Animation for Illustration: Animating Textures in Photoshop

1. Introduction: Hi, my name is Kay Leathers and I'm an illustrator and designer for motion graphics from London, England. One of the most valuable things I've learned as an illustrator is that there's a growing demand for illustrators with the knowledge of animation and their social media posts, which move gets the most engagement. If you've been wanting to add movement to your illustrations, I can definitely give you some techniques that I've learned on my journey that will not only help you learn animation, but are going to be a lot of fun too. In this class, I'll be teaching you how to use Photoshop to illustrate your ideas. Then we'll be creating animated textures to apply to your illustrations. We'll learn how to illustrate and animate simple backgrounds which can be applied to existing illustrations or spark ideas for brand new illustration. We'll take these ideas and learn how to sketch and color an illustration from scratch, and then divide this into layers ready to apply our backgrounds to it. We'll also learn how to create patterns for textiles such as clothing and mass these into areas of our work. Then we'll learn some controlled random animation just for fun. By the end of the class, you'll have an amazing illustration animated with three different styles using the same technique. You all have really great grasp of how to use this in your future work. The possibilities pretty are endless. If you're an animator, you can take these patterns and textures into After Effects where you can use it in your work and give that real hand-drawn feeling. When I started life as an illustrator, I didn't like Photoshop at all. I was strictly an Illustrator user and my mind is boggled whenever I went into Photoshop, it was really frustrating. Now, after working with it on quite a few projects, applying frame by frame techniques to character illustrations, as well as abstract background designs and assets for animation, I just loved it. If you've ever had the same struggles as me or you just want some more techniques for animating, then I can help you with this course. This class is great for anyone who wants to start illustrating in Photoshop or for more seasoned users. I'll be explaining everything step-by-step, including all those helpful shortcuts to help you get more comfortable animating in Photoshop. All you need to start animating textures is Photoshop open and your computer mouse. By the end of this class, you will have your very own animated Illustration as gift, an MP4 ready for you to upload to social media or your portfolio. So if you're ready, let's get started. 2. Project: Together, we'll create our very own illustration with animated textures and patterns. I'll be showing you my whole creative process when making these and how I illustrate a character with these in mind. Then I'll show you how to export this as GIF, and all you need to do is follow along. Completing this assignment will also give you an mp4 to share on your social media and a GIF for your portfolio as well. This class is designed to be a practical introduction to animating textures and patterns in Photoshop. Therefore, practicing will help you on your journey to understanding. I've included a couple of bonus tasks which I encourage you to take part in. I will show you when and how to upload them whenever you see the bonus task slide in our lessons. I check out every single project in my courses and offer any feedback and help where I can. It's also a great opportunity to get feedback from our lovely community here at Skillshare. All my working files are available for download. Perfect for you to use as reference for your own projects, or if you don't want to illustrate your own, you can use mine. If you're ready, let's open Photoshop and dive right in. 3. Setting up Your Workspace: Hi there. Welcome to the first lesson in our course. In this lesson, we're going to set up Photoshop so that we have the same workspace, ideal for animation. If we create new file and we're going to set up a file so you can use it in your social media or your portfolio, 1080 by 1080 is the perfect size for Instagram, so we're going to be using that. I'm using 150 resolution just so I can get a little bit more information in my illustration, but you could have 72 here if you're just using it for web. Then we'll have the Artboards box checked and make the backgrounds of that white. The reason I love artboards is because it makes it really easy to use references and they're just really super handy for later on. I will demonstrate. Let's create that. Now, you'll see here that I have my workspace set up. If I go up to this arrow, to Essentials. If you don't have the same one as me at the moment, just set to Essentials and just reset it. But what we are actually going to do is set a new workspace today. You can call it your name and animation workspace. Good. Let's make some adjustments to this workspace. I'm going to keep Libraries here because this is my set of branded colors and I'm going to also drag the color tab here. Now, if you don't have branded colors, it's fine. Don't worry about it. You can just select from this. Now, we don't need Gradients, Patterns, or Swatches, so let's get rid of those. Properties, we need. I like to have it just underneath the Colors and Libraries here, so just drag it until there's a blue line and let go. Adjustments, we can get rid of because all your adjustments are actually here as well. That looks good over here. What we also need is some tools up here. If we go to Window and we click on Brushes, both Brushes and Brush Settings come in together. If they don't for you, that's okay. Just click on "Brush Settings" here. We'll also need the Tool Presets here. Now, if you're familiar with Photoshop, you know that Tool Presets are amazing because if you go into your Brush tool by pressing B, all of your favorite brushes can be saved here. I will actually show you how to do that later if you're not sure. Finally, we'll need the Timeline. Now, this is most important for our class today. This is the Video Timeline. If you press "Create Video Timeline", this whole section will change. Here, you have Artboard 1, which matches Artboard 1. If you go to the drop-down, you'll see Layer 1 there. Everything that you see here is also here. Now, automatically, you have five seconds here. If you look, you have some frames in between. Now, what we'll do for each lesson is we'll set the timeline frame rates. This is set to 30, which is far too many for me. The usual is 24 for, say, cartoons like Disney. But I want that choppy feel, so we're going to use 12 frames per second. Also, this means that we don't have to do as many drawing switches. Oh, it's a blessing. Click "Okay" and you'll see that the timeline here adjusts. It still got five seconds, but within each of those seconds, you have 12 frames instead of 30. Now, I'm just going to make an adjustment. I'm just using the mountains here to zoom in and out. Now, this Layer 1, at the moment, is five seconds long. We're just going to use this widget here by clicking, and dragging, and making it 1 second long. If I zoom in, you can see 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12 make one second. That's the adjustments we made. Now that we have the workspace all set up, we are ready to start animating some background textures. 4. Playing with Patterns: Now that we have the workspace all set up, we are ready to start experimenting and creating our background textures. I wanted to put this lesson first because it's a great starting off point, especially if you are stuck, you have a creative block. It just helped spark your imagination and gets you ideas flowing. So for each texture, we're going to do the same five steps. So step number one, create new. This should be 1,080 by 1,080, 150 resolution and we should have the art board's box checked. Then we're going to create video timeline, Step 2. Step 3, set the timeline frame rate to 12. Step 4, open up a layer and just reduce that down to one second. Number 5, we're going to duplicate that layer by ALT and drag. Now, if we zoom in, we can see that we have all 12 frames in our second here. Now, we need to make some decisions about how long each illustration in our background is going to last. Let me explain by showing you a demonstration. So here we have an animation and it's animated on twos. Now what that means, if I opened up, we can have a look at the file. Now, every two frames, there is a different illustration. So 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 and 12, because it will loop. So if I click it, it will cycle through all six of those illustrations in one second. So if I go back to the original, you'll see it's exactly the same file, just mast into the circle here. Now I can check you a comparison. This next one is animated on threes. So every three frames 3, 6, 9, you have a different illustration. You can see how that affects the movement and the feeling of the animation. I like animating on threes. I also like animating on fours. See you can compare all three here. If you have sixes, you only have two illustrations in one second and you can see it's very slow. So generally from here, I like animating on threes and fours. You can add however many you wish, but for today's demonstration, I'm going to focus on fours. Sorry, let me just close that. So what I'm going to do is make that first layer four frames long. You can see on the widget that you will have a little time and next to it that says 04. Just for ease, I'm going to duplicate that layer and drag it across to that next frame because we want to fill up that one second and again. Great. So now we have three different layers for three different illustrations. There's little rhyme that I like to go through for each one just to help me and that's move the player, select the layer. I'm now going to pick a brush because we need to start making these animated backgrounds already. So I'm going to look through. Now, I have this mega pack from Kyle. If you don't have this already, you can click on get more brushes and that will open up for you. If you have the Adobe Suite, you can just download those and it will install in Photoshop for you. I'm going to go straight down to some classic brushes. I'm feeling like hand some, my soft watercolors say, let's have a look at this one. Pretty nice. On a bit softer. Let's see, yeah, that's the one that I want. I'm going to select a color for my palate. Now, I'm going to make that brush really big by selecting open brackets, big and small open brackets. Just going to make a nice pattern. Then I'm going to move the player, select the layer and make another pattern. Real quick. Nice big brush on this one. If you're not sure how they look compared to each other, you can always scroll back through. Feel like the first one is a little bit more blue than the others, so I'm just going to move the player, select the layer and just add a little bit more blue to the others. Move the player, select the layer and good, now I can scrub through them using this or I can press play it with the spacebar. We can see that those three illustrations are cycling through. That is our first pattern. So let's save it. Save as and if I go to my desktop, I have a folder ready here for me. I've included this in the resources file. So you take advantage of it if you want to. I'll call that animated textures, go to project files, Photoshop. I'm going to create a new folder. I shall call it textures. This one, I like to call it some adjective and a noun. So I'm going to call it soft clouds. That's what it reminds me of. Great. So I have some brushes saved here. Now, if you want to save a brush, so this nice soft watercolor that I had before, you can open up your tool presets and press "Plus'' and it will come up with its current name. You can call it something else, you can call it soft watercolor or whatever it means to you and it's added to your library. You will need to save these in a good place so that you can load it when you open up Photoshop again, I definitely recommend to do that so that you can have all of your favorite tools in one place. So that class is done so we're going to close that one, Command + W. We're going to go through our five steps again. So create new. Create video timeline. Set the timeline frame rates. Number 4, change the layer size. Number 5, duplicate it. So I'm going to call that first layer background and we have our plain layer here. I'm going to reduce that down to four frames again. Let's make it a little bit bigger so we can see and duplicate and duplicate and drag that along to fill there. So this time I'm going to pick a different color and I'm going to fill the background on this one just because I'm feeling a bit crazy. So we're on layer one, the player's in the right place and this time I'm going to pick a nice slattery brush, press "B" to select your brush. I'm going to go for splatter one. Now, splattered one is really nice because it has multiply as one of its brush settings. So if it goes over itself, it's going to darken itself. I'm also going to set the layer mode to multiply because I feel like, yeah, that is better just nice, line through there and move the player, select the layer. This also needs to be a multiplying. Let's do it. A bit straight on that one. Move the player, select the layer, make that multiply and there we go. Press "Play". Looks like a nice sandstorm somewhere you can imagine someone standing here waving in the wind. This is, again, a really good tool if you ever get stuck with what you're doing and having creative block, just throw in some textures, animate them and it will give you so many idea I promise you. So let's quickly save that one as "Sandstorm". Good and close it. Five steps again. Let see you if you know them now. Step 1, select new. Step 2, video timeline. Step 3, set the frame rate. Step 4, adjust the layer size. Step 5, duplicate. Let's call that background. I'm going to go to our first layer. Adjust it to whatever size you like if you want to experiment, maybe who go for threes. In fact, let's do threes together. Duplicate those and select a blue this time and there was colored background brush, select the layer and I'm going to drag this across. Really nice. So this time we're going to have four drawings because we're on our threes. Move the player, select layer. Keep getting. Good. Now, this is bringing up all ideas for me. This looks like when you're sitting calmly in a swimming pool and at the other end of the swimming pool, there are kids slashing all over the place but you're chill because you're on the other end. So let's see how that animation on threes looks. So on this one, I don't want to see the white background color, so I'm going to put it on transparent and I'm going to save it. So this one I'm going to call it gentle waves. This is going to be perfect inspiration for my illustration in the next lesson. Now, that we finished off three different background textures, I think it'd be really great to show our progress in the project gallery. So I'm going to quickly show you how to simply export these as a GIF. So I'm going to pick my gentle waves one and I'm going to give it a bit quick background so it's clear that when I upload it, it will look the same. Then we go to File, Export, Save for Web and your GIF will come up in the center here. I'm not going to explain the setting for now as I'm going to go into a lot more detail in the exports lesson, but for now, just trust me and set it to a GIF 128 dither and save it. If you go into your Animated Textures folders, Exports, Stills, GIF, create a backgrounds folder then save your GIF. I'm just going to replace mine as I already have one in there. If I have a look in that folder now, I have my gentle waves GIF. I can just upload that by clicking on that icon, place, backgrounds and there it is. Keep this page open and just keep adding images as we go throughout our course. I hope you've had fun creating your animated background textures. Once you finish the course, you will have a whole library of textures and patterns to apply to any future illustrations. The next lesson, we're going to look at illustrating an ideas sparked by this creative process. 5. Sketching Your Idea: [music] From the last lesson, I was really inspired by my gentle ways animation. It reminds me of being at the pool, lying on a lie low in the sunshine with a nice cocktail. So for my illustration, I'm going to do a character. I'll have my animated waves in the background, I can think about textiles. Let's say you can have some textures in the clothing, so the swimsuit and maybe the hair swishing around in water amongst other things. These has plenty of opportunity for animation. In your illustration, you can draw whatever you like. You can draw a character along with me, or an idea sparked by lesson 2 or anything you want. As long as it has those three opportunities in mind. So the background texture, a textile of some sorts, and some opportunity for some randomness. If you're ready, let's get started. So the place that I would like to get references from the most is Pinterest, although I do use Google and other places. So I'm going to search for a pool floatie and it comes up with loads of results for really cool pool floaties you see this cool avocado one. So you can add that to your boards. I have a board for this already called floating. But if you don't have a board, you can go to Create board and you can put your name in there and you press "Create". I already have one, so let's pin it to that and let's look through and look for some other cool things. Maybe she could have a drink in the pool. So once you've saved quite a few references, and I literally just go on a rambling trained through loads of different pins and collect loads of interesting things that I want to include. So sunglasses, swimming costumes, floaties, what people might look like on the floaties. So what I'm going to do, is use these and put them in my file. So if I look at this particular one, I can take screenshot, Command Shift 4 on the Mac. You can just drag it straight from the corner, it's quite a new feature and pop it in your file. Automatically it will go inside your art board but what's amazing about art boards, as you can put it outside and it will show you, so that when you work on your own later, you can have these on the side for your reference. I already have a good cooking show. It's all set up over here. So here are all the references that I gathered, all by using screenshot and placing them in the file and now we're ready for our sketching. Today I have my iPad, which I use with asteroid pad studio, which just allows me to work home. I connect to using asteroid pad and it's still 99 a month, I think it's pretty cheap really. I know with the newer versions of the Mac, you can automatically connect to your iPad so definitely look into that if you haven't already. So let's begin our sketch. We have a layer here and we're just going to start off really, really rough. Let's get a sketching pencil, I think this is a HP. Just like this lady here, I'm going to roughly sketch out a lie low and just coming from the corner. If you know anything about me, I do like to fill up my areas so my lady is going to be pretty big in here and she's going to be lounging but this time, unlike this lady, she's going to be crossing her arms. We're going to have her head, the main focus of the shot. As we said, the hair is going to be flowing out into the water. I'm just going to put a rough area for the hair. I can see from this lady, she's got quite a lot of forehead showing, so let's put some hair in. The glasses and everything are gathered round the bottom of the face and let's have a nose here, and a mouth here. Let's have some ears as well. Okay. As you can see, it's super rough sketch. Let's move on to the next layer, making that previous layer reducing the opacity here to around 20. Now we're going to get serious on the sketching. Let's take our brush again, and this time, I'm going to leave those gaps. [music] I'm just going to use those really smooth flowing lines because I think it just helps to carry the viewer across the page and be confident [laugh] in any mistakes that you make, because they're probably not mistakes. They are probably character in your drawing. I'm going to give my character my distinctive lips than I usually do to my female characters, give her a bit of [inaudible] , and I'll just carry on sketching, give a better speed to the video. [music] With this bit, I'm just going to lasso this lens and delete it. I'm going to lasso the other lens because I prefer it. If I right-click, I can lay my copy and I can actually transform that and move it to the other side. I'm also going to go to the Edit menu, transform, flip horizontal, and then rotate it into the right place. Now I can have one glasses be a little bit more even. Just adding some final touches now. I'm going to have some clouds reflected in the glasses and her hair streaks and let's add a tooth gap. Give us some real attitude. Yeah, I'm pretty happy with this. I think I need to make just some minor adjustments to little areas. I'm just going to save this as, let's find our desktop file. Pop it in, Photoshop. Let's make a new folder now because I know what she's going to be, a swimmer. I'm just going to call this Sketch. Save it and you've got your Sketch File safe. Well done, I'm sure you have an awesome sketch to get you started as well as hopefully a few more tips on using Photoshop. In the next lesson, we'll be looking at coloring and dividing our layers. [music] 6. Colouring and Dividing Layers: In this lesson, we'll be learning house color and divide our illustration into layers, ready for animation. In the break, I did make a few sneaky changes to my illustration by getting rid of the cat folder and making adjustments to the head. Please feel free to do the same, no way do I ever get drawn right on the first few goats. As they say, the key to a good illustration is to always draw and redraw. Now, it's finally ready coloring. I ran a few colored tests beforehand to decide which colors I'm choosing. I always choose from my color palette here. If you would like to know how to choose a color palette, I did explain in my previous course. You can go to lesson number 4, making layers, and around 6.30, I explain how I got my color palette, so definitely check that out if you haven't already. I grabbed some color tests, as I said, and I decided that this one in the corner was my favorite. I just do these really quick, just quick color, quick scribble. You can see I've even colored over here, just to decide on the one I like most. This one I chose because I think it reminds me of McDonald's, which I was only treated to when it was summer. It also reminds me of one of my good friends who always has to wear factor 50, when she's on holiday because of her beautiful red hair, and fat skin. I'm going to go with that color combo. What he did was just pop it on the side here. If I hide my references, this is just a quick reference for my coloring. Just, before we move on, we are going to save as he can go to File, Save As or Command Shift S. Let's save this as Color. You can spell it without the u, if you're American. We're going to get rid of these, because we already have those in our sketch pile. This is our sketch now. We're going to keep that on the top, so let me drag my layer down here. We need to start from the back most. The back most part is going to be our background. Now, obviously I'm keeping in mind my animation, which are made in the dark blue for the waves. I'm just going to put a light blue is the background. My animated layer will go above this, but we're not ready for that yet. The next layer, which is back most, is the ring. I love to use the circular marquee tool for any circles that I need to do my work. You just drag and let go when it's the right size. I'm going to hold O to minus from that to make the inner circle. We can hold Shift to make it equal circle, and then just try and get that in the right place. Good. Then selecting My Color, going for the yellow. We can just fill it in, and then de-select to get away from that. We're going to make the patterns of the ends. I'm just good when I'm really focus on each part as I work my way up. Next bit is the body. We can just color pick from here, or you can select from your color palette. I'm going to grab one of my favorite brushes, which is the amazing cartoon nib, and this is one of the color brushes. Just going to size that up a little and zoom in, and let's just start coloring in. Going to reduce her capacity a little bit, yeah. I can actually see the edges, because I'm not going to outline how this time just using this raw color, because I think textures just go really well in this kind of rough, brush look. We just make that full shape, press G, and fill it. Now, with the referrer brushes, you will get kind of a bit where it can't quite fill it in. I have tried and tried fiddling about with the tolerance to get over this, but it's actually a lot quicker than coloring in. I don't mind too much. I'm making sure there's no gaps. Good. That's our body layer. Now, the next layer up is going to be our swimsuit. Let's call it swimsuit. Because I only want it to show it within the body, I'm going to hold Command, and click on the body, and that will make a selection. Then I can select the color I want for the swimsuit, and make the brush a little smaller. You can see that it won't color outside those pieces. Now, you didn't see that I'm making everything the full shape. This is because if it moves in animation, we're always going to have something underneath which is really important, especially if you're going to send it to say, an animator, and they're going to all the animation work for you, make sure every layer is complete. If anything moves, you have that information underneath. I'm going to de-select that. I can just show you that if I move that body, we still have the rubber ring underneath. The next layer I would like to do is that back color. I'm going to choose different brush for this called outlines wobbly, I didn't quite remember which one this was. I had it a while ago. But I want to see something cool with this hair later on, so I'm just going to do really rough scribble. If anyone used to watch Mr. Mann, it reminds me if Mr. Messy, and just make that meet in the bottom. It's pretty cool, I like it. But I'm going to reshape that a little fuzzy, because I just want it to come out at the sides. Scale it a bit more wobbly. Yeah, nice. Definitely happier with that one. A loop here, great. Let's name it. You can continue to work through the layers. Every time you make a new layer, you name it. I'm just going to reduce the opacity on that one too, so I can see where the face lies. I need my other brush. I'm going to continue coloring in. You can see here that I am accidentally to put two things on one layer. Again, just use the lasso tool, If you do that. As soon as you notice, you can correct your mistake. Now, with the glasses, I'm actually going to make a group of layers, because they all go together. Fill in the lenses, and add a new layer for the clouds. Now, let's put these clouds and lenses, and then command G to group them, and we'll call them all glasses. One important thing to remember is to always have the ones that you expect to be animated, the layers are separate. I want to animate this whimsy, as we said, it's an textiles. I'm just going to right-click there and make that orange. Say want to animate the back hair. I want to animate the clouds in here, so I'll make that orange as well. Just a few finishing touches and we're done. I can see that there's a couple more bits that I need to do. For example, I want to add some nice stripe declarations to the ring. If I select that with command, I open up new layer, I'm going to get my white, and just going to make my brush a little bigger, and to make your stripes in a nice straight line, if you want stripes, you can just hold down Shift, and drag straight across. It will give you a horizontal line, but be warned, if you hold it and then drag, you will get this kind of across line that you might not want. I can show you that better here, if I just keep holding it gives you a line across as well. I'm just going to pop up the one. Oops, there it was again in there. That's given it some stripes. Let's de-select that. Yeah, I'm going to do the same probably for the hair, maybe for the swimsuit, although I know I want it animated texture in there. That's the coloring, we're done. I hope you got some good tips on how to color in Photoshop. The most important thing is that, if you want to animate or maybe change layout in the future, make sure that's colored on a separate layer from the rest. In the next lesson, where we placing our animated background in our illustration. 7. Animated Backgrounds: In this lesson, we'll be placing our animated background into our illustration. Before I could possibly continue, I had to add some more details to my illustrations. So let's take a look. Here you can see my final colored character and we've got the mosaic in the background. I added some armpit hair and I added some freckles. So this lesson is about animated backgrounds. We've already done the hard work. You can see that I've tied my illustration away into just two groups of character and background for this lesson. So inside character, I have all the character pieces, and inside background I have tiles and the actual background itself. To put it in an animated background, we'll need the timeline backup, and we need to make sure our play head is at the beginning. Now, if you remember correctly, our animated background was one second long. If we just put that at one second to start with, and then we'll go to File, "Place Linked." This is really important because a linked file you can adjust and it will automatically adjust within your illustration. Then go into your Textures file it should be with your Photoshop files and place your animation. Because we're very smart and we made it the same size, it's going to fit exactly into place. If we play just that one second, it's going to loop very nicely. I'm just going to put a blending mode multiplier on that and let's just play that again so we can check that we're happy. Good. Now if I make it the four seconds that I want, I want four seconds so it will get on Instagram. Because our four seconds, if you remember, is our minimum for mp4. I can play it and obviously we only made that one second long. So I need to duplicate that animation. Go all the way down in your timeline. You can make this bigger if you wish. You'll see if you open up the background group, that gentle wave is only lasting that one second. If we halt and duplicate, we can actually drag that down into a video group. Let's duplicate it again, both of them, and fill it up to four seconds. Let's play it with the space bar. You can see that your full animation is filled. Now this is lacking still a little bit of pop for me so I'm just going to do a final adjustment layer. You click on the little moon here and bring up the Levels. Now, Levels correct the tonal range and color balance of an image by adjusting intensity of shadows, mid tones, and highlights. This is what I took from the Adobe website. I just use it to make my illustration look cool. I'm going to take some of the darker colors up already, she just looks great, much more summary. I'm going to take the mid tones down a little bit as well. Now she's popping. Let's see that play. You can just see the waves. The great thing about doing this with Levels, is you can make adjustments to it rather than going back into the file that you made before, like the animated file and trying to adjust the color there. No, add some Levels and adjust the colors. At this point, I'm going to save this as, Animated Background. That is our first animation done, aren't you proud? I'm so proud and already I think this is Instagram worthy, for sure. You can already export this as j for mp4 and have a super-quick animated Illustration ready for your online portfolio or your social media. You can take these skills and pop your animated backgrounds into any illustration using the timeline in Photoshop. For example, here's another character that I actually created in procreate. I divided it into two groups and then post it into Photoshop where I placed the linked soft clouds animation. You can see that it works perfectly. Such an easy technique to bring life to any of your illustrations. In the next lesson, we'll look at animating textiles. 8. Designing and Animating Patterns: We had a good look now at designing animated backgrounds. Now we're moving on to animated textiles. This technique can be applied to all textiles such as clothing, furniture, curtains, and even abstract shapes that you have in your work so I'm really excited to teach you that. I encourage you to use your own sketch that you have been working with. Although I've made my files available in the resources. Are you're ready? Let's do it. I have my little character here, he's is a new character. He's in the pool with the other lady and perhaps he's looking over at her. I imagine his name is Brad or Chad and he's a surfer. He looks great, but he is in desperate need of some patterns in his clothing. Here, we need to decorate his mankini and his head band here. I'll just show you that I've done exactly the same animation for this character as I did with the girl character and if I just press, play, you can see the gentle waves. Like in the other illustration, I am just going to turn up the multiplayer on that one, just to give it a bit more pop. Yes, nice. We're ready to look at patterns and textiles. I usually just go back to Pinterest, you'll see that I have a folder here of textile patterns. Whenever I see one on Pinterest, I just throw it in and then I have a whole bank of textiles to look at for when I need to decorate some clothing. You'd probably decorate usually with something in mind but for this one, I've just decorated it white, and we're going to put our references in. Sometimes the references don't show in this, you just have to transform it and then they will appear. I've put some of my favorite textiles into my art board here. I love the '80s styling and it goes pretty well with his attitude here so this retro feeling stuff is pretty cool. But it's a bit much, I think for this tiny mankini, itsy-bitsy mankini. I like big colors on this one, so I'll keep that one out and just get rid of those two. Then here we've got some stripes and some spots, which is a lot easier textile to manage. If I bring my playhead back, and I'm just going to use this spot one as my first reference. Let's put the back ground away and we're going to locate his swimwear which is here. I have my swimsuit selected here, and I'm going to add to a new layer, which I am going to mask into it using ALT. If I zoom in, I'm going to get my brush, just going to turn the levels off so it doesn't affect my colors and then I'm going to eye drop that yellow. Let's get our brush because it's masked in the layer, we should only see it there. Let's add some spots like this one. A few spots here and there, I also want to add in some pink. Let's look at that. It's pretty nice, I feel like it's a little bit clowney instead of cool, so maybe I'll try some stripes instead. For the stripes I'm going to do my click and shift, so click shift and drag, click shift, drag. I have to say it in my mind, so I didn't get those streaks across my illustration. Let's do the same with the yellow click, shift, drag. Yes, this is a bit cooler, a bit more tie dyed. I think the stripes are really good for this guy and obviously you can try out lots of patterns and see which one fits. What we're going to do is we're going to take this idea into a new file now so remember the five steps. File, new. Create a video timeline. Number three, set timeline frame rates. Number four, set your layer at one second and then we're going to duplicate that layer. It's cool that one background, just to keep that there. Now on this new layer, we're going start making those patterns. Let's zoom in. This time, I'm going to demonstrate my pattern. I want my background to be white so I'll leave it like this. I've already got my brush size because I've practiced in the other file. I'm going to have white, yellow, white, and pink. White, yellow, that wasn't straight, white, and pink. It's going to keep going on like this and if I try and do some math right now, to get this yellow line to the second yellow line, because I want the pattern to move upwards. It's going to take me one, two, three, four frames. We know that 12 divided by 4 is 3 so I'm going to make that three frames long. Let's carry on making our pattern here for speed, I'm just going to guess the distance. Now see this is what happens if you don't click, then shift. Now for this one, because it's quite a specific pattern and you can use this technique with a lot of different patterns, you can use onion skins. You won't see anything yet because we've only got one frame showing. But I'm actually going to use this frame because you might have been thinking, "Oh no, she didn't duplicate the frames", but I'm going to show you exactly what we need to do. If we duplicate that now, we'll see, obviously it doesn't really change. If I enable onion skins, this allows me to see a frame before so I'm just going to call that one normal. This is the frame before, which is one frame before and this is the frame after. What that means is the onion skin will show you the frame before the playhead and a frame after the playhead. Now it's not showing anything at the moment because these two frames are exactly in the same place but if I move this up and press enter, you can see that our first frame is on there. It's starting to show our second frame and on this one, our first illustration is showing as a little bit see-through, whereas our second illustration is the darker color. We can start to see where the previous pattern was and build on that. Now in this one, I can see that I'm missing a color here, it's our pink color and that's now drawn on this layer. If we do the same again, we'll duplicate the layer and move it up. Let's transform that and you'll start to see the previous layer. I'm just going to fill that gap in. Great. Let me just finish off the pink line there, make it look nice and ruffled at the bottom and once again duplicate that layer, move it across. Move the playhead and we'll transform that and just move it up. I can see that I need a yellow again here and that's it, so much simpler than having to draw all the lines again. I'll need to turn the onion skins off in order to see it otherwise, it will look a bit merged. It will look like this so if you get anything like that, it just means you haven't turned the onion skin off. Let's watch our pattern. There we go, it's some moving stripes. I'm going to save this as a textile in our textures folder. In textures, make a new folder command shift n, and we'll call this textiles, this is what we'll use for our clothing and everything, or our sofa or whatever you chose to draw. Let's call it, He wore an itsy bitsy teeny weeny, pink and yellow stripe mankini. Very good. That is our pattern. As I said, you can actually make any textile pattern in the same way so please don't be afraid to experiment with your patterns. Once you've found a pattern that you're really proud of and you want to share it with our community, our little bonus task is again to export that as a GIF. Just using the settings that we have on a 128 [inaudible] , export that. We can just take that GIF and we can upload it underneath our background GIF. Now we've picked our pattern file and it's all saved away in the folder. We can get rid of our little experimental files and just have this sit there. Then we're going to place our linked file. If I place that, and I make any changes to that file in here, it will show up here because it's linked. Let's look in character swim wear, and you'll see that my placed file has appeared at the bottom here, above the swimsuit wear matching here. Our current work frame is four seconds long so we'll need to duplicate that just as we did in the animated backgrounds lesson and pop that in there and that becomes a video group. Duplicate that again, that makes it up to our four frames. Now you can see that it is covering the whole thing at the moment in its position, which is not what we want. What we want is to mask it, so using command click, that will select our swimsuit or whatever layer your masking into. Then you can click on the video group and mask it, and it will pop it right in there. Let's play it. Great. I think I'm going to turn this layer around a bit, the video layer. Just unlink the chain because otherwise that will move the mask, select the video group command T and let's rotate those stripes and move them into place. Yes. Let's play it now. Yeah. Looking cool, Chad. I want exactly the same pattern for the headband so for this, I can do a little cheek because it's already been done. Just go into the head layer and I'm going to duplicate that video group, pop it above the head band. Just right-click and delete that layer mask, command click the headband and create new layer mask. Again this is not really how I want this group, so unlink command T for transform. Let's check that out. Looking totally rad Chad. There we have it, we have our animated backgrounds and our animated textiles. Experiment, make mistakes, have fun and I encourage you to make a few different textures to add to your illustrations. If you want to, you can design a swim wear for my female character's swimsuit, available to download from the resources. I'll be showing you what I did with her swimsuit in our next lesson. Also we'll be learning how to animate some random patterns for a bit of fun in our illustrations. I'll see you there. 9. Animating Randomness!: In this lesson, we'll be animating some random lines to bring some fun to our illustrations. I hope you had fun building up your textiles library and tried out a few different textiles for your work. Let me show you what I did with my swimmer girls swimsuit. I've given her some white stripes, and actually it was really easy to try out a few patterns because if you go into your video group again, let's widen this out so you can see, here's my video clip with my white stripes in it. If I wanted to just replace the contents, you right-click, find "Replace Contents" here and I can look at all the other textile patterns that I made for this and place it, and it will automatically size it and everything to fit into your illustration. So simple, and I think the dots took me five minutes to make. If you think five minutes for every textile and you use it lots of projects, you can save so much time and have just animation in all of your illustrations. I love the wiggles, but I'm going back to the stripes just because I like it to match. Our focus for this lesson is to animate some randomness. This is going to be really fun because we can animate the hair on our character. If I zoom in and turn any unnecessary layers off, so let's turn off the body and the background. We have the head isolated. If you just find the hair copy in the timeline as well, I think I'm going to animate this time on two, so I'm going to drag that until it's quite small. Let's just reduce our work area. We can zoom in as well. We have our hair currently in one position. Let me select that outline wobbly brush again, and I'm going to select that color. Let's just turn the levels off for now because it's this color that I want, and we're going to enable our onion skins. Set the onion skins to normal one frame before and one frame after. Let's drag it to our new place, duplicate the layer, and drag it across. Let's erase that content, so that's empty now and we can start our controlled randomness. The reason I say 'controlled' is because generally we want to keep the same volume of hair and then starting and ending at the same places so that she doesn't look wildly different, but we still have that sense of wildness going on. We can see the change there. Let's do that again. This time because we're animating on two's, will lead to a little bit more work. But because this is just a scribble, it's not really like that at all. The next one, duplicate that layer, leave it across. I'm just going to do enough to fill up to the 12 frames, so the one second. Let's have a look with the levels and all the other layers on. Nice. Yeah, that's cool. I'm just going to have a little trick here. With the hair that I just made, let's put it all on one video layer so I can select all of them like this and drag them down into this video group. Let's call it hair animation. Then what I can do is a little sneaky cheat. I'm going to open up my body layer, turn off my little armpits, I'm going to duplicate that hair animation and transform the whole thing, resize it, and pop it into little armpits. Let's do that again. Transform it and place it on the other on the other armpit and play. I'm just having a little glitch. If you just locate where that glitch is, let's turn off the last one then turn it back on. Yeah. Sometimes it just has a little freak out and then it's fine. Don't forget that we will need to duplicate the whole thing in order to fill up the four seconds. So make sure that you select the layers and then duplicate them just until it's full. do that four times to fill it up. You can do this for any sort of animation. You could have it outside as some grass or a bush or you could have the top of a poodles tail or you could have a cat scrambling around in some wool, and this would just be a perfect technique. The possibilities are endless and I hope you have fun with it. Great. Her hair and her armpits are dancing nicely and I'm really happy with my animation. Here's some more experiments I did with my swimmer guy's hair. Straight and curly. The best thing about this is, don't tell anyone, but you've actually just learned the basic principles and techniques of frame-by-frame or traditional animation. If you've ever thought it was too challenging, you just did it. So I think this is just a great technique to add to your animation toolkit. In the next lesson, we'll look at how to export your work as GIF and MP4. 10. Export Your Illustration: Congratulations. Now you know how to animate backgrounds, patterns for textiles and some silly randomness for your work too. In this lesson, we'll be learning how to export as GIF and MP4 and how to upload these to your project. We can see all three being put to practice here. Now, I've just gone ahead and done a little work on the clouds as well. I use exactly the same technique using the onion skins and just making two copies of the clouds to move along in a linear fashion. If I show you the result, I masked it into the lenses layer and that's just my little finishing touch. Feel free to make any finishing touches to your animation and when you're ready, we're going to export. To export our animated illustration, we're going to first of all, export as a GIF. Now just as I showed you earlier, to export as a GIF, you go to export, save for web and it will come up with your preview of your GIF. Now, I did promise I was going to explain a little bit more about GIF settings. We have our GIF 128 dithered, that's what got us to select earlier. Now what this means is this GIF is reading a 128 colors, and that's what you can see here in the color table. Now, this is the size of your GIF. You may want to, for reasons of work, or finding that it's too heavy, reduce that size. There's a number of ways you can do that. First of all, with this setting, I'm going to preview that on the web. It's looking great and we can see underneath, we've got all the information of what we selected here. Now, I am going to keep this up because what this is really handy for is comparing your different settings. For example, if I wanted to save space here, I could reduce the number of colors to 64. Now we can see that that has affected my illustration. Well, let's have a look on the preview for moving example. We're just losing a bit of color there. I can go back and rather than try and select more colors, because I do want to reduce the size, I can have a go at changing these color reduction algorithms. I could go to perceptual and it will come up with a preview, but let's have a look. Again, we still don't quite, if I compare to the other one, we don't quite have that nice texturing in our GIF with that setting. Let's go back and let's try adaptive. I have a good feeling about this one. Nice. This one really, really looks similar to the original. Let's look elsewhere, make sure there's no comparison. Great. What we've done just by selecting a different color reduction algorithm, is reduced our GIF by almost one meg. What I suggest you do is don't be afraid you can play around with these settings as much as you want and preview each time. When you are happy with your size and you're happy with how the GIF looks, you can save it. What I suggest you do in your GIF files, make a new folder, and we'll call that finals. We'll put our animated GIF in there. You can double-check it in our finals folder. Looking good, and don't forget to upload it underneath all your other content. Easy and we can see the product of all your hard work right there in the project. Doesn't she look beautiful? Don't forget you can also upload it still of your image, we can put the GIF in there. It won't play, but it will still be nice for our project. There she is. Submit. Finally, if you want to upload to social media, you can export your file. Export and down at the bottom we have render video. I'm going to go animate, it's where my MP4, that's great. I'm going to select the folder where I would like it to go. Exports, videos and this time I'm going to call it delivered because that's our final file. What you would want for our standard MP4 is this setting, H.264, and if it's not there already, you can select it from that drop down menu. You should select your work area, because that will only select these four seconds. If you select start frame to end frame, it will select the whole thing up to five or all frames. I'm happy with that, 12 frames, 1080 by 1080, let's render that and let's check our render. As you can see, it will take a moment to export so let's just be patient. There it is. Let's open that up. We're all done. Now you have your MP4 and your GIF ready to upload to social media, to your online portfolio and of course, the project gallery. You can apply these skills to hundreds of different illustrations. Make sure you have lots of fun with it. 11. Final Thoughts: Amazing work everyone! I hope you managed to pick up some valuable tips that animating Photoshop and love it even more Just as I do. We learn how to create libraries of different patterns and textures that add eye-catching animation to your illustrations. We learned how to apply these textures in all places, the backgrounds, textiles and even hair on the character. Possibilities really are endless, and we learned how to export them and I just can't wait to see what you come up with. Remember to post your final artwork in the project gallery, as well as any bonus tasks you decided to take part in so we can see your process. Each month, I'll be picking three of my favorite projects to share on my social media and if you share anything on Instagram, make sure you tag me so I can share it in my story for my audience to see. If you like the class, don't forget to leave a good review to encourage more people to find it and enjoy it as much as you did. I hope you had loads of fun animating textures and patterns in Photoshop. I can't wait to see you in my next course. See you soon.