Transcripts
1. Introduction: It is so much fun when you see your illustrations moving. With Procreate, creating simple animations has never been easier. Hi, I'm Eva and I'm creative entrepreneur, illustrator, teacher, and host of Art Side of Life webcast. Has it ever happened to you that you were making Instagram stories and you wanted to fun put GIFs in your video, but you couldn't find anything that would fit your style, taste or your brand? Or maybe you want it to make simple animations and use them on your website, in your YouTube videos or ads? Well then this class is for you. In this class, I will show you how to go about designing your own animated illustration collection in Procreate, so your Insta stories will have a coherent look and feel, fitting your style and brand. I will share with you my process of designing from brainstorming and sketching to final animation. I will show you how to export your animations as GIFs and upload them to GIPHY website, so you can use them in your Instagram stories and share them with your Instagram followers. You will also learn how to use your animations in Insta stories directly from your phone. While taking this class, you will learn to design your own animated illustrations so you can expand your portfolio and skills, having your own collection of gifts on Instagram stories, and even improve your Instagram engagement with your audience. As a class project, I would like you to create simple animated illustration, save it as a GIF, upload it to GIPHY website, then share it with others or use it in your Insta stories. I also uploaded few illustrations which you can download and practice on them. I'm looking forward to seeing your creations in the project section and I'm super excited to have you in the class and now let's create some animated illustrations.
2. Brainstorming Ideas: Before we look at all the awesome tools and things you can do digitally with Procreate, let's do a brainstorm on what and why we want to create this animated illustrations, and turn them into fun GIFs. On the side note, you can call it GIF or GIF, I will go with GIF with hard G, because it stands for graphics interchange format. Now, back to what's to create, we'll be uploading our animated illustrations to Giphy, and you might want to think what GIFs other people might want to use too. If you don't want other people to use your animations through Giphy and Instagram, I will show you how to use them in your Instagram stories without uploading them to Giphy website in the later license. So first, you probably want to try to create something fun for you and for your audience. You might want to promote your shop and talk about live updates or share your current mood. This way your audience can get to know you better and create better connections with you. Second, you might like certain colors and you want a consistent look in your stories. We can call it in marketing terms as well and this will be Branding. As a bonus, having your own GIFs can improve your visibility on social media, when other people will be using them, and even some companies can ask you to create custom made GIFs for them in your style. So let's do some brainstorming and you can do this part on paper, or you can write it in your phone, in notes, or on the computer. I will write down the ideas on paper. I will try to group the ideas and the first group will be activity. I'm thinking about what I usually share in the stories and that's what you should think about as well. So I will start writing down some of the ideas. What I usually share in the stories is a painting, creative time, maybe good morning, rise and shine, yoga, or exercise, relaxing evening. Or if someone calls you out, and you just want to relax, you can have, I can't, I have plans kind of fun GIF. You can have reading, good book, or afternoon walk. So these would be some of the activities I usually share in my stories. You can write as many as you can think of and then choose the ones you would like to animate, or have as an animated GIF text. The second group will be promotion. Because a lot of us have online shops, or you want to talk about your workshop, or thing you might want other people to check out. So first one, I will write down one of the most obvious ones, which is new post. There are a lot of GIFs in this category already, but you might have some cool look in mind. Then the second one would be swipe up. Another one can be work, work, work. Also related to working, you can have finished for today. Sending you packages, if you have online shop, going to the post office. These I can already imagine maybe character on the bike or you can draw a box. Then you can have editing video, productive day, or if someone shares your products in their stories, you can re-share it and have fun GIF with, thank you written on it. Or you can have heart, then we can have new work. Work in progress, when you are sharing some sketches, which are not ready to be shared in the main feed of Instagram. You can have creative evening, work in progress. You can share shop updates, if you have an online or physical store. You might want to promote a new class or new video if you have YouTube. Third group category, which I would say like would be feelings, because you might want to share your current mood and feelings. So here I can start with time to be happy or time to be alive. You might want to share something which reminds you of the past, so you can just write nostalgic in GIFs. You can also write, so happy about this, or you are shocked, or loving these, so cool, maybe procrastinating. That's a very long word that you can have. So cute, if you meet like super cute dog or a cat, or you just see some cute animals on the street, or whatever you might think is cute. Then in this category you can write like, yaay! When you're excited about something, or you are very motivated to do stuff, you can say, let's do this. Let's start. Let's go. If you are about to go for a trip or whatever you can think of, then you can have, you are the best, if you are sharing maybe a very nice collaboration with someone. In the fourth group, I would put food category, because I like to share things which I'm baking, cooking, or currently eating, or some restaurant has amazingly decorated food, or super cool coffee when I'm working from a coffee house. So here I would put yummy or currently eating. You can have dinner time, breakfast, brunch or brunch date, brunch nice company. So you can combine these with whoever you usually hang out with, so you can write lunch date, coffee time as well. This is one of the most common ones, which I usually share because I love coffee. Then you can have coffee fuel or coffee with girls. You can have busy eating, cooking, baking, and then you can think about steaming coffee or tea. These can be only visual, so you don't have to write it. So depending if you are a tea or coffee person, you can choose or you can have both. The fifth group can be your likes and dislikes, for example. So I really like animals, so I might say in this category, dogs, or cats, or plants, because I also have a lot of plants at homes. So you might choose something which you really like and share very often. Or when you are supporting a cause or a group, or you just really like sleeping. In the sixth group, I will put decoration items, because you might like to take pictures of the nature. So you might put some cute fun elements there like clouds or sun, because this can be very nice when you put it on the background. You can also animate rainbows, sparkles, hanging lights, small stars or dots, which are appearing and disappearing, decoration lines or blobs. You might want to put under your text. You can have arrows pointing at things you want to emphasize. Cute faces. In the Japanese cute style, you can put the face is on mugs or plants, and these can make the story right away quite engaging. Of course, only if you're like a cute style. Then we can have here amplifier with the sound on sign, or you can create notes, to emphasize that there is a sound to your story. Or you can have a pendant lights, or other decorations in this category. We already mentioned clouds and sun, but there is more to the seasonality, and this category can especially help others to discover your GIFs, because others often look to seasonal animations. So the seventh group, I would put snow, snowing, snowman, because they're always super fun to see. Christmas tree, if you are celebrating Christmas. Or you can put candles, winter head, there can be scarf, or a windy day, if you go for a walk and you want to show how windy it was or cold outside. Then you get back home and then you want to show that you are cozy. Or you can write Hygge, which is Scandinavian expression for cozy, where you're just light candles or you're just under a blanket. There is a whole movement in the interior decoration area. Then we can have Halloween, pumpkins, falling leaves, especially when you want to share a lot of stories about beautiful colorful Autumn. In this category, you can also put sweater weather. There can be also hot day in the summer of course, so you can show character melting or ice cream melting, and this will make your stories fun right away. We can have ventilator. So you can put another character with a blowing ears, or fur, or just human character with the blowing hair. So we can have both of these in either with ventilator or with a windy day. We can of course have a relaxing and swimming, if you are sharing stories during the summer. So now we have some ideas and you can, of course do them all, but here we will just select few of them for a start, to show you what is possible, and maybe later on, I will get back to all of them, because it would be super nice to have a full collection of these animations. In the next video, we will select few of the ideas as I mentioned, and start with sketching, and see you there.
3. Selecting Ideas: As I mentioned in the previous video, as the next step, we will decide on which ideas to illustrate first. I'm thinking it would be nice balance to have some ideas illustrated, and some of them will be just as a text or a calligraphy. Let's mark, which can be sum of the first interesting ideas in the activity category. I would go for painting or creative time because that's what I share a lot of the times. Then I would go for a afternoon walk. It's always fun to have some characters expressing the emotion or activity. I thought this would be a good fit here to show a character going for an afternoon walk. Then I thought about the dog, cat or lama as a character, and you can come up with your own animal or draw a human character. Now, let's set example for the promotional category. I would go for a swipe up because that's very useful, and new class or a new video. I think all the promotional texts would be very useful, so I might do them all in the future. If you have ideas for more, please let me know. I would love to hear. In the third category of feelings, I would choose love this, and here I'm thinking about hearts probably. In the fourth category of food, I will do coffee, fuel or something about coffee, and then busy eating because I like to share food stuff in the stories. It might be quite funny to have a character while showing some food. In the fifth category of likes, I would do plant because it's nice to see you your plants growing. Here we can explore some of the animation there, how to draw a plan, the growing. Then in the sixth category, I would choose clouds and rainbow because those are always fun to add to nature stories. We can also try different ways to animate clouds or rainbow and also sparkles because you can decorate any story with some small little details like sparkles. Then I will go for cute phases because why not. Then I will show you how to do sound on with some nodes and how to make it move quite nicely. As a last group, we have holidays and seasonality, and in this part, I will select the scarf or a windy day, because that can be quite nice to animate as well how it can move in the wind, then we will do cozy or hygge. There we can have another character as well. As the last one in this category, I will select falling leaves, because falling leaves are always nice decoration in the stories, and we can have fun animating this as well. Now let's go sketch the ideas.
4. Sketching Ideas: So from all the ideas we selected in the previous step, let's draw these on paper with pencil as a visual note before going to digital. One thing you want to consider is what kind of shapes are appearing in your doodles and illustrations a lot. For me, they are hearts, dots, wiggly lines, and other details like this. This is a simple way to bring your personality and style into the designs. You also might want to think what kind of mode and feeling you want to have when seeing your gifts, or when other people are using them. Is it modern, cozy, warm, eclectic, super fun, or other emotion? This is a simple way to bring your personality and style into the designs. I want to have a cozy feeling and cute and potentially fun characters in my illustrated gifts in the stories. As you can see in the idea of painting or drawing, I sketched paint, brush, pencil is icon, and a dog with a brush as this can be a nice place to put the character in the storytelling, and he can have a dripping paint from the brush which can be a nice animation. Second idea, the afternoon walk, I will create another character and I'm thinking we can make his legs and tail move, and after a walk can be also animated as a text to have both examples. Another idea is swipe up and this can be pretty straight forward, drawing wires arrows, may be even swirly arrow to make it more interesting. New class idea can be combined with a banner or a flag to have more variety in our illustrations. Love this, can be visually shown as hearts as I mentioned before, because this is pretty universal language for love. The next idea, coffee time will be nice with some mug or cup with steaming hot coffee, maybe with the face too to make it more cute. [MUSIC] As busy eating will be probably fun with some food disappearing as an animation. You can have a character here as well, which the character can be eating something. An idea of plants. If you love plants as me, you can have these cute little plant, or flower animation, and we can make it grow. Another idea we'll be selecting where falling leaves and we can make them move from top to bottom of the page, or we can just make them move a little bit in the wind. Another idea we had was a sweater weather, and we can have another character here. For example, a sheep, dog, or a lama in a sweater which could be colorful, and as a windy day idea, we can have a human character where we can animate the hair in the wind, or we can clear the dog with the cute scarf, and the scarf will be moving in the wind and maybe also his ears. Now let's take all of these into digital form and decide on what colors to use or the whole color palette. See you there.
5. Color Palette: Now we have some of the ideas for the illustrations. Next what I will do, I will take a picture of my sketches, so I can take it into my iPad and Procreate. Now let's bring everything to Procreate. We are within the app and if you have any questions, how to do something in Procreate or you are not sure, I also have another course about Procreate where I go over all the gestures and tips and tricks, what you can do within the app, so you can check out that. Now let's create new Canvas. I will go for 6,000 x 6,000, and it will create a new Canvas for me. Now what I want to do is to import some of my artworks or pictures to set the tone for the color palette. I will take some of my recent artworks and then you can sample some of the colors like this, and you can mark it here on the side. I will make my brush bigger here. If I want to have pink, for example. I can have a background pink and yellow. I can say the colors from my existing artwork and mark it here and then what I will do, I will go and create the new color palette. As you can see, I already created something which I want to use for this project and I created it like this from some of my existing art works by selecting the color, what you mark here. You can just add it to your color palette. You can see it here, then select it and you can just click and add it here. If you don't like that color palette, you tap and hold and you can actually delete it. This would be my predefined color palette for this project and if you are still not sure or you don't have really defined color palette, so you are still exploring what are your favorite color palette, you can go to Pinterest and explore, for example, earthy tones, and just scroll through all the ideas, mark down your favorite colors, and just create your predefined color palette like that here, or you can get inspired by different artists and select and create your own color palette. Let me hide this because we don't need it right now. What I will do now, I will import the images, what we took. Insert the photo, so we have our dog and sketches here, so this will be one. I will insert a photo of the other ones as well and with all the files imported in our document, we are ready to start the digital coloring, which I will show you in the next video.
6. Digital Drawing: Now, I have my images imported. This is just for exploration and making the whole process easier because you can just start drawing them from scratch. You can import these images, for example, to your computer or have a phone and next to you as a reference and start drawing them digitally right away. But I wanted to show you a more simple way how you can just take your sketches and draw over them. What I will do, I will just merge them all down together. I will reduce the opacity here, so it's not so visible then I will create another layer, which I will call color sketch and I will take one of the brushes and zoom into one of my sketches. What I thought that the sketch may stand out quite nicely when it's like black and white. But maybe black is too contrast indirect compared to other colors in my color palette. I will select this brownish color, I will reduce the size and then I will just go over my line art with brush. Now, I want to draw colors under my line art. I will create another layer which I put under the color sketch, which will be called base colors, then I will select my white and now, I can draw under my line art. I can also add different colors which might be quiet fun. I thought that can be like yellow dripping color here and maybe pink, so maybe we can combine these two and I would continue like this. You can always create the line art and then coloring under it. I'm thinking about the variety in colors in these sketches because if I have one mug, for example, yellow, maybe the other one can be green and the third one can be pink and then there will be one element which ties them together, which would be probably these white outline or ink details. So try to think what can be the element which ties all of your designs together when you are a coloring, for example, all of my animals or characters will be white with the dark outline and then other small element will be either flat color or we'll have white outline. They'll be some consistency within these theories. I'm still quite messy within these sketches because you can always clean it up and if you want to have more control over your brush line, you can go to the brush and set the streamline because it will make your brush go smoother. You want to clear the straight line, you just hold it don't release it and now you will have a string of buying coming here. I can create cake like this and here I wanted to create like someone is cutting off part of the cake and we can have crumbs and blade under it. Now, as I said the animals will have a dark outline. I am on the outline, let me rename it to outline. Now, I will go to my base colors and I will create some of these greenery and you might see me changing the colors because I just want to try and see what they like the most still fitting within our color palette. Let's color these dog here as well and here I can try out different options. I can have the dog colored with outline and maybe the sweater will be without any outline and we can use some autumn feel colors here. Here we can do a color combination which can look a little bit like a Harry Potter. It's still within my color palette it might just remind few people of the design. The next step, what I want to do is to hide the images because we don't need them right now. You can preview some of your doodles and sketches, how would they look on the white background? But because we are designing them to be used on Instagram stories where usually the background is not white, we need to test it with some real images. If you are designing these type of icons for a website, then you would design them differently, not with the white outline if the website background is white. Let's import some reference images and if you want more tips and tricks about procreate, you can always check out my other class where I talk about all the fun stuff you can do within this app. Now, let me move this images behind. I will also reduce the opacity because sometimes you are using different filters on Instagram, so I will probably use it like this and maybe the background color would be more yellowy and this is how the filter would probably look like. As a last thing, before we move to the animation, I will make the illustrations bigger to have a nice preview how they would look like on the photos in the stories, in the size, I would probably use them. Now, let's start creating our GIF animations.
7. Wiggly Text: As you can see, I added few more ideas so we can look through. We have these dogs, we have new class, busy working some of the food, chilling, new posts. Five up, sound on, being creative. Good morning. Sweater wearer, some cozy time, maybe windy time, Lama, coffee. We can have something like this. Now done. I can take one of the drawings to a new canvas and animate it, or I can start some of the animation from scratch. It's good to try different processes and then you will find your own. Let's start with the text. Because wiggly text, it's quite simple and easy to do. I will flatten all of my illustrations. I will select, close it, with three fingers. I will go to copy. I will create a new canvas. I will swipe again, and I will paste. I can resize it because I still want to redefine. I will make it like this. I will change the background color so I would see the white outline better, it doesn't matter what background color you would choose. I would go for this blue tone. Now I will clean up my sketch. I will create another layer. I will create one for outline as before, and one for base color. I will reduce the opacity of this one, so it doesn't distract me that much. Now I don't need these reference layer anymore. It's pretty clean and it looks quite cartoony, which I like because it looks quite fun. Now I will change the canvas so it's closer to my text size. This way the exported GIF will have better resolution when we uploaded it to giphy. I will turn on the animation essayist. It will show me the two layers which I have now created. If I would play it, it will go like this. Crazy. Flickering thing. Which I don't want this look right now. I will collapse these two layers. I will create a new frame where I will redraw this whole text and it will create this vaguely animation for me. Now we can check it. It's this little volubly text, which is quite fun. Here you can change the speed so it's not flickering that fast. Now if we played, it's quite fun and more relaxed. Maybe I will do it even slower. This is quite nice. Here you can change the onion skin, which means you will see the other frames behind them when you are redrawing. It depends how much you want to see them while drawing? Because we have only two frames, it will be looping from this to this one. I'll show you in the next examples how to use bing bomb as well. Right now, I like how this looks. We can go to this range icon. You can go to Share and export it as animated GIF. Check your frames per second if you like, the speed. We want to export it with transparent background because we want to use it in Instagram stories. I will select this and I will click export and I will just save. Later you can find it in your images.
8. Flicker effect: Is the next one, I would like us to take the new class banner or a flag which you can see here. This should be pretty easy. Let's just select our idea as in the previous examples, copy. Now, as before, I will clean up the idea and then we'll start animating. I would like to have this sketchy look, so you can see me deleting parts of it. I will keep a few wide gaps here. It looked like it's a hand-drawn frame by frame. I will add some of these here. We have a clean edge, but we still have a little bit of these white streaks here. I will make it a little bit bigger, like this. Now what I want to do before I write the text, I will duplicate this, so we can have this hand-drawn look. I will turn on the animation assist. Here, I have few gaps, so I will fill this in. Now, I will duplicate my flag. What I want to do now, I will write the text in the first frame with white. Let's group these two layers if you're happy with the text. Now, let's set this to background and add another frame. We'll create these small lines which will be flickering around the flag, with the same yellow as the flag is. Let's do that. Next, you will create another frame and we will draw the lines in between those other lines. Now, you can preview. We can reduce the frames per second, so it will go a little bit slower. I like four frames per second. I will resize the canvas a little bit, so it's fitting to our illustration. Now, we can export, with transparent background, and we are good to go.
9. Flow in the Wind: Okay, let's take another example. Let me take our cute dog in the wind, will copy it, will create a new Canvas. I will clean up the drawing a little bit. I wanted to have the outline a little bit thinner, which means, and we'll do it more like this. I have the eraser set to a brush with a smooth edge so it depends on the look you are going for. You can try and experiment with different brushes, now I think we are okay with redefining the sketch and the next thing what I want to do is to turn on the animation assist again, and we will see our frame. What I want to do is to animate these swirls and this scarf. Actually the dog, I want to have as a background so the dog doesn't need to move. I can select my scarf. I can also select the swirls. I can do cut and paste and now we will have them on a separate layer. I can rename this and scarf wind and I will set the dog as a background. I don't have to animate the dog. Now what I want to do, I want to create another frame for the scarf, because scarf should move like the wave in the wind. Now I want to animate the second frame and you can see the opacity change, which is the onion skin opacity. You can adjust the visibility. It's even more visible which frames you are working on. Now, I will redraw the scarf. These wave should move a little bit down and this wave little a bit up. We will have that type of movement. If you want to double-check the colors, you can always go back to the frame one, and sample the colors from that frame. If you want to make your work easier, don't choose stripy scarf because of course this will take a little bit more time than other scarf in one color. Let me double-check the colors. This is pink. This is dark and light yellow okay, we can do this. We have little bit less speed then let's add another frame. We can check how this looks. Now it goes from one side to another. Let's try settings with ping-pong, which we'll loop the frame not just from one direction to another, but they will go one way and other way back. Now this looks little bit more natural. Let me delete these winds and we will animate them separately and now I also want to animate the ears of the dog. I will select the ears and cut and paste, and now they are on their own separate layer. I will duplicate the ears. We have them together with each frame. I will merge them and now I can animate them with liquify. I will go here, liquify and you have different options what do you do now here, pushed, twirl, right or left, or pinch, which will make it smaller. I can push the ear. I can also expand in some areas and you can try so many different options here and I will go again, liquify. Let me go to this one. Now I will use only push. Let's see how that goes and now we have also the ears moving in the wind. I am not really big fan of this blob. Let me fix that. It was in this frame. I will go back to liquify and push. I will do this. Now, it should look quite, so let me check. It looks quite nice and now let's add some wind. The wind will start blowing from the right side and so we are on the first frame. The second frame, the third frame now we have the dog in the wind. I can export animated GIF. Transparent background, adjust the speed in frames per second, export and we are done.
10. Steaming Coffee: There is a next example, let's take the coffee. I will take this pink coffee mug. I will copy it, paste, scale it, change the background color so we see it better again. Now, I will clean it up. Now I will change the brush to be more smooth and I will draw the steam. Turn on the animation assist and you can download this in the project section so you can practice on this illustration as well if you want. Now I will duplicate this frame. I think 10 frames would be good so i have four. One more and now what I will start to do is I will start deleting my coffee steam. Because what I want is to appear from the bottom and disappear at the top. In the first frame, I will not have anything. I will delete everything here. In the second frame, i want tiny parts at the bottom start to appear. Will continue deleting parts of the steam, so it looks different in every frame. Now I can start also deleting small parts from the bottom. Because we want the steam to disappear. Before I delete everything from the last frame, I will play the animation to see. I will add one more frame here. Here we want to have only the ends before everything disappears and now in the last frame, we want everything to disappear. Let's see. I think this plays quite nicely. Let's adjust the frames per second. Maybe eight can work nice. I think eight works really well in this version. Let's pause this and we can export this animation and if you want to post this into the Instagram feed, you need to export it as an animated MP4 because Instagram doesn't support gifs just yet. If you want to post it in the stories, gif, and if you want to post it into the Instagram feed, you export it as MP4. Now export it as gif with transparent background. Export. Have to wait a little bit and now we are done. I save the image and now we are good to go.
11. Dog Eating: In the next one, I would like us to do the eating dog, in the area of food or busy eating. I'm sure you can try to animate these ideas as well when you will erase the doughnut, so it will disappear and you can add crumbs or you can erase the cake, the same way as we animated the coffee. You can copy it and erase parts. Now, lets do the dog. I will change the background again and I will clean up the edges, and then redefine the shape of the dog little bit more before we start the details. You can download also this illustration at the PNG and you can practice these animation as well. Now let's turn on the animation assist. I will delete the mouth, so I can see how the mouth looks like below. I will redraw the mouth in every frame so it looks like it's moving and I will start redrawing the mouth a little bit to the left and a little bit higher. I will duplicate, and I will continue redrawing the mouth in every frame, starting on the left then going to the top and moving in a clockwise direction, then duplicate and erase. Let's see, this works quite nice. Now, let's duplicate this frame and this one will be as a background. In the first frame, which is as a background, we'll just paint over with white. We can isolate it to see it better. This is our background, now we will uncover all of them, I just tap and hold. Let's play it. We can let him choose slower. Maybe 11, 12, let's see. I will clean up the mouth a little bit here because the line is not smooth. Going back to this layer now I will uncover all of them again. I will go to third frame, okay here I need to delete part, also here. Just to clean it up a little bit. Now we should be good. Yes, this is fine. If we would want to animate also the ears, we would need to remove them from the background frames, so let me do that. I will isolate it again and erase the ears. Now, I can uncover it again and now I am able to animate each frame. Let's try to play. What does it do? Ears are moving a little bit, so we need to move them also in the other frames. I will adjust them a tiny bit more because they feel like they're moving a little bit too much. I think we are good. Now I will export the animated GIF.
12. Falling Leaves: Next, I want to show you the falling leaves. I have the leaves here, I will copy them. I will adjust the canvas to be longer, like Instagram stories, something like this. We will animate only three leaves. Let me delete the other ones, these lines we will add later on. What I want to do now, I want to draw a line which will guide me through the movement. I will add another layer, and I want the leaves to follow this movement. This will be one movement, this is the second one, and this will be the third one. I will turn on the Animation Assist, I will set this to background, and I will reduce the opacity of it. I will move the leaves into a starting position in the first frame, and I will duplicate the layer. I want this leaf to move first, it will also rotate. Now when we position the leaves on the edge of the canvas, we can create a zero frame, where we will move them out of the visible canvas. We didn't start with this because when you move drawings out of the picture, they will be cut off and we wouldn't be able to copy the leaves to new frames. When the leaves are falling down, I want them to have bigger gaps in between the frames because they are accelerating down, so they are going faster. When they will go up, I will slow them down so the gaps will be little bit smaller. What I need to do now, now I have to duplicate all the frames and move the leaves alongside these paths. I will be just repositioning them and rotating them a little bit based on the line which I drew, how they should be falling. I will also squish them a little bit when they go into the rotating position, so we can make them tiny bit smaller with the liquify tool. First, let me do this yellow one. I will adjust some of these frames which are near the curve. I will use the liquify and I will push the leaf a little bit. Done. This one, and also in these frames. Now we can test it. We want to have it a little bit slower, like they're falling in the wind, and its flowing quite nicely. I want to adjust a little bit here. Yes, I think this is working nicely. Now let's animate these two other leaves the same way. Now I don't have to add any more frames because we have frames created, so now I will just go frame by frame, so we can test it out. The last one is the green. Let's move him a little bit out of the screen. What I don't like is that these two leaves are going down at the same time, let me adjust that by changing the starting placement of the orange and yellow leaf. I will also adjust their positions while falling along the wide guideline so they're not next to each other at any time. In addition to this, I will make them fall in different speeds by adjusting the gaps, the bigger the gap, the movement looks faster. Now I will turn off my guides. I can preview it again and it's quite nice. As a last detail, we will add small wide lines when the leaves are accelerating down. This will emphasize the speed movement, and for each leaf, I will draw a line in three frames. First will be the shortest. These small lines should overlap when you draw them. Now, these should do it. We can preview and export. Now let's move on to the next video.
13. Puffing Hearts: In this video, I would like to show you some cute heart because this is will be selected in the group. I love this. We have these cute hearts here. Let me copy these and what you can do also in the new Procreate, you can save and load with this little heart. You can save selections. Now I can save the selection, if I deselect it, I can select it again, which is quiet fun. Now, let's take it, I will copy it, I will go to gallery, create a new Canvas, I will change the background color to gray or some other color so I can see the hearts better. I will swipe the fingers down again and I will paste. Now I can scale them. What I want to do, these small details, I want to keep as they are. Maybe I will redraw them so they are a little bit wiggly. I will clean up the illustration as in the previous examples, okay? I'll make this one smaller. What I want to do now is to make the heart bigger and then explode. Now we will turn on the animation assist again, we will duplicate the frame and we will make them more round. With the additional details, I will just draw over them so they wiggle a little bit. Duplicate the frame. Now, I will start to make the hearts turn into little clouds because then they will look like they are going to explode. I will erase these here and draw them over. You can still see them because of the onion skin. You would see the opacity here. Here I will still want to redraw them in the same color, but i want them to be a little bit more wiggly, so I draw them tiny bit smaller. There we have some variety in those. Now we will duplicate the frame again and duplicate one more time. Now we will add empty frame. We will draw the small lines coming out of the middle. We will do it also for the yellow, here. I'll just redraw this, add another frame, so now we don't see the lines that well. What I can do here, I can hide the other frames, so we see only this one and then we can see where we are drawing. Now you don't see the frames also here, but we will uncover them later. What we want to do now, we want to make these lines a little bit longer. We add another frame and now we want the lines to disappear, so now we will draw only the ends. I can uncover all of my other frames and we can test. I want to add more frames with hearts so we see them better. We are here, onion skin, let's reduce this. We can duplicate this frame and make the heart's a little smaller. I will drag it to the front and I will just erase edges of the illustration to make the heart smaller. You can also make them smaller by resizing them but I find this one fits a little bit better, because you can also have sharper edges and you can control it a little bit more and also you would see a little bit of the wiggle there. I will redraw this one again. Now we have more of the hearts there, but I feel like the blob is there may be for too long, so, let's pause it. Maybe we don't need this blob, so I will delete this one. Let's test. It's better, but let's add another frame with hearts. Let's duplicate this frame and make the hearts little bit bigger. What I will do, I will duplicate one more time this frame, drag it to the front and I reduce the size of my hearts. One more thing, what I can do is to tap and I can hold the duration for one frame which will be like adding another frame. Let's try to play it. I like it and then I will reduce the speed, may be to 12. I will add one more frame because we want these lines to disappear completely, so this last frame will be completely empty in the middle. Now I can export it with transparent background, with 12 frames per second.
14. Growing Flower: In this video, I want to show you how you can draw a growing plant. Let's take our plant here. Then you can use the same principle with other illustrations with plants. Let's create a new Canvas and let's paste it. Our idea is here. Again, I will clean up the illustration before we go to animation. I will change the background color so I can see the illustration better. Let's give it the face because, why not? You can also download this illustration if you want to try out this exercise too. What we are going to do next, I will turn on again the animation assist, as in the previous examples. Here we will use similar method as we used in the animation with the steaming coffee. We will have the finished illustration as a result of the animation, which means we will keep this untouched full-grown plant illustration always in the last frame. The whole process will consist from duplicating the first frame and erasing parts from the edges. The plant will be smallest in the first frames and full grown in the last frame. I would like to end up with approximately 20 frames. The animation will be more smooth. Yes, the other method you could do is to draw a tiny plant in the first frame and finish by illustrating the last frame with a full-grown plant illustration. But because we already have this finished illustration from the start, we will be using the eraser and deleting part to get to our desired result. I will duplicate this one. This will be our last frame, and here I will start deleting. I will reduce the opacity. As I mentioned in the first frames, I will start deleting parts of the pink petals on top of the flower to start a deleting process. Later I will start deleting also the green leaves when the pink flower on the top will be quite small. Because I have the white strokes or lines around the drawing, I will always have to fix these details after deleting parts in every frame. If you want to make your process easier, don't include any stroke or line around your illustration. If you test it out already, now let's see how it looks. We can always make it a little bit slower. Now, I will duplicate this frame. Here I need to already add some of these green because I deleted it. I'll do that. Now I will go to my duplicated frame. I can test this out again. Let's play it. It looks like the plant is growing. Here I will continue the process by always duplicating the first frame, which is the frame I am working on and adjusting and it will be always copied to the second position. Don't forget to drag it to the front, to the first frame position. Let's go to the first frame. Now I can start reducing also the leaves. We can test it out. Now go to the first one, duplicate, drag it again to the front and continue erasing. You can test it out again. It's growing quite nicely. Duplicate, drag it to the front again. We already progressed somewhere. Let's continue with the same process, adding more frames until we get down to one small leaf. There is also a third way how you can animate these type of movement. That is drawing first a last frame of the animation and then illustrate all the movements in between. Let's check it out now. I think the plan is growing quite nicely. We can maybe make it a little bit faster. I think this is quite good speed. If you wanted to test it out that it's growing back and forth, you can do this. It's growing. This might be quiet fun as well. Lets test it out again in the loop. I think the growing in the loop is much better. If you want it to grow only once, you will do one shot. But we want to have a loop. If you want it to stop at the end for a second, we can add pause for one frame. Let's see. Yeah, so it's pretty nice when it stays there for a second. Now we can export our animation. Speed 13 works quite well with transparent background and let's export. Sometimes it takes longer depending on how long is the animation. You just have to wait. Now we should be done and now you can just save it. Perfect.
15. Uploading to Giphy: After exporting and saving all our GIFs, we are ready to upload the giphy. So you will be able to share your animations with others and use them directly through GIF selection in Instagram stories. This process is quite simple. Just open Giphy website and create an account. To upload your animations, Just click on the "Upload a GIF" here on the left or drag-and-drop your GIF into the upload window, and then write some tags, which are relevant to your animation. Then click on this purple button, "Upload the GIPHY," here on the bottom right. Right after that, you will see it on your Giphy profile page. To be able to see your GIFs in the GIF selection on Instagram, you have to apply for artist or brand account. Fill in all your details here. To be able to apply, you should have an avatar image, and social media links, and the profile created there, and you should also have five to ten original artworks. It might take around four days to get approved, and then around a week, so you can see your GIFs in Insta stories. But my process was superfast and it was available in one or two days. So it is case-by-case. The best is to follow the steps from the Support page and properly read everything, and soon you will have them available also in your Insta stories. In the next video, I will show you how you can use your animations in the stories without using the Giphy website.
16. Direct Upload from Phone: [MUSIC] Now let's use some of our animations, what we created in the Instagram stories without using Giphy. If you want to keep your animations to yourself and you don't want others to use it, this is the way how you can do it. You will have to start creating your story first, and then we will go to pictures, so let's go here. We will start creating a story. I will take one of my pictures. Let's take this one as we had it as an example in the class already. Now I will go back to my photos and I saved some of my animations and go to one of your animations, which is, for example, the flower. You will go to share. You will copy the photo. [MUSIC] You'll go back to Instagram and you will have this small sticker button. Now, you have your animation ready in Instagram stories as normally as well, in the Instagram stories you can click and flip it around. Usually when you import your animations in this way, they will have a better quality than in the Giphy, but Iike this, other people can't use it and you can't share it with your audience. But this is the way how you can share your animations. Let's test if you can add more of them. I can go back to my photos. I can take the dog that we animated before, I can go here, copy photo, go back to Instagram and add another one. You can use more of your animations like this. You go always back to your photos. We can add another one. We can do afternoon walk, copy this one, copy photo, go to Instagram, paste, and we have more of them here. Like this, you can add all of your small animations to your Instagram stories and when you want to share it, you just press, "Go to your story as usual."
17. Final Thoughts & Project: Thank you so much for taking this class. I hope you feel inspired and motivated to design and create more of your own animated illustrations, expanding your portfolio and enhancing your insta stories. If you already have some animations ready, please share them with me and others in the project section, and if you want me to share your animations on my Instagram stories so other people can discover your work, please also share your social media handles with me. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask. I love to help out. If you like the class, please leave me a review and subscribe to get notified when I release new class. I would appreciate it a lot and it will help other people to discover these class too. Thank you so much again for being here and see you in the next class.
Iva Mikles, Illustrator | Top Teacher | Art Side of Life
