Animating the Glitch Effect in Photoshop

1. Introduction - Welcome!: Welcome students. The glitch effect is an easy and creative animation style that anyone can create. Learn to draw with a brush tool, use filters to apply the glitch effect and navigate the timeline to create an animated GIF. The teacher for this class is sand concrete and say, Hi, I'm Sam. Hi everyone. My name is Sam England and I'm thrilled to bring you this class here on Skillshare. I'm an animator with over six years of digital art experience and creating glitches is one of my favorite tricks. It's easy to do and you can follow along with me as a walkthrough each step. You can use a drawing tablet if you have one, but all you need to complete the class is Photoshop. The class project is to follow along and create an animated gif. Gifts are awesome because you can share them on all kinds of social media. Let's get started. This is creating the glitch effect in Photoshop. 2. Sketching and Inking: As you can see, we already have Photoshop open on my current document is at 1200 by 1200 pixels, but you can check, by checking this guy right down here. You can click this. It'll tell you the width and the height, both in pixels and inches I have here. Inches is useful if you're printing, but since this is digital art, we're only interested in pixels. 1200 is perfectly fine. That's a pretty big size, so this is good to work with. The first step I'm going to go with here is I'm actually going to sketch my art. Now I have a few different options in terms of brushes on. This is just a brush that I had last used on a project here, but I'm gonna go in here and find a brush that I would like to use. I have my own brush here called illustration sketch, so you can see it's a little bit lighter. So if I make this bright red, it's actually a little bit transparent, which is good for me to use when I'm sketching. So I'm gonna go ahead and sketch my piece of art. All right, so that was pretty quick and easy. My sketch here is done. The next step here is I'm going to use the brush tool again, but instead of this one, I'm going to change it up to one that has less transparency. We're going to select a darker color here. I'm going to do, I'm going to draw this out the same thing, but I'm going to draw it out in black. And of course we're going to draw it out on a new layer. Finally, I'm going to go ahead and color in my art. So you can see all of my, I have everything drawn on one layer here in black. We're going to turn off the layer with the sketch, and we're going to go ahead and color this in. Now to color this in, we're going to create a new layer right underneath. Let's go with when go with a sort of turquoise see bluish gray for this computer. Now normally what I could do is just go ahead and color this whole thing in. May, take awhile, so sure I'll go ahead and make a larger brush. The thing is this isn't always precise. You can see I drew over the line right up here tiny bit. The way I like to do this. And it's super fast as I'm going to go ahead and select the layer with all of the ink, going to hit W for the Wand Tool, select the entire piece of art. And then I'm going to go in a little bit by expanding my selection and then inverse the selection, press G to color it in, and then make sure I'm on the empty layer here. And use the bucket tool real quick and easy. We have this colored in. Okay. 3. Coloring and Shading: So I have this all colored in. And the final thing I'm going to do is color in the screen. That final step I'm going to do here is shade the entire thing. We're going to create another layer that's on top of all of the colored in layers except for the ink, the, the outlines here. And I'm going to select some kind of blue tone because I'm going to mostly, mostly a blue theme here. Make my brush a lot bigger. And then we're going to turn this into an overlay at around 50%. Alright, this piece of art is looking pretty good. Let's just turn off the sketch layer here. And I'm going to put on a finishing touch that I like to do with my personal art style, which is adding a little bit of grit here, a little bit of texture. So I'm going to go to a dissolve brush just like this. See how it looks all smoky and cloudy like this. If we turn this layer to dissolve, we actually get this really cool effect. So I'm going to go ahead and utilize that to add some texture to my image here. Right now this piece of art is looking pretty good to me now it's time to move on to the next step where we're going to take this piece of art and prepare it for the glitch effect and then go ahead and apply that glitch effect. 4. The Glitch Effect: To move forward with this process, I'm going to take all of the layers that I've just drawn and combine them into a folder down here and call this original. I don't want to touch this. I just want this to be my initial point of reference. If I end up messing up my piece of art in a way that I don't like, I can always go back to this original and work with it. So let's take this entire folder and duplicate it, turn off the original. And let's take this and right-click. And we're going to merge this group into one beautiful layer here. Now this entire thing is on one layer and oh, it looks like I missed a little bit. So let's go ahead and erase that. Perfect, This is looking good. So we have an original rate here. I'm going to leave this here and duplicate it once again just to be safe. And let's create our first glitch. I'm going to put this in a folder and call it glitch one. So let's go ahead and take this layer and create our very first glitch with this layer selected. We're going to go up here to filter pixelate and mezzotint. Hope I'm pronouncing that right. If I'm not, that's okay. Let's go to medium lines and see how that will look. There are PRPs of art would look just like this if we apply this filter to it. So I'm gonna go ahead, That looks pretty good to me. We can also try different ones like medium strokes. That one looks even glitch here. So I'm going to actually go with that one. Say, Okay, and now it's distorted in a pretty fun and cool looking way. The next step is we could just leave it like this, but we're going to make it even a little more glitchy. Let's go to the rectangular marquee tool and make sure we have this second part here selected or you can hold down shift. We just wanna make sure that we can. We want to be sure that we can select multiple rectangles of this piece of art at the same time. So let's go ahead like that. Hit V and move them up slightly to move them straight up. You can hold down Shift, otherwise it doesn't matter too much. You can also move them anywhere you want, really, my my rule of thumb is I try to move them not too far away. So let's move them right over this way. And another effect I'm going to do while this is selected is Command I to invert the colors. Now this is a little hard to see because parts of this are white and the background of the whole image is white. So just for our purposes moving forward, I'm going to color in the background a color just to see how it looks. Nice, I'm loving that. Cool. Let's go ahead and make a few more glitches. Let's call this glitch 2. And remember first we're going to start by filtering it. So Filter pixelate mezzotint with medium strokes, That's perfectly fine. Now I can compare it to the first one. You'll see that the medium that the strokes that are used between them, every time you do this effect, it looks a little bit different. So even if I just alternate between these two, It's going to look pretty neat. All right, Let's select with the rectangular marquee tool. Let's select some more pieces here and mess around a bit more. All right, I'm liking the way that these are all looking. The next step is to put these together into the timeline. 5. Work with Timeline: In order to pull up the timeline, if you don't see it already, let's go to window all the way down to timeline. Now we have this year, we're going to click Create Frame Animation if that doesn't appear there. But this little guy and you can choose from one of these two. But we're going to go with for this project, create frame animation. Click that. And here we go. We haven't started. First of all, I like I like to start with the original one just to have it there and see what it looks like. Let's have that go on for 1 second. Could this guy down here to create a new frame? Let's make it be 0.2 seconds and turn off visibility for the original and turn it on for the first glitch. And let's see what this looks like. So it can pretty cool. Let's create a few more frames and throw in some of our other glitch effects. This is great. The way I grabbed all of the pieces here. I really like the way they flow together except the pacing feels a little off. It feels like the glitching part should go a little bit faster. We're going to click on this first one. Hold down, Shift select all four of these go down here, but the delay 0.1 seconds. Let's see how that feels. Awesome. I'm loving the way that looks. I'm feeling pretty satisfied with my project here. All that's left to do is I want to work on the background. Yep, I like the way this looks. This is awesome. Now for the final optional part, you can sign your art if you like, which I am feeling like I would like to do with the full version here. What we're gonna do is sign this and then export it. I'm going to save it a couple of different ways. And I'm going to show you how to do that in the next lesson here. But first, let's sign this bad boy. Awesome. Now it's about time to you go ahead and export and save our project here in a couple of different ways. 6. Save with a Background: In order to export and save this as a gift, we're going to go to File export, Save for Web Legacy. Make sure that this option up here is a GIF. Mine is marked as having 32 colors on. We can have more if you want, if you have some complex art and you want it to look really good. But that does mean that the GIF will be a larger file size and it will be slower to load and download and all of that stuff. So let's make mine around 32 is just fine. Hit Save. We're going to save this to our computer on an any place in your computer that you would like. Save it somewhere where you'll know you'll be able to find it and share it. 7. Save with Transparency: Awesome. Now let's go ahead and save a version of this with transparency. Let's turn off the background. Now you can tell that there's going to be transparency. If the background is checkerboard like this before I had it like this, just white, but that means that the background will be white. So I turned off the background in this first frame, but for the rest of the frames, the background is still turned on here. Let's click this little lock and highlight all of these to make sure it's often all of the layers beautiful, that looks perfect. Or eight File export, Save for Web Legacy. Zoom out. All right, That's looking good. Let's go ahead and save this. Alright, and we went ahead and we just created our very own glitchy effect, GIF in Photoshop and export it a couple of different versions, one with a background and one without on both of them are useful depending on where you want to share the gift. And if you're wanting to share your GIF on Skillshare in the project section, that would be great. I would love to see what you make. 8. Review and Class Project: In this class, we learned how to draw art in Photoshop, color it in, apply the glitch effect, animate in the timeline, and export the project as a GIF. Now it's your turn. Here are the steps to wrap up this class. First, go over the lessons from this class and create your own animated GIF. Next, come back and share your GIF here on Skillshare in the project section. Finally, before you head off lever review. Thank you for joining the class. I look forward to seeing your gifts. Heavy animating.