to the short cut setting that comes with your ipad, make a as a shortcut. Once you click on that, you click on the video file that you just saved. You can edit it if you'd like, but I want to have the whole thing and now I have a jiff of it. Of course, the quality isn't as great, But this is really handy for any situation where you need to use a jiff sometimes if you want to create something that can only be shared in say, a chat or in even the class project section, a jiff can be really easy to share. And also it helps replay a loop on its own rather than having to have people click on the video over and over again. So I just wanted to share that because I thought it was a great way to be able to have a jiff format during the time before Procreate Dreams adds it natively into the app. So as you get your project exploited, don't forget to share it with us. 12. Final Thoughts: Congratulations on making it to the end of the class. We've covered so much ground together. And I hope that you have a good understanding now of how to use procreate dreams to bring your illustrations to life. To recap, we've covered the three main ways, how to animate and procreate frame by frame, animation, key framing, and performing. As you continue to practice, you'll get the hang of when to use which method of animation to get the result that you want in the most efficient and effective way. I encourage you to continue to experiment, practice. Keep a list of animations that you're learning along the way so that you always have a reference. Things that you can apply to your illustrations. I've also created a class handbook so that you have a quick reference of everything that we've covered and a list of additional resources for you to explore. I highly recommend keeping an eye out on Procreate James own official handbook as they always keep it up to date as they release new versions of the app. You should also definitely check out the other classes on procreate jams, on skill share, and even free resources on Youtube. If you'd like to keep in touch, I welcome you to take my other classes. Follow me on social media and join me in Memo Chai Studio where I share more direct teachings and classes. Until next time, take care and keep creating. Bye.