Animation For Beginners: Add Animation To Your Instagram Photos Using Procreate

1. Introduction: Let's be honest, animation can be intimidating, especially if you've never animated before. It can be time-consuming, yada, yada. But don't worry, that's why I'm here. Hello lovely people. I'm Tyra Washington, I'm a graphic designer, YouTuber and I guess you can call me a self-taught animator. Today I'll be your guide in helping you create your very first frame by frame animation in Procreate. Whether you want to use animation to market your brand or to add a little magic to your personal Instagram photos, animation is easier than ever with tools like Procreate. If you're a complete beginner who wants to dip into the world of animation, or you're a pro who wants to learn how to use Procreate for your animations, this class is for anyone who wants to add a little magic to their Instagram photos using animation. In this class, we're going to use procreate to create our animations. You'll learn how to use Animation Assist in Procreate and then I'll walk you through a series of different animation techniques that you can apply to your photos. For example, I'll show you how to animate different objects in your photo, how to animate expression lines, text, lights, and how to use masks to animate. Lastly, I'll show you how to export your animations from Procreate and how to loop your final animation using Adobe After Effects. I didn't go to school for animation. I'm actually still learning. That's why I believe that anyone can animate. If I can do it, you can do it too, so let's get into it. 2. Class Orientation: Welcome. I'm so excited that you've decided to take this class. For the class project, what we're going to do is use Procreate to create a frame-by-frame animation that loops on top of one of your photos. Once you add a little magic to your photo, the final step will be to upload your animation to Instagram if you want to. I thought instead of creating an animation completely from scratch, why don't we add some supporting animations to a photo that already exists. Plus you'll have an amazing personalized animation that you can share with your real friends and real family, along with your virtual friends here on Skillshare, of which is a bonus, if I do say so myself. I believe this class is for all skill levels. I'll walk you through a series of different animation techniques, and based on your skill level, you can choose to apply one technique or you can apply a few different techniques together with me in the end. For this class, you will definitely need an iPad and the Procreate app. I recommend getting an Apple pencil, but you can definitely use your finger if you want to. You'll also need a laptop and the Adobe After Effects program. When we finish our animations, I would absolutely love it if you guys uploaded your projects to the class projects. I along with all of your fellow classmates here on Skillshare would love to see what you've created. All right, I'm excited to get started, so let's go. 3. Animation Principles in Procreate: Before we start animating, there are a few animation principles to keep in mind. These principles will just make it so that your animation looks more realistic and just flows better. In this lesson, I'm going to cover four of the 12 animation principles. This should be very helpful for a new start animating. The four principles I'm going to cover in this class are timing, slow in and slow out, arcs, and squashing stretch. You'll be able to take these concepts and apply them to almost anything that you animate. Let's get started. First up is timing. Timing is basically determined by the amount of frames you use in an animation. In this example you see this bird animation has many frames, in this airplane animation has less frames. Which animation do you think will have the faster animation? Let's see. You see that the animation that had more frames is actually slower than the one that has less frames. Basically, all you need to know about timing is more frames equals slower timing, less frames equals faster timing. Which brings us to the next principle which is called slow in and slow out which, basically talks about the acceleration of an object. In real life objects start out slow, speed up in the middle, and then they slow back down when they're about to stop. To achieve acceleration you start with more frames in the beginning, less frames in the middle, and then more frames in the end. Here's an example of the ball not using slow in and slow out. Really robots are the only thing that can move at a constant speed like this, so it just doesn't look very realistic. Now we'll talk about arcs. Most objects in real life follow an arc when they're in motion. Arcs basically make your animation look way more realistic because it's following the rules of gravity. If you didn't follow an arc and your animation looks like this, it will look more robotic, and the dog in this animation will probably be like, "I ain't eating this tree because I don't trust it." Next is squash and stretch, which really just emphasizes the way that an object either stretches or squashes as it's moving. The way that an object squashes and stretches really helps the viewer see how heavy the object is and how fast it's moving. For example, if you throw a basketball it would have way more squash and stretch than a bowling ball. Now you have a little background knowledge on some of the animation principles. You learned about timing, slow in and slow out, arcs, and squash and stretch. Just keep these in mind as we start animating later in this class. If you've found these principles interesting, I really recommend that you look up all 12 principles. I'm done talking about principles. Join me in the next lesson where we'll get a little familiar with Procreate. 4. Getting Started in Procreate: [MUSIC] Procreate is a digital illustration app that artists used to create just incredible works of art. Recently, Procreate updated its animation feature. Now, artists can create frame-by-frame animations right from their iPad. Not going to lie, Procreate is a little more limited than some of the other apps that are created specifically for animation. One of the biggest drawbacks being the layer limit, and there's some limitations with the video, but you can still create some pretty amazing frame-by-frame animations in Procreate. In this lesson, I'll show you how to set up your canvas to the correct size and DPI for Instagram. I'll also show you a few of the basic tool in Procreate. Open up your app, and I'll show you around Procreate. When you open up your Procreate, your screen should look a little something like this. Usually, you'll see rows and rows of projects that you're working on. But I'm not going to lie, my dashboard was looking crazy, so I decided to clean it up to look a little more professional. Anyways, [LAUGHTER] to add a new artboard, press the plus sign. You'll see there's actually a ton of options already available, but we're going to create a custom size by pressing this icon in the corner. Let's talk about the different dimensions for an Instagram post. Instagram has three different options you can choose from currently. You can choose a square option, a portrait option, or a landscape option. Depending on the photo that you're going to animate, just choose the option that's best for you. For now, I'm just going to choose the square dimension because I think it will work best for the photo that I'm going to use. I'm going to type in 1080 x 1080 pixels. For the DPI, 72 is good for most social media and digital use. But just know, if you're trying to print this out, this will be a pixelated mess. If you think there's a chance you might want to print this out, definitely set your DPI to 300. I'm not sure why you would want to print out an animation, but just know. Now that we have all of our dimensions plugged in, we can see how many maximum layers we'll be allowed to have. Lastly, you just double-check to make sure that you have Pixels selected since this is for social media. One last thing, just make sure your color profile is set to RGB, and Create. Here we go. A new artboard waiting for you to create some magic. Now, let's walk through some of these tools. First things first. Here is the Brush tool. You'll see there are so many brushes to choose from. Anything from sketching to painting. There's also just some cool textures you can apply to your art. I recommend just exploring all of the brushes. Plus within each brush, you can click on it, and that opens up a whole window of even more options. We got options on. One thing that might be helpful to adjust is the stabilization. That just helps make sure that your lines are more straight. Once you select the brush to play with, we can slide over to the left side, where we have some size options. What's really cool is you can actually choose a size and save it. No more inconsistent line sizes, you have them saved right over here on the scale. For example, if we're over here drawing some lines, and we're like, "Hold up, wait. What was that bigger size I was using?" Well, bam. It was already saved for you. [LAUGHTER] Anyways, you can delete the saved sizes by just pressing the minus sign. Under the brush size, we have the Opacity settings. You can knock down the opacity, make things look real, translucent. Make things look transparent. Last tools we have over here are the Undo button. You can just tap that, and the Redo button. A shortcut that I use all day all night is the double-finger tap to undo or the three-finger tap to redo. Let me tell you, this is the best shortcut ever because I have been using it all the time. In addition to the brushes, we have the Smudge tool, and the Eraser tool, which the eraser has all of the different options that are available for the brushes. Just select your brush, and watch it do what erasers do best, erase. Next, we have the Layers panel. This is the only layer we have so far. You can slide it to the left and duplicate it. You can also click on a layer to reveal a whole bunch more options. I'm just going to rename mine. I'll call it lines for now, or I guess a layer 1 lines. Sure. Of course, you can add a new layer by pressing the plus sign, and you can delete a layer by sliding it to the left and pressing Delete. Next up is the color panel. As you can see below, there are a few different views you can choose from. This first view is the disk view. Then we have the classic view, which is my personal preference. Another really interesting way to select colors is this harmony view. Based on the color you choose, you can click on this corner. There's a whole bunch of different color palette options. Once you select what the colors, it will automatically pop up in the right-hand corner. That's where you can drag and drop your new color palette onto your artboard. Another way you can view your color palette is this Value tab. This one's for very specific colors. You can input specific hexadecimals, and so on. The last option is this color palette option, which is where you can create your own custom color palettes, which is pretty cool. Moving on to the left side of Procreate, this is where we have the Wrench tool, which is just a panel full of actions. In this tab called Add, we can insert a photo. We can insert some text. All that good stuff. In the Canvas tab, this is where we'll use Animation Assist later, different options for our reference image and Canvas information. Then we have the Share tab, which just gives you different options to export your artwork. This is actually where the Time-lapse Replay lives. If you ever want to export your time-lapse video, it's right here. Just some different preferences that I'm not going to get into. Next up, we have the Adjustments panel, which gives you so many options to change the color of things. To adjust the blur, liquify, clone, just all kinds of adjustments. Next up, we have the Selection tool, which allows you to select specific objects on a layer, and just apply a bunch of different adjustments to them. While your object is still selected, [NOISE] you can use the Direct Selection tool to move your object around. There's different options below like flip horizontal, flip vertical. Basically, this tool will just let you distort and transform your object however you like. I'd say we covered the basics here. Now, we're all set up in Procreate. You learned how to set up your canvas to the correct size and DPI for Instagram. You also learned about a few of the basic tools in Procreate. In the next class, I'll teach you all about Procreate's Animation Assist, which is the secret weapon when it comes to animating in Procreate. [MUSIC] 5. Animation Assist in Procreate: The major key to animating in Procreate is this thing called Animation Assist. Which is basically a visual timeline that allows you to set your background and foreground image, allows you to see onion skinning as a guide, and allows you to just play back your animation to see what it looks like. It's a really powerful tool when it comes to creating frame-by-frame animations. What are frame-by-frame animations, you may ask? Well, basically, frame-by-frame is drawing frames with slight differences between each frame, and when you loop them together, it appears like the object is moving. Get ready to draw some frames y'all, let's dive in. So to turn on Animation Assist, go to the Wrench tool, go to Canvas, and then just turn on this Animation Assist toggle. You'll see the new animation assist timeline pop up at the bottom of your screen and this is going to be really helpful, for when we start creating our frame-by-frame animations. I'm going to go ahead and draw the first frame of my animation. Let's just pretend something's going to melt over the screen. The first branch pretty much done to add the next frame, we're going to press Add frame in the corner of the timeline. When you do this, you'll notice you can still see the previous frame of your animation. This is called the onion skin. The onion skin basically acts as a reference for when you're drawing your next frame. You can adjust the visibility of your onion skin by going into the settings. You can choose how many onion skins you see at once by adjusting the onion skin frames. I usually like to set my own at one, because I think it's less distracting to just have one onion skin. You can also adjust the onion skin opacity, so I like to set mine at a low opacity, just so I can see underneath. Another thing, you can change the onion skin color, which I don't know, if you want to have an orange onion skin, or a purple onion skin for any reason you can do that here. But yeah, once you have all your onion skin settings to your liking, you can go ahead and draw the second frame of your animation. I'm just going to draw this second frame a little lower so it appears like it's melting downwards. Just like that, you've created the first two frames of your animation. I'm just going to toggle through to see how this animation is looking so far. I mean, it's moving. Sure, let's say we want to duplicate this frame. All you do is click on the layer, and then when this new dialog box pops up, just press the word "Duplicate." Instantly, you'll see that it made a new copy of the layer we were just on. I want this animation to continue melting. On this new duplicated layer, I'm just going to use the direct selection tool, to move it down a little bit and to quickly fill in this big old space at the top, just click and drag the color swatch in the top right-hand corner. Wow, this is the fastest melt I've ever seen. To adjust the speed of your animation, just go into settings and adjust the frames per second. I think most animations are set to about 12 frames per second, but honestly just ingest yours to whatever looks best. I think I'll bump mine up to about eight and just now you can always adjust this later. So we talked about this timeline. Now, let's take a look at this layers panel. You'll notice that all the layers that are down here in the timeline appear up in this layers panel as well. That means any new layer or group of layers in your layers panel, will show up as one frame in your timeline. That means if you have an illustration that uses more than one layer, you can group it altogether and it'll appear as one frame in your timeline. Now let's say you want to add a background to your animation. Let's just add a new frame, go up to the Wrench tool, add and insert a photo. Let me just go through my album really quickly and just drop an image into place. But don't worry, I'll go into way more detail on how to add a photo to your artboard later in this class. You'll notice when we play our animation so far, the photo just looks like another frame in the animation. But one cool thing about Procreate is you can actually set the background image. Let me move this frame to the beginning, and when you click on it, you'll see there's an option to set it as the background. Which means, when you play the animation, that image stays in the background the entire time. Just make sure that the image you want as your background is the very first layer or else you won't be able to set it as the background. Just like the background, you can also set your foreground. Let's say that we want the subject of our animation to stay on top of our animation the entire time. I'm just going to use the selection tool to select part of my subject, and once I'm happy with the selection, just go down to copy and paste. You'll see that it automatically put your selection on a brand new layer, just like the background had to be the very first layer. To set the foreground, it has to be the very last layer. Let me just turn that on, and see how this animation plays. The way I cut out the subject is absolutely terrible. But hey, it's staying in the foreground just like we want it to. I'm actually going to turn this off, because I don't like it. Let me just actually delete this altogether. I'll just click on the frame you want to remove, and press "Delete". Our animation is moving, and I'd say that's a good sign, and I'd say we covered all the basics of Animation Assist. In this lesson, you learned all the basics of Animation Assist in Procreate. You learned how to add and duplicate frames. You learned how to set your background and foreground image. You also learned about onion skinning and how to use them. Make sure your Animation Assist timeline is visible, and then meet me in the next lesson, where I'll show you how to import an image into Procreate. 6. Import an Image into Procreate: [MUSIC] The photo you choose will make a huge impact on your animation. A good image will inspire you and just open you up to a whole world of possibilities. In this lesson, we're going to select the image that we're going to use for this class, and then I'll show you how to import that image into Procreate. Let's get started. I already know what image I'm going to use for this animation. To add an image, let's go up to the wrench tool, press ''Add'' and ''Insert a photo''. Immediately, you'll see your image gallery pop up. I actually recommend creating different photo albums for your photos so that they're easier to find. I'm just going to open up this album right here. My friends and I used to go on photoshoots all the time so here's just a select few photos from those photoshoots. As you look through your images, just ask yourself, what is the main subject of the image? And how could an animation interact with that subject? Is there anything interesting in the photo that you can animate? Could you change the color of something like maybe the background of this image? Could you maybe show a motion or show motion? As you look through your images, just see what jumps out to you and what inspires you. For example, whenever I look at this image, all I can imagine are the ice cream cones melting. I'm definitely going to incorporate that into my animation. Now that I have my image on my artboard, I realize that maybe I should use the portrait size instead of the square size just because I think it'll fit my image a little better. I'm going to go to the wrench tool, Canvas, and then Crop and Resize right at the top. In the new dialog box, I'm going to go to Settings and this is where you can change the dimensions of your Canvas. If you remember, the portrait size for Instagram is 1080 by 1350, so I'll plug that in and you'll notice it gave us a little more space on our Canvas. I'm just going to press ''Done''. I don't want to risk my image getting pixelated by scaling it up so I'm just going to re-upload it. Let me delete this image, go to the wrench tool, Add, and then I'm going to reinsert my photo. I'm just navigating back to my photo, it was super easy to find because it was in an album. Now I'm going to scale up my image just a little bit just to get it to the edges. Just use these little handles and just adjust the cropping of your image. Make sure you're really happy with the cropping of your image before you de-select your image because once you de-select it, the edge of your image is completely gone, like bye girl. [LAUGHTER] But don't worry, you can just use the two-finger-undo and start again. Just make sure it's cropped to your liking and just take your time. Make sure it's cropped right. Just as the great Bubba Sparxxx once said, crop it right, crop it tight. I don't know if that was a direct quote, but moving on. [LAUGHTER] Let's do some adjustments to our image. The first thing I like to do is to sharpen up my image. Press ''Sharpen'' and I really like to do this because we did lower the quality of our image to 72 dpi, so adding a little sharpness will just make sure your image is a little more crispy for Instagram. Just use your Apple pencil and slide to the right to adjust the sharpness to your liking. Now our image is looking nice and crisp. Some other things you can adjust are the curves which just adjust the brightness and darkness of your image. You can also use the Clone tool, which is pretty similar to the Clone tool that's in Photoshop. When you select the Clone tool, you'll see this little circle pop up on your Canvas. This little circle basically acts as the reference point to your cloning. Let's say I want to cover up this phone line. Wherever the reference point is, is exactly what I'm going to paint with my paintbrush. Let's say I have the reference point over here, you'll see that I'm actually cloning the DQ sign and that's not what we're going for here, so undo. Another cool thing is you can use whatever brush you want to clone. If this scripting brush is too hard, you can use something soft like an airbrush at a small size. Just clone it away, making sure that your reference point is in the spot that you want to copy. Also, I just want to note that you can do all of these image adjustments in Photoshop beforehand and then upload your image to Procreate. Honestly, some of these image adjustments can be so much easier in Photoshop. For example, there's this thing called Content-Aware which removes unwanted things from your image basically just like magic, so quickly. But just know that there are options. I just wanted to show that you could do all of these adjustments right here in Procreate. I think our image is looking good. I think we're ready to start adding some animation. In this lesson, we went through a few things to consider when selecting an image to animate. We also learned how to import that image into Procreate and how to do just a few Image adjustments in Procreate. In the next few classes, I'm going to walk through a series of different animation techniques that would just add a speck of magic to your Instagram photos. If you're ready, join me in the next class where I'll show you how to animate an object in your photo. [MUSIC] 7. Animate Objects (Part 1): Animating objects in your photo is a great way to bring your photo to life. In this lesson, I'll show you how to edit your background image to get it ready for your animation, you'll learn how to look up a reference video, and lastly, you'll learn how to animate an object in your photo. Let's dive right in. We already have our photo in place from the previous lesson. Now, we just have to figure out what we want to animate. In this photo, I definitely think the ice cream cones are the main subject and I think it would be really cool to add a little motion to this image by making the ice cream cones melt. The very first thing that I like to do with this type of animation is sketch out my idea. We're going to create a new layer and I'll just rename this sketch for now. Basically, on this sketch layer, I just want to plan out what I want my illustration style to look like. Just ask yourself, "Do you want your illustration to look more realistic or more cartoony?" Nailing down your illustration style now will save tons of time for when we're ready to start animating and bringing our photo to life. To help us get a little inspired, let's look up a reference image and one of my favorite places to find inspiration is Pinterest. Oh my gosh, every time I open up my Pinterest, I'm just amazed by the things people create. It's so cool. But anyways, let's go ahead and use the Search tab, and I'm going to search ice cream illustration and let's see what pops up. We have some options. I think this one is really fun. I really like how round it is and the way that it's melting. This one's just pretty classic like a generic cone, but I really like the shape of it and I think it would work perfectly for my animation. One cool thing you can do in Procreate is you can click and hold on any app that's in your doc and just drag it right beside your Procreate window. You can also adjust the size and bam, reference image right before your eyes. Before we start sketching, just double-check to make sure that you're on your new sketch layer. Because if you accidentally start drawing on your background image and you accidentally make a mistake, when you go to erase the mistake, you'll actually be erasing your background image as well, which we don't want. That's why we draw on a new layer. That way if you make a mistake, you can erase just the layer with the mistake, which is a lifesaver. But anyways, we can go ahead and start sketching in our ice cream. First, I'm going to go ahead and grab my favorite brush, which is the Script brush. Another brush that people really like is the Syrup brush so maybe try that one out as well and see what your favorite is. But it all depends on the style of illustration you're going for. I really like how the top starts with the little swirl. Let me get this shape right. I'm not going to copy this ice cream cone completely, I'm just going to modify and add my own style to it. I definitely don't think I'm going to add as many ripples to mine. I think maybe three ripples on each side is fine. It's good enough for me. This is a good basic shape. I drew mine down pretty low, so I'm going to use the Direct Selection tool and bump up my illustration a bit. I'm fine with this basic outline, and now I think it's a good time to start adding in a little color. I'm going to press and hold on the canvas to eye-drop this brownish color. I'm going to add this new color layer right underneath the sketch layer. On this new layer, I'm going to trace along the outline that I drew previously and just do your best to stay in the lines. We're done with that, let's go back into these layers. I'm actually going to rename this layer just so we can stay a little organized. I'll call this Chocolate, maybe base color, so we know what this is. So far we have our outline, we have our base color. Next up, I'm going to add in the shadow layer and I want this to be right above our base color. The reason I'm keeping all of these parts of the ice cream on separate layers is because it just gives me more flexibility. We name this layer Shadows, and what I'm going to do is, I'm going to grab a slightly darker brown color for the shadow. I'm going to slide it down into the right a little bit for a darker brown shade. I think adding shadows to your illustrations gives a nice depth and realism to them. When I'm drawing the shadows, I'm just pretending that the light source is coming from this upper left area, which means that the shadow would fall on the bottom of each ripple. Also, there are some shadows present in my reference image, so if I get lost I can always look at our reference. Another thing, when you're drawing in these shadows, don't be afraid to experiment with some different brushes that maybe have some texture. There are some nice textures under the Drawing brush group and maybe even Charcoal, so just keep that in mind as an option for your illustration. Just like we filled in the shadows, next, we're going to fill in some highlights. I'm going to eye-drop the base color of this cone and then choose a highlight color that's a little up and to the left of my base color. Go ahead and make a new layer right above the shadow layer. I'll rename this Chocolate highlights, and I'm going to start drawing these highlights in on the top edge of each ripple, which is right where our pretend light source is coming from, this top left-hand corner. I think I'll do one more highlight and I'll call that good. As I'm looking at this illustration, this outline is actually starting to bother me a little bit. I don't like that it's going all the way across, so I'm going to erase a little bit. This is actually a perfect example as to why we use layers. I was able to adjust the outline without bothering any other layer and now I'm adjusting the shadows, all without ruining the entire illustration, which would just be tragic. At this point, I'm done with my final illustration, so I'm just going to group all of these separate elements together. Just select each layer by sliding it to the right, and then once they're all selected, press the "Group" at the top. Lastly, I'll rename this group so we know what it is. I'll name it Chocolate ice cream. Now that we're done with our first illustration, we really don't need our reference image anymore at this point. To get rid of the Pinterest window, all you do is grab this handle right here and swipe it right out of the frame, like that. Now we're ready to start setting ourselves up to start animating. To turn on Animation Assist, go up to the Wrench tool, then go to Canvas, and then turn on the Animation Assist button. You're probably wondering, "Why does my frame look like this?" Well, what you need to do first is go down to the Timeline and make sure that your image is set to background. That way your image stays in the background during the entire animation. I'd say one good rule of thumb before you start animating is to find a good reference video, so I'm actually going to pull up Google real quick just so that I can do a little research on how an ice cream actually melts. One place that I actually really like to go to is Adobe Stock. I just think that they have some pretty good quality video, so let's go to this website. Make sure that video is selected in this drop-down. Now I'm going to type in my search, which I've already typed in before, ice cream melt, and let's see what we come up with. Immediately, there are already so many good options. Let me scroll through and take a look at a few. Let's just click on this video for now. The first thing that I notice as I'm watching this video is that the ice cream shrinks and gets shorter as it's melting, so I definitely want to do that in my animation. What's really helpful is you can actually scroll back through the video and pause at the moments that you want to look at a little longer. That can be really helpful. Let's look at another video, maybe this one. In this video, this is a good video to reference how an ice cream would drip. It looks like the drip gets really long and then as soon as it breaks off, the drip snaps back and shortens again. I honestly recommend looking up reference videos for anything you're animating, whether it's fire, lightning, and you could probably honestly look up other animations to get inspired as well. I think we've gathered some good inspiration. Let me just go back to the Procreate screen because I think we can actually start animating this ice cream cone. We actually already have the first frame of our animation finished. To add a new frame, just go to Add Frame in the corner of this timeline, and immediately, you'll see the onion skin of the previous frame. I want to adjust the opacity of my onion skin and just bump it up a little more, so I'm just going to do that in the Settings. That looks much better. I think it would be helpful if I had my reference video in the same window as my Procreate. Just press and hold on any app that you want next to your Procreate window, and let me just scroll down to the video I want to see. Now, whenever I'm a little stuck when it comes to animating, I can just take a peek over here and know that I have a little backup just in case. Now, we can start on the second frame of this animation. Based on some of the video references we looked up, we learned that ice cream cones shrink down and get a little shorter as they melt, so as you can see in this frame, I'm making the ice cream cone a little shorter and I'm drawing each ripple a little lower than the frame previous. I'm also adding in some little waves that will turn into drips later; so I'll add one there, maybe another on this ripple, right there. I drew that frame a little too wide. I think I'm pretty happy with how this frame looks. Now, it's time to draw the next frame. Just come down to the timeline again and just press Add Frame. On this third frame of the animation, I'm still just focusing on the outline, so I'm still making the ice cream cone shorter, while also making the drips a little longer. We're just continuing this downward motion, making each ripple a little lower than the last one and just using your onion skin as a guide. At this stage of the animation, it can be really helpful to just go back through and see how your frames are looking so far. Let me actually change my settings so we're only seeing one onion skin, so it's easier to see what's happening. We start with our full ice cream and you can see that it's slowly shrinking as we go. On to the next one. For this next frame, I'm going to make this drip pretty long, I think it's probably going to break off in the next frame. It's basically the same story, new frame, we're just making this ice cream shrink while also paying attention to what stage each drip is in. For example, on this next frame, this drip is definitely ready to break off. I'm just going to draw the drip and if you remember back to the video reference, as soon as the drip breaks off, the top snaps back and shrinks to a smaller size. Let's make this start to shrink back just a little bit, like that, and let me just speed this up as I draw through the rest of these ripples. Just making these drips a little longer too. We'll probably have them break off in one of the upcoming frames. Let me just check the progress of this animation. I'd say it's always a great rule of thumb to just check the progress of your animation as you're going because it's so much easier to make edits at this stage versus when you're farther in the animation process. On this next frame, we're going to have this drip move down a little farther, and we're just going to add a little squash and stretch to exaggerate the movement of this drip dropping down. With this top portion, we're just going to continue allowing it to shrink back up, and we'll decide if we want to make this drip again later. Again, just continuing to draw each ripple a little lower. I actually wish these two drips weren't landing up. That's something we can decide to change now or just leave it. Now, for this drip, I think it's a good time for this one to break off. I'm just going to draw the bottom part like this, and then remember we need to make this top start to snap back a little bit. At this point of the animation, the timing of each drip might start to get a little confusing, but just focus on one at a time and you'll be fine. This drip is still continuing to fall down, and I'm actually going to have a squash a little bit as soon as it hits my finger. For the top of the drip, I think I'm going to have it drip one more time, so let me just make it a little longer. Continuing everything downwards. For this little drip over here, I'll have it stretch and then snap back a little bit at the top. Once again, it's always a good idea to playback your animation to see what it's looking like so far. Just make sure nothing is looking crazy and just make any edits that you need to while we're still at this stage. As this is playing back, I think it's a good idea to look at each drip separately just to see how they animate on their own. I'm just going to add in a few more frames to this animation, I think I'll just have the drips land , and then I'll call it good. Let's go ahead and add a new frame and as this drop lands, I'm just going to have it completely squish against my finger. Then I'll go through and just have everything else shrink a little bit, and let gravity do what gravity does best, which is just pull things down to the ground, and I'll go ahead and let this second drop squash into my finger as well. This middle drop is looking a little weird, so let me just fix that up really quickly and let me see how this looks. Now, it's looking a little too thin, so let's just thicken this up a little bit and make it a little longer. Let's look at this. Another thing that I'm noticing is this top drip is bouncing back a little strange, it's almost like too bouncy if you know what I mean. Let me just find the frame that it starts to be a little weird, which is this one, and let me just shorten this up a little bit. Let's just draw this frame a little more similar to the previous frame so that it moves more slowly. When I play this back, I think I need to edit this last frame as well, shorten this one up as well, and maybe a little thinner too. Let's see how this plays. I'd say that's a little better. Yeah, I'm fine with that. The last thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to trace an exact copy of this frame just so that it loops at the end. I'm basically just going to go through and trace everything exactly the same. I'm not trying to make it melt anymore, I just want this frame to jitter at the end, so I have the option to loop it if I need to. With my two jitter frames at the end, I'm going to copy both of them so that it loops just a little longer. I'm going to duplicate this first frame and then duplicate this second jitter frame. When we play this back, you'll see it shakes a little bit at the end, instead of just staying still. I like to have this little shake at the end of the animation so that I have the option to loop it for as long as I need to in the end. For example, I'm definitely going to animate the other ice cream cone in this photo. The two jitter frames will help me time the animations so that they end at the same time. Now that we're done with our base frames and we're 100 percent sure that we're fine with how everything looks, we can go into each frame and start to add in the color and details. 8. Animate Objects (Part 2): Let's go back to that first reference frame and just eye-drop the color that we're going to add to each frame. Let's move to the first frame where we're going to add in color. I think it's actually easier to use the Layers panel for this process. You'll see we have about seven or eight-ish frames that we need to add color to. Let's add a new layer for our color frame. Then we need to group this layer with frame number two. Just slide the layer to the right to select it, and then just press "Group" at the top. After you press "Group", you'll notice that it put our two layers in one nice and neat folder, and you can just use this little triangle on the side to collapse the folder. Honestly, onion skins can get a little confusing at this point. So you can either turn them off or you can press and long hold on our group, and isolate just the group that we're working with. Make sure you're on your new layer. Then this is the relaxing part. You can just go through and color in your frame, just like a coloring book. We're done adding color to this first frame. To turn on the visibility of all the layers again, just press and long hold on the check mark again. On to frame number three, we're going to create a new layer for our color again, slide frame three to the right to select it, and then press "Group." Also, make sure for each of these groups that the outline layer is on top of the color layer, because we want to be able to see the outline. I'm just pressing and holding on the check mark again to just isolate this group, and I'm just enjoying a little time to color. I'd say that this is the most relaxing part of animating, because we finished the hard part planning out each frame, and now we just get to relax and color. I'll show you guys another way to group layers together. We're going to add a new layer for our color, and then just drag the new layer right on top of frame number four to group them together. Once again, we just need to make sure that our outline is on top of our color layer. Let me just isolate this group and color this in really quickly. Also, I don't know if I'm the only one, but is this chocolate ice cream starting to look like the poop emoji? Yeah, kind of weird. Just because of that reason, we're not going to isolate the groups anymore. I'm going to color the rest of the frames with the background image on. Next up is frame number six. You guys know the drill by now. Create a new color layer, group it together with the frame outline, and get your color on. You see that it is a little distracting drawing with the onion skins on at this point. So just go into settings and turn the onion skin frames to none. We can just focus on the frame at hand. This is getting a little repetitive. I'm just going to finish adding color to these last few frames, and I'll meet you guys when I'm finished. We back. Let's see what it looks like when we play it back. It looks pretty good. But guess what, the only thing we're missing are the shadows and highlights that we included in our reference illustration. That basically means we need to go back through each frame and add a shadow layer to each ice cream cone. Let me go into this first group. I'm going to add the shadow right above this base color layer. But first, let me actually go back to our reference so I can eye-drop the correct shadow color. There we go. Let me add that to the new layer we created right above our base color. It's really up to you to determine how much detail you want to add to your illustration. I like to add shadows just because I think it looks a little nicer and a little more realistic. Just know that the more detail you have in your illustration, the longer it will take for you to finish each frame. Here I am over here, adding highlights to each frame as well, and I'm adding it right above the shadow layer. I'm not done adding in my shadows and highlights yet, but you'll notice that my chocolate ice cream is starting to poke up underneath my animation. To fix that, I need to do a little editing to my original background image. I'm just going to isolate the background image by pressing and holding on the check mark, and that's just going to turn off the visibility of all the other layers. Another thing I want to do is I want to make a copy. So slide your background image to the left and just press "Duplicate." I like to make a copy just in case I were to mess up. I'm just going to turn off the visibility of the copy, and we'll work on this image for now. To remove the chocolate ice cream, I'm going to go up to the Wand tool and press "Clone." Just move this circle to a nice reference point. I think I want to copy this cement. You'll see when you start painting, it starts to copy whatever is underneath the circle. I'm actually going to use a softer brush for this, and maybe something a little smaller, so it's not too crazy. Yeah, this looks much better. Maybe I want to clone this yellow curve a little bit. Yeah, we're just getting rid of the top of this ice cream cone. It doesn't look perfect, but nobody's going to notice. If you're not digging the Clone tool, you can use the Selection tool, and just use it to select the area that you want to copy. I'll select part of the street, part of this curb, and just make sure you select an area that's wide enough and tall enough to cover your ice cream cone. I think my area is big enough, so I'm just going to come down to this bottom bar and press "Copy & Paste," which will automatically copy and paste just the area we selected in a new layer. I'm just going to move this new layer and place it right on top of my ice cream cone, and this alone is already starting to just disguise the ice cream cone. You can also distort this layer a little bit to make sure that the curb is lined up. Make sure that everything is covered. I think this coverage looks pretty good. The only thing I need to adjust are these harsh edges. I'm just going to use this Eraser tool and maybe use a softer brush like an airbrush, and I definitely need to lower the size of this, because it's erasing too much. But yeah, just erase the parts that we don't need, and just soften the parts that are a little harsh, like right here. Just do your best to blend all of the edges in with the rest of the image. Just like a magic trick, that is how you make things disappear. I'm pretty happy with how this looks. I'm just going to merge it with the copy of my original image. You can either press "Merge Down" or another way you can merge layers together is to just pinch them together with your fingers. Sometimes pinching layers together takes me a little time, but, hey, we did it. Now let's see what our animation looks like with the background removed. Hey, it looks pretty natural to me. I'm not going to bore you by adding in the final highlights and shadows. Let me just pull up my final animation. There are a few differences in this version. For example, I used a brown outline instead of black, and I also used a little texture for the shadows. Just like before, I did include my two ending jitter frames, so that we can loop this for as long as we need to. One other thing I want you guys to be aware of is Procreate's layer limit. To see how many layers you have left, go to the Wrench tool, Canvas, and at the bottom press "Canvas information." In the new window that pops up, just make sure you have Layer selected, and it'll give you a whole breakdown on how many layers you have available. It looks like I only have 19 layers available, and it took me about 41 layers to create this animation. That being said, I will definitely need to animate this vanilla ice cream cone in a different file. I actually already animated this vanilla ice cream cone. As you can see, I have the chocolate ice cream cone, I have the vanilla ice cream cone. I even animated this Dairy Queen sign to melt as well. If we want to take a look at the vanilla ice cream cone, you'll see that I just animated it the exact same way as I animated the chocolate ice cream cone. I created a couple of jitter layers at the end, so that I can just loop it for as long as I need to time the two together. I'll show you how to combine all of these separate animations into one looping animation, in one of the final lessons. Just stay tuned for that near the end. Perfect. In this class, you learned how to edit your background image to get it ready for your animation in Procreate, then you learned how to look up a reference video, and lastly, how to animate an object in your photo. Now it's your turn. Look at your image and see if there's an object that you can animate or add motion to in your image. Then meet me in the next class where I'll teach you how to animate lines of expression in Procreate. Let's go. 9. Animate Expression Lines and Shapes: [MUSIC] Using basic lines and shapes in your animation is a great way to add expression, movement, and interest to your photos. They also just give emphasis to the subject of your photo. In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to animate some lines of expression in your photo. For this animation, choose an image that has a clear subject that you want to bring a little emphasis to. I'd say that the ice cream cones are the subject of this image. So I'm just going to use animation to bring a little spark of interest. The first thing we're going to do is create a new layer. We're going to add it right above the background image. I think I'm going to rename this sketch. I'm going to use this layer to sketch out my idea for this animation. Let me grab a nice brush really quickly. Most times I use the scripting brush under the calligraphy but I would definitely say experiment with brushes to find out which one's your favorite. The basic idea here is to have sparks coming off this ice cream cone, like expression marks. My marks are looking crooked but don't worry, just use the "Direct Selection" tool and you can make any adjustments you need to. That looks pretty good, now I need to add the spark to the other ice cream cone. To make a copy of any layer, you just slide it to the left and then press "Duplicate". Then I'll just use my handy dandy Direct Selection tool to move my second spark into position. I think this second spark would look better if it was flipped. So let me press this "Direct Selection" tool again and just press "Flip Horizontal", which just mirrors it horizontally. Now that my sketch is done, I'll just go ahead and merge these two layers together. You can do that by just simply squeezing the layers together and then I want to group this sketch with my background images, I already have a new group set up from the last lesson. But basically, just click and drag your sketch and hover it right on top of your background to group them together. I think we're ready for Animation Assist. Come on over to the wrench, press Canvas, and then Animation Assist. When the timeline pops up, just make sure that your image is set to the background. This will just make sure that our image group, including our sketch, will stay in the background during the entire animation. That being said, let me actually just reduce the opacity of my sketch just so it's a little less distracting. It will also help so that I can see my animation frames a little better. All right, so let me just show you a couple of ways that we can animate these sparks. With any animation, you want to start by first adding a new frame. Let's go to Add Frame in the corner of the timeline. For the first option, all we're going to do is completely trace our sketch layer. Then we're going to create another frame by pressing Add Frame again. On this frame, we're going to simply trace the sketch again. That's it for the first option. When you play the animation, you'll see that it just gives the sparks a little jitter and it just looks like you added a gift right here your image. Now I'll show you another way how to animate these sparks. I'm going to build this animation so that the first option for sparks and second option for sparks play at the same time so that we can compare them. Just give me a second to add more frames in. This first animation looks exactly the same. I just added in more frames so that I can create this second animation. Usually, I would create a second animation in a completely different Canvas but I just want you guys to be able to see these side by side. First, let me create a new layer for the first frame of this animation. Then I'm going to select the first frame of our first animation and group it together with the first frame of the second animation so that they play together. Basically, any layers that are grouped together in the layers panel appear as one frame down here in the animation timeline. For this second animation option, I'm going to make this spark expand outwards and then disappear. For this first frame, I'm just going to draw a really small portion of this spark. That's good for the first frame. Now, let's go to the second frame down here in the timeline, in the layers panel, I'm going to create a new frame for our new animation and just group it together with the second frame of our first animation. Then let me just adjust my settings so that my Onion Skin frames are set to one. Because I think it'll be helpful to see the first frame of our animation for reference. Then this popped up. Since this frame of the animation is in a group, it's basically asking me which layer I want to draw on. Let me show you, actually, how I got this setting to pop up. If you want this setting too, go to the Wrench tool, then go to Preferences, and then tap on "Gesture Controls". There are so many preferences you can set up, but basically what I did was I went to this Layer Select option and then turned on this button plus Apple Pencil toggle. This option is actually really cool when you're trying to find a specific layer in your artwork. Back to where we were. On frame two, we're going to press the empty layer that we created. Then on this frame, we're just going to extend the spark a little further than the first frame. I'd say extend it to a little more than halfway through your original sketch so that there's just a little bit left at the end. Moving on to frame three of the animation. Up in the layers panel, I'm going to create a new layer and group it with frame number three. Let me turn down the opacity of my Onion Skin so I can see a little better. On the third frame of this animation, I want to extend our spark to the end of our sketch, but at the same time, I actually want to start shrinking it. I'm going to draw it in a little higher than the bottom but extend it all the way to the top of our sketch. If we want to preview our animation so far, you'll see that it's starting to extend outwards. I actually think we only need one more frame for this animation. Let me go to frame number four. As always, we're going to create a new layer in the layers panel and group it with frame number four. Wow, it's actually hard to tell the difference between my Onion Skin and my sketch. Let me just bring up the opacity of my Onion Skin. Basically, just use the Onion Skin settings to do whatever is easiest for you to see. For this last frame, frame number four, I'm just ending with a little dot right outside of the previous frame. I think that flow is pretty nice. Here are both of them together. Actually, let me turn off our original sketch layer so that we can see the animation in full effect. Here are the two options together. You'll see we created this jittery spark and then the spark that extends outwards. But just know there are so many ways you can add lines of expression to your animations. Just get inspired and don't be afraid to experiment. In this lesson, you learned how to animate simple expression lines to add motion and emphasis to your image. Now it's your turn. Look at your photo and see where you can add some lines of expression. Then join me in the next lesson where we'll do a little text animation. [MUSIC] 10. Animate Text: [MUSIC] Using words in your animation can give a little backstory to your animation. It can also give a little context to the viewer as to what you want them to know. There are so many ways you can animate text in Procreate but in this lesson, I'll show you how to make your text gradually appear and then disappear. Let's go. For this animation, I'm going to use this photo that I took in San Diego. I just love this guy in the background and I think it would look really nice with some text animation. I already have an idea of what text I want to add to this image, but if you are completely stumped for a word, what I would do is start searching through some idioms. The word that I think I want to include in my animation is the word dreams. Let me just search dream idioms and see what comes up. We have things like beyond your wildest dreams, that's nice. We have things like broken dreams. You can click farther in and see what other results pop up but that's just an idea of how to come up with a word or phrase. But anyways, once you have a word or phrase selected, I'll show you how to add some text. We're going to go over to the wrench tool, press "Add", and then press "Add Text." Instantly, you'll see a new text box pop up. While the text is still selected, this is the time that I like to choose the color. For this, I think I'm just going to stick with the color white just to keep the background nice and clean. Now it's time to type in our word. Just pull up the keyboard and the word I've selected is the word "Dreamers", just because this is a really nice and dreamy image. Make sure your text is selected. To format our text, we're just going to press this double A in the corner. That's just going to pull up this font style dialogue box. As you can see, there are several different fonts you can choose from, so just go through. I'm going to stick to the DIN Condensed just because it's nice and clean. Then you can just go through and make any other adjustments. You can choose the size. Just play around with the settings. If you don't like something, just put this setting back to zero percent. One thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to make my text all caps by pressing this little toggle in the corner. Another thing you could do is make your text all outlines by pressing that. Honestly, to be honest, I don't even know what that tool does. We're just going to undo. [LAUGHTER] I'm pretty happy with these settings, so I'm going to press "Done". If your text is going on two lines like mine, you can just use these little handles on the corner and make your text box as wide as you need. The text is looking pretty good. I just want to position it in the center. I'm going to go to the direct selection tool and I think I want it to be about right there. We'll scale it up a bit. That looks good. Our text is looking mad normal. There's nothing too special happening. I think what I want to do is make a custom shape, like maybe I'll have the text arc a little bit just to add a little more interest. What I'm going to do is I'm going to add a new layer. Let's just call this reference for now. On this reference layer, I'm going to just sketch out the shape that I want my text to follow. The top is going to be straight. I'm just going to drag, hold down with my Apple Pencil to make a straight line, and then you can hold down with your finger to make the line snap to a perfect horizontal line. At the bottom, I'll make an arc. I'll just draw in my arc, press and hold with your Apple Pencil without lifting to make it a perfect arc, and then press down with your finger to make it a perfect circle arc. Then I'll just enclose this shape. On the sides, click and hold, use your finger to make the line perfectly vertical, and I'll do the same thing on this side. This shape's looking pretty good, but I think I want to adjust the height just to make it fit in the space a little better. I'm going to grab the selection tool and just select the top of the shape. Make sure I'm on the right layer. Then I'll use this direct selection tool to just bump up the height a bit, to about I think that looks pretty good. Now that we have our reference shape created, I'm going to start adjusting the text so that it follows this shape. Let's go to the text layer. In order to adjust the shape, we need to rasterize the text. First, I'm just going to create a copy so that we have it just in case. For this other text layer, I'm going to press rasterize, which rasterizing just means that you can no longer type with this text anymore. It's just like a shape instead. There are so many ways you can adjust text in Procreate. One thing I see people do a lot is use Liquify. Under Liquify you can adjust the size and just push your text into a wave shape. You can also twist your text if that's your jam. You can probably actually do a cool animation with that one. I don't know, just play around with some of these effects that are available. But for this class, I'm not going to use any liquify effects. I'm actually going to use this direct selection tool. This direct selection tool has all the tools I'll need. Let me just scale this up to the edge of my reference and we can begin. Over in the corner, you'll see this option called Warp. When you click on it, it'll add all these little grids to your text and you can just use it to stretch your image around. I'm just going to pull down one side just a little bit, then the other side. Then I'm going to push this middle back up. I'm just going to keep on making these really small adjustments to one side, the other side, and then fixing the middle. I'm taking my time with these adjustments because I want to keep the integrity of the font as much as possible, even though we're distorting it. Another option, if you guys want your text to look even more perfect, you could actually create it in Adobe Illustrator and just import a PNG over to Procreate. Let me just bring down the crossbars of the Es, and I think this looks decent. I'm pretty happy with that. We're done with this reference. I'm just going to go ahead and delete this shape. To finish out my phrase, I'm just going to add a few more words to the top. Once again, we'll go to the wrench, add, and add text, select your color. Then for the top of my phrase, I'm just going to type in "Revenge of the". Shout out to anyone who knows what this is. Anyways, make sure your text is selected before you format. Just format your text however you'd like. I'm going to make mine all caps again and scale the font down quite a bit. This time I'm going to use some kerning to the width of the word "Dreamers". Let me just adjust these handles a bit. I'm pretty fine with that, so press "Done". Once again, I'm going to use the direct selection tool to just scale up this text to the width of the word "Dreamers" and make sure that you have Uniform selected or else you'll just be distorting your text in a weird way. Unless you want that, I mean, go for it. We have the base structure of our text set up. Now it's time to start animating. To turn on the Animation Assist, go to the wrench tool, then go to Canvas, and then turn on the Animation Assist button. As always, I like to set my background image to background so it stays in the background for the entire animation. I think I actually want this text to stay in the background as well, but let me just grab "Revenge of the" and group it with the background image. Anything grouped with the background is going to stay in the background the entire time. You know what? I'm even going to put our custom text that we just created in the background group as well, because I want to use that as more of a reference instead of it actually being a frame of the animation. Let me actually just rename this Reference so that I know to keep referencing back to this as I'm animating. We have our structure and everything set up, now let's think about the animation. My plan is to have an object shoot in from the left to the right and fill in the letters as it goes. Then maybe I'll have it transition out by having all the letters melt. To start, let's go to our handy dandy Reference layer and press "Select". When your layer is selected, you'll see all these weird diagonal lines. If your selection looks black like this, just make sure free hand is selected. The selection just means that we can only draw within the shape that's selected, which happens to be the word "Dreamers". Go ahead, add a new frame, and what we're going to do is gradually fill in the letters from left to right. But first, let me just lower the opacity of this reference layer so we can see what we're doing a little better. I think down to like 21 percent is fine. I also think it would be useful to just add a sketch layer to sketch out the path of our animation. I'm just going to draw this red arrow to indicate the arc that I want to follow. I just have this little sketch layer in the background group with the rest of the background. Select your first frame and lets finally start the first frame of our animation. I'm going to start out a little slow. I'm just going to make a really small bloop for the first frame. Now, this is important. Every time you add a new frame after this, we're going to press "Duplicate" so that we can just keep on adding on and build this animation as we go. Press "Duplicate" again, add a little more length to your shape. Press "Duplicate" again. Add even more length and width to your shape. Let me do one more just so we can see how this is turning out so far. Duplicate, add even more, and now let's see what we've created so far. It's coming together slowly, but surely. One thing that I want to note is now our layer is not selected, so when we go to fill in the E, it's free-range at this point. Basically, anytime you scroll through the timeline, instead of just clicking on a layer, it's going to deselect your selection. What you have to do is go back through your layers and find your reference. Make sure it's selected, and when you select a layer on your timeline, click it with absolute certainty so click instead of scroll. Then from there you can go ahead and continue duplicating. I think you guys get it at this point so I'm just going to fast forward a bit. Just continue on duplicating each slide and then filling them in farther and farther each time. As I go through building in each of these frames, I'm trying my best to follow along this red arc path that we created for ourselves earlier in this lesson. We're a little more than halfway through our animation and let's pretend to make a mistake. Let's say I forgot to fill in the top of the D and I didn't notice it, so I'll just continue on duplicating frames to fill in the rest of this animation. Let me just fast forward through a few more frames and I'll show you what happens when you forget to fill in a little piece of your letters. I think this is pretty good for the example. After I made that mistake, I filled in about four additional frames. Since we're duplicating frames, that means that the mistake is on the last four frames of this animation. Let's just scroll through the timeline to see where we made the mistake. I'm just going to lower the opacity of my onion skins. Looks like the mistake was made on this frame, which means that was copied on all of the frames after it. It's about four or five frames, which is not bad for this example, I could easily go back and just fill that in on the five frames. Let me just select my reference and then select the frame. Remember select not scroll. Select the frame where I need to fill in the D and just continue doing that through all of the frames that I missed. This wasn't a very terrible mistake, it was pretty easy to fix, but you can imagine that if you made a mistake in one of your first few frames, it might be a pain to have to go back and fix all of the frames after it. Honestly, depending on the situation, it might be easier to just delete all the frames after and start from the frame where the mistake was made. But anyways, I'm going to continue by filling in the last of these frames. Just one more after this and we can call it done. I'm just going to duplicate this final frame one more time, and let's see what it looks like. It's looking pretty good, but this red arc is a little distracting so I'm just going to turn off that layer. Actually, we can turn off the reference layer at this point too. Now let's see it at the full effect. I think that looks pretty good, but I think I could add actually a few details to make this animation look a little cooler. I'm going to scroll to the point where each letter finishes like right here, this is the frame where the D finishes and I'm just going to make a little splash mark. This drip just emphasizes the end of the D and it acts as a secondary animation within our animation. In the second frame, I'll just finish off the drip with a little dot. Next, let me see where the R ends. It's actually the same frame as the D. I wish that the D, R, and E finished at separate times but I'm just going to roll with it. Let me just do the drip element on the E and on the second frame, finish it with the dot, just like the D. I'm going to skip the A and the M for now and find the point where this E finishes, which is right here. I'll draw a small drip on the first frame and then on the next frame, I'm going to make the drip disappear with a little dot. Here's the R. Once again, I'm making the drip on the frame where the R ends, and then on the next frame, I'm just making a little dot to make it disappear. I definitely love how the E, R, and S all end at different times. I think when animations are staggered this way, it just brings more interest compared to if they all end at the same time. Let's take a look at this animation with the drips added, I definitely like it on the end with E, R, S, but the beginning looks a little plain. Let me actually go ahead and add a drip to the R. This is the frame where the R ends, and then we're just going to make the drip disappear. Now let's see how it looks. I did that, but one thing that I noticed as this was playing through is that the words are overlapping on top of his head. I think this would look so much stronger if maybe his hat was on top of the letters. I think that was the hat overlapping, it would add a nice depth to this animation. What's cool about Procreate is just how you can set a background image, you can also set a foreground image, which means that the image would stay on top while the entire animation plays out. Let me go to the background image and make a copy of this hat. I'm going to use this selection tool to just draw around the outline of the hat. Just take your time with it and follow along the outline as good as you can until you trace the entire outline of the hat. I think that selection is pretty good so I'm just going to go down to copy and paste, and when I press that, it automatically drops the hat onto a new layer. I'll just name this hat just to stay a little organized. The only way you can set a foreground image is to have your image either on the top of the layers panel or if you look down at your animation assist timeline, it has to be the very last frame. Now we have our foreground image set and look, those letters are going behind the hat. I think it looks pretty good. You can leave this animation as is, or you can actually animate the way you want the letters to exit. This is my final animation, and I actually decided to have the letters melt to exit the stage. The way I created this melting transition is actually pretty easy. Let me just scroll back to where the letters are full. This is the beginning of the mouth so let me just turn off my onion frames. Basically what you do is you just keep erasing letters from the top and just adding little drips to the bottom. Just keep doing this and little by little, the space with the drip will get smaller until eventually you just have these little lines and then they'll disappear. That's just one of the many ways you can animate text in Procreate. In this lesson, you learned how to use the text tool in Procreate, you also learned how to work your text into an interesting shape, and lastly, you learned how to animate your text to gradually appear and disappear. Look at your image and see where you can add some text animation and meet me in the next lesson, where you'll learn how to animate some lights. [MUSIC] 11. Animate Lights: [MUSIC] Anytime there are lights in an image, that is a great opportunity to add some animation. In this lesson, I'll teach you how to use masks to create a nice, dynamic lighting effect and how to animate blinking lights in your image. For this animation, I chose this image with this really cool neon sign in the background. This sign is basically screaming to be animated. To start, I'm just going to label this background layer as Normal. That's just going to let me know that this is the original layer with no lighting effect. Of course, I made a typo. Let me go back in and fix that. Now, I'm going to make a copy of this layer for the lighting effect. Just slide the layer to the left and press Duplicate, and then I'm going to rename this layer and I'm going to call it Bloom, since that's the name of the lighting effect we're about to use. Now, we're ready to add this lighting effect. Go over to the Wand tool and then scroll down and find the word Bloom. When this new window pops up, all you do is slide your cursor to the right, to adjust the amount of bloom that you add to your image. Instantly, you'll see that now the light looks like it's up to maximum brightness. When you toggle between the visibility of your layers, you'll see there's a big difference in the lighting. With both of these layers created, let's see what we have so far. I'm going to turn on the Wrench tool, go to Canvas, and slide on this Animation Assist. Then the first thing I always do is set the background image in the timeline. Let me just turn on the visibility of our Bloom layer and see what we have. We have nothing. [LAUGHTER] The background image stays in the background, so it's never really popping up over the bloom layer. I'm just going to create a copy and put it above the bloom layer. There we go. Now, we have something way too fast. I'm just going to adjust the Frames Per Second in the settings. This looks much better. I think this animation looks nice as is, but I think we can do something a little better and more dynamic. Let me just get rid of the copy of this normal layer and I'm just going to turn off Animation Assist for now because it's time to get a little sketchy. I'm just going to create a new layer and I'll rename this Sketch. I'm basically going to use this sketch layer to just sketch out the movement path of my object. Let me grab a nice bright color and let me just do a nice sketching brush. My idea is to have a little magical light beam come in and activate the lights. Let me just try to sketch out a path. Not that. [LAUGHTER] It's going to come behind me here, in front, and activate the light right here. I think I want the lights to activate one at a time, so 1, 2, 3, 4. First, the M, then A, then the K, then the E. Now that I have my object's path mapped out, now I need to map out the timing. I'm going to do the slow end, so our principle. We're going to have the object starting slow, speed up in the middle, and it's going to slow down around the corners, beat up in the middle, slow down around the corners, and so on. Remember, if you want your object to go slow, you add more frames. I actually want this to go a little faster there, so I'll remove some frames. Okay, we have a plan. I'm just going to group this sketch layer with the background and I'd say we're ready to animate. I'm going to leave the bloom layer turned off for now, but don't worry, we'll come back for that. Let's come over here and turn on our Animation Assist again. It's the Wrench tool, Canvas, Animation Assist, and make sure your background image is set in the timeline. We already set as earlier, so we're good to go. Just press Add frame and let's start this animation. I want it to look like a light beam is coming in to activate this light. I think this light pen will give me the effect I'm looking for. As for the color, I think this light has a bluish hue, so I'm just going to choose a color that's pretty similar. Before you start animating, make sure you have a new frame, I already have one. Let's just create the first frame of this animation and around the frame number 2 and 3. As I'm drawing in these frames, I'm just using the tick marks that I put in place before. I'm also using the squash and stretch principle to really exaggerate how fast this slide is moving. When lights move really fast, you see a street, and as it's moving slowly around this corner, I'm just going to make it smaller. Now, at this point, I want the light beam to go behind me. This Hushbrush isn't working. I'm going to use something a little more softer, like this soft brush. I think this soft eraser just blends the light a little more and makes it look like it's going behind my hair. It doesn't have to be perfect since this animation is going to be moving really quickly, but I think that looks pretty believable. On to the next frame, just press Add Frame, and once again, this one's going by in my head. I'm going to use this soft brush to erase it from behind my hair. Add a frame and once again, we're to the point where the light is slowing down around the corner, so just try these frames, and it stretches as it's going faster. That line looks wonky, so feel free to undo at any time and try again. Just try not to judge me for the amount of times that I undo because it gets pretty crazy. Let's make a deal. Let's make ad deal. If you don't judge me, I won't judge you. We have the light still moving pretty quickly and right into this side of the sign. I think we're done with our light beam animation, so let me turn off our sketch and wow, I can't believe I have all these onion skins on the whole time. Sorry if that was hard to follow. Let me also speed up the Frames Per Second here. Yeah, that looks much better. Here's what our little light beam looks like so far. He's pretty cute, he's moving quickly. I think I actually want to add a little spark when it smashes into the side of the signs. Let me just draw that in. See how this looks. Sure. It looks fine. Let's move on. You didn't think I forgot about the neon sign, did you? No, we don't do that over here. Right now, our light flashes once and it's just not that exciting. I think it'd be more exciting to have one letter come in at a time until it builds out the entire word and then maybe it flashes a couple of times. To do that, first, I want to duplicate our bloom layer. Just slide it to the left, press Duplicate. I'm just going to name this one Full Bloom because this is where our animation is going to end. I'll just hide this for now because we don't need it until the end. For now, we'll just focus on this bloom layer. I'm going to rename this Bloom Number 1. Basically, on this layer, all we want is for the M to be lit up. I'm going to click on this layer and select Mask and instantly, you'll see a new mask layer added right on top of your bloom layer. It's time for a slight intermission because you might be asking, what are masks? For this example, I have an image, and when I put a mask on it, you'll see it adds a new white layer right above my image. Since this mask is white, that means I can use the opposite color, which is black, to erase part of the image. Now, when we look back at our mask, you'll see our black scribble right on top of it. Why don't you just use an eraser? You may ask. Well, the answer is because erasers can't bring an image back from the dead after we erase it. As you can see, the part that I just colored in white reappeared into the image. Basically, all you need to know about masks is black makes things disappear, and white makes things appear. What happens if I invert my mask? Well, the mask turned black, which means that my entire image disappeared. Since my mask is black, what color can I use to make my image reappear? The answer is white. When it comes to masks, the color white makes things appear and the color black makes things disappear, and it's as simple as that. With this mask on my image, I'm going to invert it so that all of the lighting on my bloom layer disappears. The only thing I want to show up on this layer is the M. Since my mask is black, I'm going to use the opposite color, which is white, to make just the M lighting reappear. Actually, let me get a softer brush, like this soft airbrush to do this. I'm just filling in white to make the image reappear. If you make a mistake and you want to erase part of the image, just use the color black. I hope this is making sense, guys. Basically, use white to make things appear and black to make things disappear. I think we're done with the first letter. On the next layer, I want the M and the A to appear. I'm actually going to duplicate this M layer. You'll notice, when it duplicates, it duplicates the layer, as well as the layer mask with it. That's actually what we want. I'm going to rename this layer Bloom 2, and I'm going to select the layer mask and make the A appear. Using which color? The color white to make things appear. Honestly, if you can't remember which color makes things appear and which color makes things disappear, I'd say just go by trial and error. Choose a color and if it doesn't create the effect you want, just try the opposite color. We're making progress, we've got the M and A, now it's time for the K. Now, I'm going to duplicate Bloom 2, rename it Bloom 3, just so we can stay organized. Make sure that you're coloring on the layer mask with the correct color. We have M, A, K, and for the E, I'm actually just going to turn on the full bloom layer because that layer already has all of our lights on and activated. Good. Now, let's see what our animation looks like so far. It looks like all the letters are coming in correctly, but I'm thinking once all the letters come in at the end, wouldn't it be cool to have them blink off and on a couple of times? Let's try it. What I'm going to do, is I'm going to copy our original layer that doesn't have any of the lighting effect and I'm going to drag it to the frame after the full bloom. Hopefully, it looks like it's blinking on and then off. I think I'm actually going to copy the full bloom and the original layer a couple more times, just alternating between the two. Let's see how this looks. Nice. I think the blinks are way too fast, so let me try the Frames Per Second, see if that helps. The light just still blinking pretty fast for me. The first thing I notice is I'm not ending with a full bloom layer. Let me fix that, add that to the end. That should help a little bit. That looks much better. But another thing I want to do is, I just want to hold the duration of each of these blinks a little longer. I'm going to click on each layer and just slide the whole duration to one notch. It's pretty self-explanatory, but what it's going to do is it's going to hold each of these layers to the duration of one frame. I accidentally did two on this one, so let me fix that. Let's see how this looks. Yeah, that's the one. I think we did it. I'm going to call this, Finished. In this lesson, you learned how to use the bloom effect to add lighting to your image. You learned how to use masks to create a nice, dynamic lighting effect, and lastly, you learned how to animate blinking lights. Now, look at your image and see where you can add some light animation to your image. I have learned how to animate different elements in Procreate. Join me in the next lesson where I'll teach you how to export your animations from Procreate. [MUSIC] 12. Export your Animation: We're finished with our animations. We need to get this animation out of Procreate and into the world. In this lesson, I'll teach you how to export your animations from Procreate. As you can see, I have a few different animations in different Procreate files. Let's just go into this chocolate ice cream cone file to start. Our animation is looking pretty good and we're ready to export. To export your animation, we're going to go up to this wrench tool, then we're going to press "Share." At the bottom you'll see several options for how to save out this video. Let's just talk about a few of these options so you can decide which option is best for you. The first option we'll talk about is animated GIF. GIFs seem like a good option because they automatically loop over and over and over again. But Instagram actually does not support GIFs, so we're not going to use that today. Next up, we have animated MP4. Honestly, if you're happy with your animation and you don't want to make any more adjustments, you can just save it out as an MP4. However, Instagram requires that your video be at least three seconds in order for it to loop. If your video is not three seconds, then let's do this next option, which is PNG files. PNGs will save out each frame of your animation as an image. Which sounds really weird, but this gives the most flexibility for editing in After Effects. This is the option that we're going to choose for today. But first, we need to come back into our file and make sure that we turn off any background and foreground images. Because we want each of these frames to save as transparent PNGs. We're ready to save this out. Let's go back up to the wrench tool and press "PNG files." Give this a little time to export, and Right up top you'll see that this is going to save out 14 separate image files. We need to send these files to our laptop so you have a few options. I usually go with AirDrop. Cool. We got that one saved. Now we need to save out the rest of my files as PNG files. Let me go out into the gallery. Next we'll save out the vanilla ice cream cone. Just like before, it's very important that you turn off any background and foreground images because we want each file to be transparent just like this. Looks good. Let's save this as PNG files, Wait for it to export. Then I'm going to AirDrop 13 files to my laptop. I have two more files to save out as PNGs. I'm going to do that really quickly and we can move on. In this lesson, we talked about the different video limitations that Instagram has in place. We also talked about different export options that are available in Procreate. Lastly, we exported our animation from Procreate. Now export your animation as PNG files, then grab your laptop and meet me in the next lesson where I'll teach you how to loop your final animation using After Effects. [MUSIC] 13. Loop your Final Animation: All right people, we're in the home stretch. Adobe After Effects is the industry standard when it comes to motion graphics. I'm not going to dive too deeply into After Effects in this lesson, but it'll be a great beginner intro. In this lesson, we're going to import our PNG files into Adobe After Effects, where we will create our final looping animation for Instagram. The first thing we're going to do is create some folders so that we can stay organized. This first folder, I'm just going to name it ice cream animation, and this is where I'm going to hold all of my files. Then I'll just open this up, and we'll create some sub-folders. First, I want to make a folder for our After Effects file, so I'll just name this After Effects. Then we also want a folder to save all of our PNGs in, so I'll create a new folder and call it PNGs. Lastly, I'll just create a folder for our final animation. So these are our main folders, but I also want to break my PNG files into separate folders as well. In this folder, I'm going to create separate folders for each group of PNGs. I'm going to save my chocolate PNGs in this folder, then I'll create a folder for the vanilla PNGs, another one for my DQ sign, and lastly, I'll create a folder for our expression PNGs. We're all set and organized, now let me just start dropping my PNGs into these folders. Here we have the airdropped files for the chocolate PNGs, I'll just save it to downloads, and drag all of these PNGs into the chocolate folder like so. Next I'll airdrop the vanilla PNG files, so I'll save these to downloads, and drop all of these into the vanilla folder. I'm just going to quickly, fast forward and save out the PNGs for the DQ sign, and the PNGs for the expression lines. Now we have all of our PNG files all nice and organized. Now let's open up Adobe After Effects so we can combine all of our animations together and loop our final animation for Instagram. Let's just wait for Adobe After Effects to get nice and warmed up. In this new window, you can press "New Project", and I don't know why, but my new project window pops up right behind this window, so I'm just going to exit out. In After Effects, the first thing we're going to do, is press "New Composition", and immediately, it's going to ask us to set up our composition. I'm just going to name this new comp ice cream animation. Next step, it's going to ask for the size. We're just going to input the size that we used for our Procreate animation, so yours maybe 1080 by 1080, but for this one, mine is actually 1080 by 1350. Then it's going to ask for the frames per second. Once again, we're just going to match this to what we used in Procreate. Mine was set to eight, but I think most animations are set to 12 frames per second. Next, we need to set our duration, and for Instagram, our video has to be at least three seconds, so I'm going to set it to three, and then press "Okay". Now we have our new composition, and it's just waiting for our lovely animation. Let's go ahead and import in all of our PNG files. Let's go to "File", "Import", and then file, and in the new window, just navigate to where you saved all your PNGs. Mine is on my desktop in this ice cream animation folder, just select all of your PNGs. If you don't know how to do that, just go ahead and click the "Top Folder", hold down Shift, and then click the "Bottom Folder" to select everything. Now with everything selected, just press "Open", and you'll see immediately all of your folders are dropped in this project panel. Where to start? Let's start with our Chocolate folder. In this folder, you'll see all of our PNGs. This first one is actually our background image, and then after that, we have each transparent PNG of our chocolate ice cream animation. Let's just select all of our PNGs by pressing "Shift" again, and drop them into our timeline. One thing I like to do to stay organized is just change the color of these. Click on this color chip, and I'll just make these brown to match the chocolate ice cream. Let's come over here and play our animation so far. Just press the "Space Bar" to play the animation, and you'll notice that nothing is animating, all we can see is our background image. That's because all of our layers are the same length in the timeline, so we need to sequence them. To do that, first make sure that all your layers are selected, then move your play head over one frame, and then we're going to press option "right bracket" to trim all of the frames to the same link. Then lastly, we're going to right-click press "Keyframe Assistant", and then go to "Sequence Layers". We'll just press "Okay" on this little message, oh, and already you caught me slipping, when we press "Play", you'll notice that my animation is actually playing backwards. If this happens to you, just press "Command Z" to undo, and then select your layers from top to bottom while holding down shift. Because I think the order that you select the layers is actually the order that they will sequence. Let's try this again, so right-click, go to Keyframe Assistant, and then press "Sequence Layers", and then just press "Okay". Yay, now it's sequenced in order, and when you scroll through, our animation is playing correctly. However, you might be wondering where the heck is our background image? Our background image is actually chilling up here, it's this top frame, so let me actually rename this. Just click on the layer, and press "Enter" in order to rename, and I'm just going to call this background image so I can tell it apart. Then we need to drag this down to the bottom, where the background image belongs. If you want to, you can press this color chip to change the color of the background. I'll do this nice and bright yellow, and I'm going to drag this to the entire length of our timeline because we want the background to be there the entire time. When we moved our background from this first layer position, we left a little gap, so I'm just going to select all my layers by pressing "Shift", and just drag them over one spot. Just press the "Space bar", and let's look at our animation so far. Well, mine is actually glitching out, and it's not playing. You know what? This is a great time to save our file. We actually should have done it sooner, but here we are. Just go up to "File", and go to "Save", and then we'll save this in the folder that we created for our After Effects file. Mine is on the desktop, Ice Cream animation After Effects file. Then I'm going to rename it, I'll call this ice cream animation as well, and save. Back to the glitch, so usually when my After Effects starts glitching out and doesn't play my animation, what I do is I usually come over to this project's panel and just double-click on our composition, and that should reset it, and let's see. Yay, now our ice cream cone is animating. Let me actually trim my work area by just dragging this little guy over, and let's take another look. Yeah, it's looking pretty good. So we have our chocolate ice cream cone in place for the most part, now let's add our vanilla ice cream. Let's go back over to the projects panel, and open up our vanilla folder, and we actually don't need this first frame because it's the background image, so we're just going to select everything except for the background image. Just like the chocolate ice cream, we're going to drag these down into the timeline, and I'm going to change the color to sandstone because that seems like a nice vanilla-y color. Let's sequence out these layers, I'm going to pull the play head over one frame, and then press option right bracket to trim them all. Let me just pull this back to one frame, and then we're going to right-click press "Keyframe Assistant", and then sequence these layers. There they go. Okay, so let's press "Space Bar" to play the animation so far. As this animation is playing, I noticed that this vanilla ice cream cone is blinking, and that's because our vanilla animation is one frame shorter than our chocolate animation. But thankfully, I created those two jitter frames at the end of this vanilla ice cream cone, so I'm just going to copy this second from last frame, and put it at the end. I'm going to press "Command C" to copy, and "Command V" to paste. I'm just going to drag this copy to the bottom of my vanilla layers, and then move it to the end of my animation. Let's see what this looks like. Now the ice cream cones are times together. They both end at the same time, I'd say we're looking good. Let's add in the next part of our animation, which is the expression lines. Once again, the first PNG is the background image, so I'm going to select everything except for that one, and drag it into the timeline. I'm fine with this color, so let's just trim these layers by pressing "Option", "Right bracket", and then let's sequence them out by pressing "Keyframe Assistant", and sequence layers. Now let's see how our little sparky plays. I like it. I don't think that I'm going to make any more adjustments to this spark layer, so let's just group them together in one nice layer. Just right-click and press "Pre-compose". In this new window, I'm just going to name these Expression, and make sure you have adjust composition duration checked. Now, you'll see our expression group is in one nice and neat layer. Let me actually change this back to lavender so I know it's a separate object. Now, I want to copy this spark animation onto the chocolate ice cream as well. While the layer is selected, press "Command C" to copy and "Command V" to paste. Now that we have created a copy, we can just simply go up into our video preview and drag the copy over our chocolate ice cream cone. I want to flip the animation, so I'm going to go up to "Layer", "Transform", and then "Flip Horizontal". Actually, I'm just going to flip my animation horizontally. Let me just reposition it to about there, and let's see what we have. We have our sparks and then let's see. That looks pretty good. Let's just play around with timing a little more. Maybe we want the first frame of our ice cream cone to stay still for a while, then when the spark comes in, then it activates the rest of the melt. I'm going to select all of my ice cream layers. Click the top layer, hold down Shift, and then press the bottom layer, and I'm just going to move all of these over one frame. Let me move this back. I'm going to make the first frame of this vanilla cone, last two frames, and I'm going to do the same to the chocolate. We just have our ice cream paused for the first two frames. Then, we'll have this spark come in on the third frame and activate the rest of the ice cream melt. Yeah, this looks pretty good. Let me just adjust my work area to make sure everything's within, and let's see what this looks like. Pretty cool. We have one more element to add, which is our Dairy Queen sign. Let's come over here. Let's open up our DQ folder and grab our PNGs. I'm just going to drag it on top of the timeline, and I think a good color for these would be red. You guys are all pros by now. You know that I'm going to select all of my layers, trim them to all would be about one frame long, and then use Keyframe Assist to sequence our layers. There's our DQ sign all sequenced out, looking good, but you'll notice that the Dairy Queen sign is much shorter than the rest of the elements in our timeline. I think what I'll do is I'll have the Dairy Queen sign stop melting when the ice cream cone stop melting. I'm going to drag all of these frames to line up to the end of the ice cream animation, and I'll just drag out this first frame. It'll be still at first and then start animating later. It actually looks like the DQ sign starts animating after the sparks go off. I think I'm fine with that. I'm almost done. Now, I just need to make sure that my animation plays for at least three seconds for Instagram. Let me pull my workspace back to three seconds, and I'm going to start pre-composing some of my elements so that it's easier to loop. The first thing I'm going to pre-compose is the DQ sign. I'll just select all of the layers and then press "Pre-compose". Of course, I'm just going to name this DQ sign. Pretty self-explanatory. Just make sure that Adjust composition duration is checked. That put our DQ sign in a new group. I'm just going to make this group red. Basically, I want to repeat this animation until we get to our minimum of three seconds. Let's make a copy of this by pressing "Command C" to copy and "Command V" to paste. Let's move this group to the end of this animation. Instead of having this animation just repeat, I think it'd be cool to have this play in reverse. Just right-click, go up to "Time" and then press "Time-Reverse Layer". Now, let's just see what this looks like. Our animation starts out forward and right before it ends, it reverses. I'm going to go ahead and group all of the rest of the layers together as well and play them in reverse speed just like the DQ sign. I'm going to select my vanilla, press "Pre-compose", and I'm going to pre-compose it into a group called vanilla. Here's our new group. I'm just going to press "Command C", "Command V" to copy and paste and then move it to the end of the animation. Actually, our animation is past our three-second minimum now, so I need to give us more time on our timeline. Go up to "Composition" and press "Composition Settings", and I'll adjust our timeline duration to about four seconds. I think that should be enough time. That looks better. Let me just drag in my workspace to the end of our animation and let's continue. I left off with the vanilla, and I want this second animation to reverse just like the DQ sign. Right-click, go to "Time" and "Time-Reverse Layer". This is the last one. We're going to do the same thing with our chocolate ice cream. I'm going to go ahead and pre-compose this into a group. I'm going to name this group Chocolate, press "Okay". I'm going to change the color of this just so we know that it's our chocolate ice cream. Lastly, you just copy and paste, drag this to the end. I'm going to reverse this layer by going to "Time", "Time-Reverse Layer". Let's see what we have so far. Everything starts out forward and then it reverses to end, and we met our three-second minimum, so we're basically good to go. We're ready to export, but before we export, I just want to show you guys that there are a lot of effect options that you can play around with in After Effects. Let's say that we wanted to add a glow to the spark on the chocolate ice cream cone. All you do is come over to the "Effects & Presets" panel. If yours isn't visible, just go to "Window" and make sure Effects & Presets is checked. You just come into this panel and type in the word glow, find glow, and drag it on top of the layer that you want to add a glow to. You'll see that there's already a light glow, and you can actually adjust the settings of the glow in this panel. Let's say we want to adjust the intensity, just play around with these settings and see what looks good, but I'm not going to add in glow to this today, so I'm going to press "Command Z" to undo. Another cool thing you can do is, let's say you want to change the color of something. For example, maybe we'll change the color of this chocolate ice cream cone. Just select your layer, and over in the Effects panel, we're going to go to "Color Correction" and then scroll down until you see Change to Color and just drag this effect onto the layer that you want to recolor. Once again, this panel full of options will pop up. To apply this effect for the From color, you need to eyedrop the color that you want to change, and then for the To color, you can actually select the color you want to change it to. I'll choose a crazy red color, and I'm going to mess with these settings to see what looks best. Hue and saturation makes the most dramatic change. Look. Now, we have a really weird red ice cream cone. I don't know why anyone would want to do that, but this effect would work perfectly for something else. I'm just going to "Command Z" to undo all of that. Just know that there are effects available in After Effects, and if this interests you, definitely explore. Now, we're finally finished with our animation. We're happy with it. We have all of the elements put together, now it's time to export. To export, just go up to "File", "Export" and then go to "Add to Adobe Media Encoder Queue", which I know that sounds really weird, but this is what we got to do. This is actually going to open up a new app. Just give it a little time to let it think, do what it's got to do. Here we are. Now, just give it a little time to let your video pop up in this box. Sometimes it takes a few seconds. Here we go. I'm just going to click on this to open it up. First, just make sure that your format is set to H.264, so have that set. Match Source - High bitrate is fine. Output name is actually where we'll choose the location to save this, so press on that and navigate to your final animation folder. Press "Save". Next, let's go to "Video". Your width and height should already be set to the correct size. Just make sure that you have Render at Maximum Depth and Use Maximum Render Quality. Have both of these checked. We should be good to go. Just press "Okay". Back in this window, we're going to press this Play sign right here, and that's going to export our animation. Done. Let's go check our final animation folder to check out our animation and see what it would be looking like. Drum roll, and there it is. Look, it's four seconds, which is perfect for Instagram. Let me play it one more time. All right, guys. This is basically ready to upload to Instagram. Just send it to your phone and you're good to go. In this lesson, you learned how to create a new comp in Adobe After Effects. You learned how to use Keyframe Assist to sequence your final PNG files. Lastly, you learned how to export your animation for Instagram. Wow, we made it. Now, save your lovely creations and meet me in the final class. 14. Conclusion: You did it, and hopefully you created something that you are so happy with and so ready to show the world. You should be so proud of yourself. Now you know a few basic animation principles, you know your way around Procreate, and how to use animation assist in Procreate. You also learn a few different animation techniques like how to animate objects in your photo, how to animate lines of expression, text lighting, and how to use masks to animate. You also learned how to export your animation from Procreate, and lastly, how do you Adobe After Effects to loop your final animation for Instagram. Hopefully, you realized that animation doesn't have to be that scary, and with a little imagination, anything is possible. Now go into the world and create some beautiful animations, but don't forget to come back and share those animations in the Project tab. I would absolutely love to see what you guys created. All right, guys. Thank you so much for taking this class and spending some time with me, and until next time, peace out.