Animated illustrations for Instagram

1. Intro : Developing an obsession is with every artist does all along their career. Artists master their obsession and challenge themselves to create unique art. Hi, my name is Aurelia, and I'm a graphic artist. I was born and raised in a suburb of Paris, and now I'm currently living in Copenhagen. I will describe my style by saying that it's vibrant, colorful, minimalist, and its a mix of different cultures, Africa and France, especially. I'm currently inspired by the African music. I like to watch YouTube videos and see how the dancer moves, so I integrate my multicultural background for my inspirations that are Danish, because I live here in Copenhagen. So the Danish designers, they use gray tones and I try to integrate this inside my illustration and being minimalistic in the same time. So bringing some touch of colors, and I'm also inspired by the African prints called the Wax. So you can see all of these elements inside my illustrations. Today am going to teach you how to animate your illustration. So we are going to make some researches; how to analyze a movement. Then we're going to sketch. We are going to go to illustrator so we can digitize your drawings. Then we will animate the drawing in Photoshop. I hope you want to join my class. So let's get started. 2. Getting inspiration from your experiences: Before to start the lesson, I would like to share with you my journey as a young French artist. I am French as you can hear. Yes, I have horrible accent. I'm trying to work on it, but it comes every time back. What can I do? But seriously, I come from Paris. I lived in the suburb of Paris in the south. My hometown town is located at a few minutes from Paris if you take a suburb train called RER. I had a great childhood and I was very happy. At the age of 18 years old, I moved to Dijon, the mustard city. I think you might know this mustard thing. But they don't only do mustard actually. They have an art school. A public art school really good where I studied for the year. I was introduced to painting, photography, art performance, design, architecture. I got a rich education and it was really cool because in my family nobody has an interest for art. For me to to be somewhere I can really relate, somewhere where I can develop my interest and talk with people, share something, have common interests and meet incredible people from everywhere in the world. People came from China, India, Spain, Columbia, England. It was really crazy for me because I come from the suburb of Paris and a little town where I felt I was the only foreigner. I really felt inspired and I started to work on my best known art work. I started to re-question who I was and who I wanted to be as an artist. Yeah. I think it was only but [inaudible] but it really helped me. I even traveled to challenge myself more. I went to Copenhagen. I did an exchange for six months. At a design school. I wanted to come to Denmark because I really liked the Danish minimalist. I was amazed to see that in every home there is a piece of design. Could be a chair, a table, a poster. Yeah. The design is incorporated to the life of the Danish people. In France, design is seen as something very luxurious. I don't believe that design is only for some people. It's for everyone. Because it can really change way of living. If it's well thoughts, then it can really be positive for everyone and inspire people. I think that Denmark is a city for getting inspiration. It's a green city. It is really pleasant to live here. You can have your bike and experience the city slowly without stress. Denmark is a small country. There's only 6 million inhabitants. In Paris it's six minutes inhabitants. Yeah, it's small. Denmark can inspire other countries in terms of ecology, social welfare and well-being with design. Well, it is my little drawing. I am trying to illustrate my thoughts with this video. I just drew whether came in my mind. It's not perfect, but I really like to also draw spontaneously. Because I think drawing is so important to share ideas and to create a vision, to make a story. People can see what I'm talking about and how I see things. You can see what's going on in my mind in a way. Let's start the course. Yeah. 3. Sketch - Part 1: I have chosen to represent myself clapping for this class. In order to animate to clap, I am going to focus on the ends first. I have chosen this action because it can be repeated forever in a loop. I want my clap to move according to five poses. First my hands start to travel, then they go down. I focus on the hands because they express our thoughts, emotions and feelings. We feel something we want to show to others. It's a way to express and communicate. In this exercise, you're going to make your version of the clap. It can be your clap to celebrate, it can be your clap to honor someone, it can be your clap to give an order, it can be something you feel related to. I decided to interpret my clap as a fun boost. Because I want you to be boosted until the end of this class. 4. Sketch - Part 2: I am going to sketch how the body is going to move with the hands right now. I want to transmit from my drawing a feeling of boost and happiness. I am drawing what I would like my body to express while doing the club. I would like my body to bounce. To animate it is to observe how the world is moving and understanding why it is moving that way. I like to watch animation movie because I love seeing someone's interpretation of our world. My favorite at the moment is Inside Out, because I think they really succeed to imagine a micro world of what's going on in our mind by creating crazy characters with lots of crazy details. I'm amazed. To create your character. I advise you to watch animation and movies to get ideas on how to create your unique universe. I have to admit I spend lots of time watching movies, music videos to nourish my references. For me out eats out because to create you need to experience through other artists. I heard one day a quote from Picasso saying, good artists copy, and great artists steal. I have to say I agree with that. 5. Sketch - Part 3: Now we are going to make a stop motion sketchbook. Before to go digital, I want you to understand the process of animating. This task is going to take time, and is the most important in this class. You cannot go further if you don't manage to create a flow in your animation. There are many ways to animate. I decided to animate frame by frame, which is 20-30 images per second, depending on the action I want to draw. It is the best technique to get a smooth movement. Now I am drawing on a transparent paper, image by image. You have to draw the poses between the five key poses you had sketched in the previous video. As you can see I am not doing that because I have a clarity of how my movement should look like, but if you're hesitant, and need a guide, take your previous drawing, and check if you are in the right direction. Look at the first pose, and the second pose together, and draw the three poses between them. Do that for the rest of the drawing. So in between each of the five poses, there is three poses you have to create. I am going to let you see what I have been doing so far. Note that I am not drawing into detail, but just the overall, because I'm going to scan all of the drawings to refine them in Illustrator with the red colors, and lines. 6. Refine - Part 1: Phase 1 of the digital drawing. So I scanned my first images of the sequence, I imported the image into my Illustrator file. I start to create layers and names them so I don't get confused, very important and I don't serve the right colors right now, I just want to draw the lines on top of the original sketch. I start by the face and finish with the body. So in this course, I'm not giving you all of the answers about how to use technically Illustrator because I want to show you the global process of how to make an animated illustration. The faces I draw with white outlines, very thin and so there are graphic nucleic symbols. I play a bit with the eyebrow, sometimes our plans sometimes they are blank. It depends on my mood, I guess when I draw, it's also about what I'm feeling right now. I'm trying to follow my feeling so my visuals are representative of my creativity flow, I guess. The look of my models is generally proud and never too smiling because I want them to look serious and focus on what they are doing. As you can see, I'm really focus. I usually listen to a lot of music, while I'm doing that, to give me some boost and inspiration. Yeah. I guess I have to say that. 7. Refine - Part 2: Now, I am done with defining the lines. It looks clean and the lines are sharp. I am going to look at the details and bring some harmony to personage now in terms of the color and to shape. I have to reshape the hairs, mouth, hands, and bring some life to the character to give it some punch and fresh attitude. In this phase, I can spend a lot of time to refine, think about the colors, patterns, the shape, harmony. It's a phase that can be long. It can take some time because it depends on your mood. It depends of my mood, how I feel about colors right now. If I think that it's a right pose. If it goes well to my universe. It can take some time to figure it out I guess. I like to use vibrant colors because I think that it brings some [inaudible] , and something fresh, something that makes you feel alive. I don't know. Something that excite the eyes and my palette is around the red, purple, blue, and orange. I would say like warm colors. 8. Refine - Part 3: After drawing 15 poses in each layer, I am now ready to export my work in Photoshop to animate. I am so excited because we are getting close and I am looking forward to seeing how the images are going to work together. It's my favorite phase in this process, I've taught drawing longtime. We are finally getting to see the animation. To export, you need to go to "File", "Export", name the pixel you want to export. Use the format which is PNG and then you click "Export". You need to do that for each of the layer you have in the file. 9. Frame by frame - Part 1: Now we are in Photoshop. I slide also 15 pictures into a new document in Photoshop. So the pictures lay on top of each other inter layer section. You have to use the timeline to animate, go to Window to find it. In the timeline, you use the frame animation, see in the bottom, the icon to switch. Once you have done it, creates 15 frames with each other, 15 images. You have to organize well, all of your frames. As you can see, I did a little sign for [inaudible] club as well, to give some little punch to the move. 10. Frame by frame - Part 2: I copy all of the frames from the timeline. I click on the little icon here. I select Copy frames. I go again, I click on the little icon. I select Reverse Frame, and now I need to delay the frame 16 and 30. I do that to create a loop. To export the video from Photoshop, you need to go to File, Export, Render Video. Then you need to name it and choose a folder and the size of it should be HDTV by 1018, but it depends what you want. Then, it's ready to render. So let's see how it looks now. It looks quite cool. 11. Bonus 1 - Part 1: So far as a bonus, we are going to insert some text in the background around the character. It's going to be fun and with some music also. Let's go to make this. I just drew a text, which is a clap along and stay happy. I drew a text on a paper as I did for the character and I vectorized it on Illustrator. Now it's ready to be used for Final Cut Pro X. I am importing to document without any background, so it's a PNG file. 12. Bonus - Part 2 : So for this bonus, I am using Final Cut Pro X, so I can create some rhythm and put some music and also use some effects so we can make the texts appearing and disappearing according to the song. My boyfriend has made the music for this little video, I wanted to have something special, something that feeds to the atmosphere and something like fresh, funny, so, I hope you like it. 13. Bonus - Part 3 & FIN: I am using the effect draw mask. I take it from the library and I slide it into my picture. I'm going to draw the dots which is going to help me to make it appearing and disappearing, as you can see here. I feel like I am done soon. Let's see the results now. I hope you enjoyed the class and that you're going to use other information, and you will make something exciting. I'm going to see everything you've been doing so far and I will comment it. Hi.