Animated Characters: Create Your First Loop in Adobe Photoshop | Georgina Cahill | Skillshare

Playback Speed


1.0x


  • 0.5x
  • 0.75x
  • 1x (Normal)
  • 1.25x
  • 1.5x
  • 1.75x
  • 2x

Animated Characters: Create Your First Loop in Adobe Photoshop

teacher avatar Georgina Cahill, Animation Art Director

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      2:07

    • 2.

      Class Orientation

      1:04

    • 3.

      Pose to Pose Practice: Key Frames

      2:27

    • 4.

      Arcs Out in The Wild

      1:28

    • 5.

      Squash & Stretch: Playing With Clay

      1:20

    • 6.

      Designing Characters: Color & Shape

      4:05

    • 7.

      Recording a Reference Video

      1:37

    • 8.

      Sketching Key Frames

      4:38

    • 9.

      Outlining Key Frames

      1:32

    • 10.

      Drawing Inbetweens

      4:59

    • 11.

      Looping the Animation

      1:12

    • 12.

      Adding Color

      3:34

    • 13.

      Adding a Textured Background

      1:20

    • 14.

      Exporting Your Video

      1:02

    • 15.

      Conclusion

      1:16

  • --
  • Beginner level
  • Intermediate level
  • Advanced level
  • All levels

Community Generated

The level is determined by a majority opinion of students who have reviewed this class. The teacher's recommendation is shown until at least 5 student responses are collected.

550

Students

2

Projects

About This Class

Learn how to animate your own character dancing in Adobe Photoshop. 

After graduating in 2020 with a degree in animation and working as an animator and illustrator for nearly 6 years, I've learned how valuable a skill like animation can be. It's engaging and can communicate messages in a unique way.  It has the potential to cross the boundaries of age and language.  Animation is for everyone.

If you're an artist looking to add motion to your work, this class is for you.   

We'll go through the fundamental steps to create a frame by frame animated loop. By the time you finish this class, you’ll have a fully colored animation that you can use to share with your friends, on social media, and your website. 

This class is geared towards artists who have experience with Adobe Photoshop and are interested in adding movement to their work. Even if you have little to no animation experience, this class is a great way to kick off your animation skills. From animation principles to exporting your final animation, we'll go through the entire process together.   

I’ll share tips on: 

  • Seeing animation principles in your everyday life 
  • Recording a reference video
  • Creating a unique character 
  • Sketching keyframes
  • Giving your work color and texture 
  • Exporting your animation

This course is aimed for artists who may have digital art experience but haven’t experimented with animation yet or anyone who would like to try making a character move and groove.  In this class, you'll gain a strong foundational knowledge-base of principles of animation and how to incorporate them into your body of work. What you learn here can be applied to many different art and animation styles and can add a relevant and valued skill to your work.   

If you’re already dancing with excitement about learning animation, join me in animating a dance loop!

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Georgina Cahill

Animation Art Director

Teacher

Hey there, my name is Georgina Cahill and I'm an Animation Art Director located in Chicago, IL.

I create animated advertisements for companies and organizations worldwide.  If you've ever been annoyed by one of those ads popping up on your social media feed, there's a chance I made it! I work with brands ranging from dog food to seltzer water.  Some previous clients have included Miller Lite, Peroni, Vita Coco, and Enso Rings.

           

When I'm not animating for brands you can usually find me creating animations for my Instagram and TikTok .  These animations inspired my first Skillshare class about ani... See full profile

Level: Intermediate

Class Ratings

Expectations Met?
    Exceeded!
  • 0%
  • Yes
  • 0%
  • Somewhat
  • 0%
  • Not really
  • 0%

Why Join Skillshare?

Take award-winning Skillshare Original Classes

Each class has short lessons, hands-on projects

Your membership supports Skillshare teachers

Learn From Anywhere

Take classes on the go with the Skillshare app. Stream or download to watch on the plane, the subway, or wherever you learn best.

Transcripts

1. Introduction: Do you want to bring your arms to life and see the world through our nanometers. Hi, my name is Dr. J, K, L, and M, an animation art director and illustrator living in Chicago. But you might recognize me better as this girl. My job is to bring life to drawings and images. I create animations for brands worldwide, but also for my social media channels and for my friends and family. Animation is eye-catching and can gauge your viewer in a unique way. In this class, we'll go over how to use Photoshop to animate a looping dance animation that is unique to you. We're going to be focusing on three of the 12 animation principles. How to animate pose, to pose, arcs and squash and stretch. All the animation principles are important. The three that we're focusing on in this class are connected with printing fluid believable motion that captures the viewer's eye. Throughout the process, we'll cover how to observe and find where arcs exists around us. Squash and stretch effects characters with the help of some clay, the basics of character design and how shape and color can say a lot about your character. How to animate pose to pose using a reference video of yourself to extract key frames. I started making his animated dance loops as a way to share information with my audience on social media. They're fun to watch and make them fall. I'm trying to share it. Easier to digest. This class is gonna be perfect for anyone who's just getting into animation. To make the process easier, you'll have access to my class Guidebook, which outlines the key points from each lesson. Am I working product files for your own reference? Whether you're an illustrator looking down another skill to your tool belt, or someone who wants to get into animation, but not sure where to get started. This class is a great way to kick start your journey and tell you innovation. You'll come out of it with the ability to pull the animation principles from your everyday life. They use it in your work. By the end of it, you'll not only have a fun animated dance loop to add to your portfolio or social media channels, but also a framework to use for your enemy of work going forward. Once you're able to see the world through nanometers, I, the sky's the limit with white and create. I'm so excited to get started and I hope you are too. 2. Class Orientation: Your class project will be to create a dancing loop animation with the character that you've designed yourself if you love drawing. But our new data emission, this cost will be perfect for you. I'll take you through the principles of animation as well. C2, few shortcuts make you're animating time quicker. For this class, you'll need a computer with Photoshop on it, a drawing tablet, clay or conditioner and cornstarch, and any camera that can record video like the wider your phone. In terms of animation, these hand-drawn animations can be done fairly quickly, but anything that you're animating is going to take some time. So we've already spent a little bit of time on your project. I'll be here to guide you every step of the way. And if you get lost or feel free to leave any questions in the discussion section. And I'll try to get back to you. You'll have access to the class guidebook and my working files, which you can find in the resources section of this class. Once you've finished making your way through the lessons, I'd encourage you to share your work in the project gallery so we can all see what you made. Everyone are we making unique character and dance loop for this class? And I'm so excited to see whatever omics. 3. Pose to Pose Practice: Key Frames : We're looking at an animation or video. What you're really saying is when two pictures or frames, one after another very quickly. It's not actually moving, but your mind perceives it as motion when you're animating. There's two ways of thinking about how you want to put your pictures or frames together. Either pose to pose or straight ahead animation. Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas and they're 1981 book, The Illusion of Life Disney Animation introduce the idea of the 12 basic principles. They're still used by many US animators today. I won't be going over all of them in this class, but just a few that I think will be helpful for creating your animation. One of these principles is straight ahead animation and pose to pose animation there, straight ahead animation, which involves drawing the first key pose. And then I'll sequential in-betweens after that to create your motion. There's pose to pose animation, which we'll be using in our class since it gives you more control of your animation and endpoints or Chrome proposed suppose animation, you created key poses for your character and then in-betweens between them to create the emotion that you want. Your key frame is the frame that indicates important aspects of your movement. In this example, this is going to be the cup on the table, grabbing the cup, I'm picking up the cup. These three poses are the pinnacle of the motion that you're showing. The in-betweens are all the frames in between them. When you're planning out your animation, tried to think about what key poses your character will have. This will make animating smoother later. If you're new to animation, try this exercise to get familiar with the idea of keyframes. Take a video of yourself doing a simple action like opening your fridge or standing up from a chair. Then watch the video back and try and pick out some keyframes. Grab a camera or your phone and videotape yourself doing something simple. Here I am filming opening a book. When I'm watching the video back, I'm going to be looking for places where there's either a pause in the action or movement that highlights what the sequence is about. Right here. The video is just focused on the steel book. I'll consider that a keyframe, since it's still in the eye, focuses on it. The next keyframe will be me grabbing the book and starting the motion of opening it. The keyframe following it will be the book open. The keyframe I'll close on would be the book lying open on the table. This exercise is meant to be easy and get you used to seeing videos as pictures. You can do something in your routine that you do every day, like pouring your cup of coffee or opening your closet. See something that you do all the time in a new light. Look for which parts of this maybe Monday and action are really important. The next lesson, we'll go over how another animation principle can add some life to your pictures. 4. Arcs Out in The Wild: When you look at how most things move in this world, I'm also a robot. Usually they'd all in a straight line. Whether it's your dog's tail wagging or your back hunched over your computer watching this video. Usually things that occurs to them. In terms of the 12 principles of animation, these curves are known as arcs. Adding these arcs and tear animation can help the movement look more believable since your eye recognizes them from real life. When you look at this pendulum swinging, the string moves in an arc and so does the ball along the bottom. In this animation, you can see that the character moves in an arc and lands and a key pose That's also in an arc when you're creating your animation, keep his arc type motions in mind. They'll help the final piece look more believable and pleasing to look up, try to find arcs in your everyday life. This could be the way that leaves fall off the tree, the way the waves in an ocean curls over itself. Or even as your roommate sitting in a curve position, you don't even have to leave your house to notice oxygen your life. This will be actively observing stereo pot, watching the action. I'm noticing not only that my hand is making an arc or full circle, but the ripples of water make while I'm stirring are also an art shapes. So throughout your day, see where he knows arcs around, you know, some things around you are making undulating motions. You can do this exercise just with your eyes. But I'd highly recommend recording it so they can look back on it later. Noticing these arcs in your surroundings will help you recognize how you can use them in your own work. 5. Squash & Stretch: Playing With Clay : The last principle of animation and going to introduce to you in this class is squash and stretch. Squash and stretch exaggerates movement of characters and objects. It also shows your viewer how squishy an object is and can help your animation from looking too rigid. This character uses a lot of squash and stretch. When the characters in the air, their body stretches out. When they hit the floor, their body squashes down. This gives the idea how much weight they have and how they react to their surroundings. When you're editing with squash and stretch, remember to keep the volume the same when you're animating. When the character is being stretched out, you make them narrower. And when they're getting squashed down, they need to be wider. A great way to visualize squash and stretch is through clay. When you stretch it out, you can see how the middle becomes more of an hourglass figure. When you squash it down, you can see how flows down into a pancake. Using squash and stretch can be a great way to show what your character is made out of how they react to the world around them. As long as I've lived here character. To get a better understanding of the concepts. Grabbed piece of clay or if you don't have any, make your own, squash the clay, play with it, Stretch it out. See how the clay reacts to these movements and use it as inspiration for your character later on when we designing that character in the next lesson. 6. Designing Characters: Color & Shape: In this lesson, we're going to design your character, which is one of the most fun parts of my opinion. You can either do this starkly in Photoshop or on a piece of paper, whatever you're more comfortable with. I'm going to take you through a few steps to figure out how you want your character to look. For example, I'm gonna show you how I designed my character that I usually use. I want this character to look relatable, cute, and seemed friendly, which is why she is mostly made up of round shapes. People generally connect rounder shapes with approachability. But if you want your character to appear stronger or more balanced, image issues with more pointed edges, very character like squares or triangles, give me a character. Different shapes can give you a whole new character. When you're designing your character, keep in mind that we redrawing them over and over again. It's tempting to give them a lot of detail, but redrawing every button and crazy hairstyle can get tiring after awhile. When you're designing a character. Trying to make them simple enough that you handled fall off while you're animating. But give them enough detail that they representing what you want to animate. For my character. I want to turn to look like me. Now. I worked for Home and barely leave my house. So I'm usually wearing my glasses because I have terrible eyesight. And we usually also wearing some kind of sweatshirts, shorts and slippers combo. Now my slippers are actually bears, but I thought the ears on the bunny slippers would be more fun to animate. So it's often about if you're drawing yourself, it doesn't have to be a 100% accurate. You allowed to have fun and experiment. You're just trying to capture the essence of what you're drawing. So when I'm drawing the character I usually use. I start with the head, which is a circle before making my way down. Then we'll move on to the body, which is kinda like a pair oval shape. The arms are like half moons that flare out at the end like a penguin. Then I'll add in the legs, bunny slippers, ponytail and glasses. As you can see, she's mostly made up around the chiefs. But if I wanted to design the same character, move maybe a little bit stronger or have more assertive personality. I'll try dry her with shapes that have more edges. I'll start with the head as more of a box and add a rectangle for the neck. The body is kinda an inverted triangle and then have the glasses and hair and end points. But you know, you can be really creative with your character. They don't even have to be human. Maybe you want your character to be a slice of pizza that has a combo round and pointed shape. Because if it's the concept that you're going for, I'm going to start with a base of a triangle. And then at some round half circles for the crust. The arms are some lines with rounded circles on then to them. And remember to be creative here, to go along with the pizza idea. Maybe he has a mushroom knows, tried to play and have fun with your character while you're designing it. You can base your character on yourself or person like my first character. Or you can base your character more on a feeling like the second one which was more assertive. Or take it somewhere more wacky and fun like the third pizza idea. Your character is personal to you. Try a few different drafts and approaches to find the character that feels right for your animation. Now another thing you want to think about is color. Not only if you want to color your animation, but also what colors you want to use. In this class, I'll show you how to color your animation. But I personally leave my animation with an outline look. Because one, it's a lot faster than coloring everything in. And two, I want my career to seem transparent and truthful. I won't go too deep into the psychology of character design. We picking colors, it can be helpful to have an idea of what colors people generally associate with these colors. Here's a little chart to help you out if you're not sure where to get started. For my character, I usually draw her in pink and blue. I really like this color combo, but I also like what it represents. I think usually it's associated with playfulness. Although blues scene is calm and truthful. If you're going to color your character. Tried to pick two to three colors to color them with weak, a lot easier to color, and also give your character a sense of cohesion. Tried a few different versions of your character. Try different shapes and color combos until you find one that's unique as well, simple enough that you can draw over and over again. And we have your character ready. Let's jump into the next lesson. 7. Recording a Reference Video: This lesson is all about reference videos. What are they? What do you need them for? Reference videos are live-action footage that animators use as reference for their projects. They can help the animation process go a lot smoother since you're not guessing about what the motion should look like and you have something to go off of for this class. So we're making a looping dates animation. So when you fill your reference video, keep that in mind and try making motions that are easily looped, like walking, jumping, pointing, things like that. Just things that are easily repeated over and over again. Having a reference video makes the animation process go a lot smoother. So I'd highly recommend having one. Is there a few reference videos? I took my dog for an animation. Either the animation is highly stylized, having a reference to see how her legs move together and how her ears popped up and down was really helpful in completing the animation. If you're like me and a major introvert, making reference video may feel upward or embarrassing, but it's just meant for you and it supposed to be fun. Unless you're like me and putting it on the Internet for everyone to see. But I hope that you have a great time making one throw on some music, have a fun dance party, and just try to be loose and see what you come up with. We have a reference video that you're happy with. We can go into the next lesson, which is starting to animate your character, which is why you're all here for. 8. Sketching Key Frames: In this lesson, we're going to use the reference video that we took to sketch out our keyframes. This will give us the key points of motion in our animation. If you remember from earlier, we'll be using the post pose animation method. These keyframes will your guideline and endpoints of our animation. First thing to do is scrub through your reference video and pick the loop that you want. Crop the video to those frames, and upload the video to computer. You can do this by emailing it to yourself, texting it to yourself, or air dropping whatever works, open up Photoshop and create your canvas. I'll put up the most common sizes depending on what you're using this animation for. I like to use 300 DPI because it's high-quality, won't lose quality when it's posted in Photoshop. Go to Window, timeline, create video timeline. Then click on the Create Video Timeline in the box or pops up. Go to the hamburger menu and set your timeline frame rate. Most animations are created in either 24 or 30 frames per second. This means that you guys secondary animation, you'll need to draw 24 or 30 frames. The more frames that your animation has, the smoother the animation will be. I'm personally going to use 24 frames here. You can zoom in and out of your animation frames with this slider with the mountains on it. Then create a new group and name it reference layer. Then go to Layer Video layers. New video layer from file and dropping your reference video. These timeline layers are kinda like a roll of film. You can see all the photos are frames on one line. And I put my reference video in the corner and scrub through to find the keyframes. And go pull out the frames that show the pinnacle part of the motion. Once you've found your keyframes, use this as a tool to cut out the frames they want. And then you can delete the rest of the video. While I'm cutting these out. I also like to put them all together. So when it plays, it will play them back one after another, like a roll of film. Then create a new group, a new layer, and use the scissors tool to make the same amount of frames as there are key-frames. Click on your first layer, change the brush tool, I'm sketching brush and your draw your character and the pose of your first keyframe. When you're drawing your keyframes, you may also want to use your Onion Skin setting in the hamburger menu. Somebody unawares prefer just to flip through the keyframes. I personally like to use onion skin because it allows me to reference the pose before or after my current pose while I'm drawing. And then repeat with the rest of the keyframes. Will you play this back? You'll have a very fast repetition over your animation. To slow it down, you can stretch out the frames of your animation to get them to hold longer. You play it back. It will be slower since your eyes seeing more pictures. A couple of tips while you're making your poses for your keyframes. Remember delivered places you can incorporate the other principles of animation like arcs and squash and stretch. Don't rely too heavily on your reference layer. Keep in mind that animation is meant to be an exaggerated version of real life. Use your reference layer as a starting point and then see where the principles of animation can be used to push it. Remember to label your layer groups. These animations are fairly simple, but it's a lot easier to keep track where your layers are when everything is labeled correctly. The keyframes you create in this lesson are going to be the baseline for the rest of the animation. There'll be the posters we use to connect the in-between drawings together. Once you finished sketching your keyframes will clean them up in the next lesson. 9. Outlining Key Frames: When you have all your keyframes all sketched out, you can either leave them in the sketchy version if that's the aesthetic choice you're looking for. If you want the lines to look a little bit more defined, you can trace over them and clean them up. You can turn off your reference layer for now. Then create a new group, a new layer and label it outline. Create the same number of frames as your sketch layer and line them up. Choose a brush for your outline. He's a hard brush. If you're looking for something more bold or something with more texture, if you want to stylize, look. Then trace over your first sketch. You can connect all the lines if you want the character to have a defined border or leave them open for more illustrative style. Then repeat for all the keyframes. Tried testing out different brush textures to find the one that you're looking for. Adobe includes thousands of brushes and their subscription on their website. If you're drawing something circular and one more perfect shape, increase the smoothing of your brush. Give me your character and outline like this can help make them more visible and cleaner. It's not necessary, but it can help bring the vision of your character to life. Well, you're done tracing over keyframes. We can start working on our in-betweens, which uses a lot of the same steps as making keyframes. 10. Drawing Inbetweens: When you hover keyframe set up, it's time to make the in-between drawings to connect them. Making in-betweens is pretty similar to making keyframes. There just tends to be a lot more of them. But always showing your shortcuts so your handmade time is a lot faster. So now you can turn off your line layer and in your sketch layer, make a new layer and use this as a tool to cut a bunch of frames and place them in-between your keyframes. Like the name implies, you're going to be drawing the poses in-between your keyframes. This is another place it's helpful to use your Onion Skin setting to see the post before and after. Instead of changing how many frames you see before and after my current pose and my onion skin settings, I prefer to move my keyframe poses in towards my current primary Milan. I think it's easier to see. And I can also flip through my frames faster. Look back at the reference video we made to get an idea of the motion that you're looking for. This isn't meant to be an exact copy, a reference video. It's just there to give you a starting point. Then you can start sketching your in-betweens. The more drawings you have, the slower and smoother animation will be. When I'm drawing in-betweens, Asia, use the Scissors Tool to cut about three frames in which we write key poses to start with. When I play it back, if I feel like the motion is too fast or slow, I'll adjust the keyframes to get the timing I want. While sketching, I'm looking at the post before and after trying to visualize suppose in the middle of them. Guineans can setting is helpful here because I'm able to see exactly what my character was and where are they intended. Endpoint is, while I'm working, I also occasionally a disabled adults and setting umbrellas in a while and scroll through my animation instead. This makes it easier to see if I forgot to draw any parts of the character's body and make sure the animation is flowing high. Wanted to. If you want something to move very quickly though, you can also incorporate a smear frame. You dress Mary, you're essentially making a blur of the motion. Like you're drawing multiple frames at once. They go by so fast that your eye doesn't even notice. But they can't look pretty funny when you pause on them. If you ever need a laugh, look up, smear frames on Google Images. Big guaranteed to brighten your day. You're drawing these in-betweens. Look for places where you can incorporate the animation principles with the poses I'm working on here. I'm actively trying to exaggerate the curve and characters back to give her poses more of an arc shape. While you're drawing your character, think about where you can cover character's body or motion to give them more of an arc. Or we can push and pull their body tannins and squash and stretch elements. This might not apply to all animations. But if you have your character doing the same action, not I'm excited that animation like mine is. You don't have to redraw those firms on the other side. Group the first half, your animation, then duplicate it. Move the new group to the end of your first group. Then go to edit, transform and flip horizontal. Line up your animation with the keyframes that you created earlier on that side. When you play back Gil the same animation, both sides. Then you can delete the initial keyframes maybe for the other side. And that's the initial animation done. Now we're going to repeat the process without blending or in-betweens, just like we did for key-frames. Your outline layer, you're going to make a new layer, cut the same number of frames you made in your sketch layer, and draw over your sketches. Then groupies, Then group these frames, duplicate them, and flip them just like you did for your sketch layer. While you're working. Remember that even though his animation can be relatively quick to make in terms of animation, it still can take a good chunk of time. Try listening to a podcast, watch TV, or listen to music while you work to make it more enjoyable. Also, remember to get up and stretch every half an hour to 40 minutes, get some water, a stack, or just take a break isn't meant to be fun, enjoyable experience. So feel free to take breaks as needed and come back when you're feeling refreshed. Also, remember to save often, there's nothing worse than losing your work. With your keyframes and in-betweens connected together and outlined. You have an animation. But this initial animation done, you can use these frames to create a loop. 11. Looping the Animation: When you have your animation completed, you can create a loop with the frame so you already created and just a few seconds without having to redraw everything over and over again. In Photoshop. Take your outline group and duplicate it. Move it to the end of the first group. Repeat until you add the length of time that you want your animation to be. You can also just the title and length. If you need more time for your animation. Play the animation back to make sure that loop seamlessly. If you see the background become transparent, you may need to extend the background layer at the bottom of your video timeline. I'm also going to change the background layer to pink. You can make your background layer whatever color you like or leave it as wipe. Your animation is looping seamlessly. You can see how the final product is turning out. It's so fun to see your character come to life after all the work that you put in. Even though you have a looping animation. Now, this might not be the final look that you're going for. If you're interested in adding color to your animation, I'll be sharing how to do that in the next lesson. 12. Adding Color: I didn't color TV animation isn't necessary, but it can add another layer of depth to your animation and add more personality to your character. Adding color to your character is pretty similar to the methods we used earlier for animating them for the animation. So make her social media. I usually like to use a color background layer as my color. Then if we want to fully coloring your character or part of your character, I'm going to show you how to do that by coloring my character's shirt and shoes. This is similar to how you create in-betweens. Create a new group, namely color. Also before I start coloring, if I know I have a lot of different colors I want to use. I will usually create this group name is something like color frame brace and duplicated every time I use a new color. That way you can have all your colors on different layers, which makes it easier to go back and change anything if you need to. You don't need to keep cutting and bilayers reframes, then create a new layer and scrub through clean animation layer and create the same amount of frames in your color layer. Duplicate your color base layer, and click on the first layer. There are a few ways to color your animation, and I'm going to show you too, if you're looking for more of a flat color for animation, on each layer, outline where your color is going to be. Make sure the shape is closed and the line connects. Go back with the paint bucket tool and fill in. The paint bucket tool in Photoshop is a little outdated. Even we use the paint bucket tool. It may have an outline from where it hasn't filled in all the way. This can even be true when the tolerance setting is as high as setting of 255. Just double-tap the paint bucket tool, do get it fully colored. I like to outline first and then go back in with the paint bucket tool for all the rest of the frames, color and until you reach the end of the initial animation you made. Once you have your first loop of animation color, you're going to duplicate the color layer like you would for creating a looping animation. Duplicate it until your animation is complete. The second method of coloring can be helpful if you want a lot of texture on your animation. I'm going to duplicate my color base layer and make another group. Take the texture brush you want in color and where you want the color to be. P for the remaining frames. When you're coloring, try to stick to about two to three colors max, especially if this is your first animation that you made. Keeping your color palette minimal can be a great way to have your character look more coherent and make the animation process easier on yourself. Color can be great way to elevate your character and make them more eye-catching. It can give your character more personality, and also can give you insight into what their motive is. Now that you've colored in green animation, you might want to add a little bit possessed your background as well. I'll be showing you how to do that in the next lesson. 13. Adding a Textured Background : You now have a looping animation. If you're happy with your piece, you can leave it as is. But if you'd like to make it a little bit more eye-catching, you can try adding texture to your background. Doing this combines a lot of what we already covered in the course. It only takes a few minutes to complete. Underneath your animation at a new group. Legal background texture, create a new layer and use the scissors tool to cut around three to four longer frames. I try to hold these frames for a four to six rooms each. Allows her to focus on the more it keeps it from distracting from your initial animation. He's a heavily texture brush and make some very large heavy brushstrokes. I might also add in a secondary color with some smaller strokes. Duplicate your layers until you reach the end of your animation. Texture to your Rocco can be an easy way to make your animation even more visually appealing. They can add secondary motion to your animation, which can be visually pleasing without the distraction. Now that your innovation is complete, you should share it. And I'll show you how to do that in the next lesson. 14. Exporting Your Video: Congrats on finishing your animation. Animating is a ton of work, a shoe proud of yourself, especially if it's one of your first times animating. And I'd encourage you to share your work both on here in the project gallery, as well as with your friends and family and on social media. It takes for your work, go to the hamburger menu and click Render Video, name it whatever you like and select where you'd like to save it. Formatted as an H.264, which will make it an MP4. And you can easily share it on your social media channels. For the range she's your work area. Then render. Once it's exported, playback to make sure it's how you want it to be. Gather your videos rendered out. You can either share with your friends, upload it to social media, or even put it on your website or portfolio if you make any animation so you post on social media, please tag me. I would love to see them. 15. Conclusion: Congrats on making your way through this Skillshare class and coming out of it with a new skill if you're new data meeting and an animation. As a full-time animator, I know how much work goes into animation. A shoe feel really proud of your work. I hope that you've enjoyed animating with me and learning about a few principles of animation, making a goofy reference video. In any meeting your personalized character and Photoshop. I hope that you're feeling inspired and with these skills under your belt, I hope that you anime more in the future. After this class, I hope that you start seeing the world a little bit more like an animator, where arcs are in your everyday life or how objects are affected by squash and stretch. And don't forget to share your project in the project gallery. I would love to see how they turned out. If you share them on social media, please tag me. I'd love to check them out there too. If you enjoyed the course, I'd appreciate it. If you left a review, it'll be great to get your feedback on it. Thank you so much for joining me and happy in a meeting. You draw you draw all the frames of the sequence. Oh my god, everyone. We making everyone. Oh my god. Oh my god.