Transcripts
1. Class Intro: Collage making is fun, creative play for people of all skill levels. The beautiful thing about collage is that anyone can create a unique, eclectic piece of art. Contemplating a surreal scene will really spark your creativity. Hi, I'm Kelley Bren Burke. I'm a digital artist living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I'm obsessed with collage and animation and I think you could be too. Here is what we will explore together. We'll source images from the best free photo websites to combine vintage and modern elements. I'll reveal an underused composition trick that will help you create dynamic collages. This trick will help you in every kind of visual art, from collage to illustration to photography. I'll be using my iPad, my Apple Pencil, and the Procreate app. You can follow along that way, or you could kick it old-school and use images that you have from your personal photos, your magazines, newspapers, whatever you have lying around. After this class, you'll have all the tools that you need to create a captivating collage. You'll have the inspiration, the elements, and the tips, and tricks to tie it all together. You'll have an eclectic piece of art that's entirely your own. After we've created a digital collage, we'll animate it using the Procreate app, even if you've never created an animation, no worries. It is so fun and it's easier than you would think. I will walk you through every step. But wait, there's more. After you've created your animated collage, you want to share it. In a bonus lesson, I'll show you how to share your animations on Instagram. At this point in time, Instagram does not support gifs, but I'll share workaround with you. This is the question I get asked the most and I'm giving you all the information here. After this class, I hope that you'll be inspired to apply what you've learned to collage into all kinds of art that you'll create in the future. Ready to play? Let's go.
2. Class Project & Resources: Welcome back. For your class project, you are going to be creating a collage, and I wanted to give you lots of resources to support you with this, so let's talk about those resources. I would love it if you would share your collage, whether it's animated or unanimated, digital or analog. I love looking at collage and I am so excited to see what you create, so please share your collage and I will give you some feedback. I'd love to see what you create. To support you in creating a great collage, I have some assets for you. If you look here under the Project and Resources, I have some resources for you. I have a collage brush set, which we'll be talking about a little bit later, and I have all the isolated elements for our collage today. This is our collage today and it has five different elements. It has these red doors, which we are going to animate in the end, it has this rock structure, it has these three women, it has these other red doors, this is a church. Then I added some clouds in the church for a mystical feel. All of those isolated elements are there for you in the resources, so that will make it really easy for you to create a collage. With all of my classes, you can either follow my process exactly or just use it as inspiration to create your own unique collage. Later on, we're going to be talking about my favorite resources for photos online, but I also wanted to mention here that personal photos are a great resource for collage, whether it's an old vintage picture of someone in your family or more modern personal photo, using personal photos in a collage will really elevate the meaning and emotion in your collage. So that is a great way to personalize your collage. Let's look next at my Pinterest board on collage so you can get some inspiration here. I have a Pinterest board and collage, and again, that's linked. You can see all of these. There's just some amazing collages here. I was browsing this morning, I get really distracted every time I look at this, I found something else. This one I think is really beautiful, it has this row of dancers, and then the triangles at the top. I just really love that, and then it looks like crystals maybe, flowers, so cool. This one right here, I haven't seen before, I have used these skater girls in my own collage. These skater girls are from a site called Deposit Photos, rather that's where I got them from, I don't know if they're in other places. Deposit Photos is a paid site, but you do get your first 10 images free. So I highly recommend checking that out too. This is a great collage, I'm going to save it to my collage album. Let's go back to that. I found these collages this morning, these memories on a diving board, and then these, I love this one. I think that's so cool. I really like this person's style. Those flowers in the diner or restaurant, it's a diner. It doesn't really matter. But yeah, fish and chips. Anyway, that does not matter. I was just curious, and yeah, so those are some cool collages. Let's just look at one more. I always say just one more in my classes, I've realized. I really like collages like this too. I'm actually really into divers lately for collage, but I like it when people are just combining simple shapes with a collage. I love collage, and I hope you like collage as much as I do. This one is cool. This is like, they call it urban Tetris. Love that. Anyway, lots of collage inspiration is on Pinterest as you can see. I really could just keep looking at this, but let's move on. I think these resources will help you create a beautiful collage of your own. In the next lesson, we are going to talk about two composition tricks that will help you create a beautiful collage. I also have some resources that will help you with that. I will see you in the next lesson.
3. Elevate Your Compositions: Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to talk about two forms of composition that will help you create a beautiful collage. The first one we're going to talk about is symmetrical composition, and that one's pretty obvious. You've seen symmetrical composition, you may have created things with symmetrical composition. With this one right here, you could just put a line down the center of it and you can see that it is a symmetrical composition with one-half of her face on each side and then the other things in the middle. That sounds strange, but let's look at this one too. This is one of my favorite collage artists. I'll pronounce his name, but I'll probably pronounce it poorly, Julien Pacaud, he's French. Here we have a great example of symmetry. This woman has been duplicated and flipped over the other way. We have this line down the center and the clouds. This is a great example of symmetry. I love looking at his pieces. Here's another symmetrical one that's very similar to the other one, and has this main person in the center, the house, the clouds, and then the two men to the right and the left are very similar, but different, but it does create a nice symmetrical composition. Let's look at one more symmetrical composition and this is, again, similar to the other ones. It has these people in the center and then this balanced mountain structure and the circles behind there. That is another example of symmetry. If you want to create a symmetrical collage, that is a great way to go. I last talked about design trick is the rule of thirds. You'll hear about the rule of thirds a lot in photography. But it's helpful in all kinds of design, whether that's graphic design, art, photography. If you think of your camera in your iPhone, when you take pictures, you might see a grid exactly like this, and the grid will break the image up into nine different squares. The squares are less important than the lines that we see here. We have a line to the left, to the right, to the top, and to the bottom. What you'll want is for things to be happening where these lines intersect, so right here, right here, right here, and right here. Here we have the stem along this line, roughly, it does not have to be exact, and then I never know what this part is called, this circle part at the intersection here. Roughly we have this bee, again not exactly, at the top. Then the other thing that you will see in rule of thirds often is more white space at one of the intersecting parts. White space or negative space or breathing room, that's when there is not a lot happening there. So that's a good example of that. Let's look at more examples of the rule of thirds. This is a good example. It has these white lines here. The little girl, I love her skirt and boots, that's really cute. She's along this left line. Her head is where those two lines intersect. We have a horizon line here at this bottom line, a horizon line here at this top line and then more breathing room going along here at this point and at this point. That will create an interesting composition. I have this board linked for you. You can find it in the class project in resources section, you can browse it there. I've created a Procreate stamp brush that will help you visualize the rule of thirds in your compositions and I'm going to show you that next. Let's go into Procreate. I've created a gallery here with composition examples of the rule of thirds and also some symmetrical ones. This one you can see has a rule of thirds composition. I'm going to show you the stamp brush that I created for you. That is right here. I'm going to clear it so I can show you how that works. If we go to my KBB collage set which is available for you, I have different rule of thirds stamps here. There's a square, an eight by 10, a screen size one, and then one that's 1920 by 1080 pixels. These are sizes that I use frequently and I hope they're helpful for you. This one right here is an eight by 10. I have my eight by 10 brush set and it's pressure sensitive. I can never get it exactly the right size, but if I go to this arrow and I'm on uniform, I can bring it up to this corner, and then once it's in the corner, I can drag it down and leave it there. You can turn the opacity down while you are collaging or you can turn it on and off. I'm often turning something on and off. I'm going to turn the opacity back up though so you can see it. You can see here that we have the woman along the right line. We have the twinkle lights roughly along the top line, and we have the beach ending roughly at the bottom line. Then we have a little bit more breathing room right here and right here. There's not as much happening along that line. Let's look at some more. I'm not sure if you know this trick to browse the canvases in a gallery, you can pinch it open like this and then you can swipe left to right and throughout the whole gallery. You're not editing this way, you're just viewing things. This is another example of the rule of thirds. Another one. When you're using photographs from Unsplash or other places, you'll often see that they already have a rule of thirds element. Here we have the city at the lower horizon line, this building going up at this line, the clouds roughly along this line. Once you know about the rule of thirds, you're going to see it everywhere. This is another example. This one's an animation. Another example of the rule of thirds, this one I think you might be able to see, I don't have a stamp exactly with this one, so you'll see some space over here, and that's fine. It's not an exact formula, it's just to give you a rough idea. Here's an example of two different forms of composition. I love these girls. They're super fun. Obviously this is a symmetrical design because they are in the center, the road is in the center, but if you look here, the mountains go up to this top line, the horizon is roughly at this bottom line, so you can combine different forms of composition too. This one, obviously a very symmetrical composition with her in the center, but we do have this bottom line at the horizon and this top line at the top of the graffiti wall. One more hybrid, mostly a symmetrical composition as you can see here. But there's also rule of thirds elements with this metallic moon here and here, and then we have the horizon at this bottom line. You can definitely combine those. Now that you have your stamp brushes and some examples of composition tricks that you can use, we can move on to the next lesson. I hope this was helpful and I hope you enjoy your rule of thirds stamps. I will see you in the next lesson.
4. Discover Inspiring Images: Welcome back. This is my favorite source for modern photos. The website is Unsplash, and it's linked in the class project and resources section. This is the homepage. You can get an idea of the variety of photos there. This is also a searchable library. You could look for things like night sky. This is an ad up here at the top. Those images cost money at iStock, but these are the free Unsplash images, and you could save these to a gallery, you could download them, you could also just search, sky. Again, these are the images that cost money, the advertised thing. Then the other images down here are part of Unsplash. You could use any of these in your collages. If you're not sure what you want to use, but you just want to get ideas you could save them to a gallery. This is one I've used before, so it will already be in my collage gallery. But if it wasn't, you would just hit plus, and you could create a new collection, or you could see what galleries that photo is already in. This is my collection of curated collage elements, and you are free to use any of these. One of the things that I'm often looking for in a collage, a great way to start is to use a portal. A portal would be in a doorway to walk through a window. This would be an example of a portal. If I was to collage this, I would probably remove the blue door and have another surreal scene behind there. This is a portal that I'm going to be using in today's class. For this one, I isolated the rock away from the center. This rock serves as a portal into another world. I'm also going to teach you how to do the isolating in Procreate. But if you don't want to do that, I have the isolated images for you in the class project and resources. This could be another portal where you're isolating the rock from the sky and the water, and you have something else behind there. This is another image that I'm using in today's collage. It is a church in Massachusetts. This would be another great example of a portal. In this case, I would isolate the border and the door away from everything behind it and then put something else different behind there. If you are not sure where to start, a portal is a great way to start. To give your collage some dimension. Feel free to browse this gallery of images that I thought would be great for collages. You can also create your own gallery in Unsplash and start with your own images. I also love Flickr for vintage images. The trick for Flickr is to go to the homepage, and that's flickr.com. If you go to Explore, tap the comments. The comments are photos that are free to use. They have no known copyright restrictions. You'll want to search the comments in this middle box right here because if you're searching at the top, you're searching all of Flickr, and you're going to find images with copyright restrictions. In the comments, you can search whatever you want. You could search actress and find a bunch of images here. Here it says no known copyright restrictions, and that's how you know that you can use the image. You can save your image to your gallery by hitting plus. I have a collage gallery here, so I just added it to there. Let's look at my collage gallery. If I go to you and galleries, this is my gallery of collage images. When I'm creating a collage, I'm starting with a strong image, whether that is a person or a natural element. It's great to use people that are in motion. That's a really fun way to use a great collage, like these folks. You could take someone that just looks very surreal, like this woman. There are just so many fun, creative images here. This is from the Library of Congress, which is one of my favorite places within Flickr to browse. It's a favorite resource for two reasons. One, all of them that I've seen have no known copyright restrictions, and 2, the Library of Congress images often say higher resolution image is available, and then they provide a link. If you click on that link, here's the image again, and it will show you that there's a JPEG available that's smaller, a larger JPEG, and then a large tiff image. This one is 23 megabytes. If we click here to the largest image, you could save this image to your files and use it later. Once you start paying attention to the rule of thirds, you'll see it in a lot of different images. Here we have the top horizon line, we have the bottom horizon line, we have her at the right vertical line, and then these people at the left vertical line. Once you start looking for the rule of thirds, you will find it everywhere. We could also tap on the Library of Congress, and then that's another way to search. We're on the Library of Congress, and instead of using that top search engine, again, we use this bottom, we tap on this bottom one, and this will search within the Library of Congress. We could search for dance. We're going to search for images of dancers, and here are photographs within the Library of Congress. I also have an album for this class. If we go to me, galleries, this is an image that I am going to be using in our class today, and it will tell you some details here. It's three women at Florida field. I believe they're watching a football game, and it was 1959. What I did here was I isolated the women from the fence and from everything else, and I put them in a collage. I have this isolated image for you so you could use it as well. I isolate the images using the Procreate app and that is what we are going to do next. I will see you in the next lesson when we talk about isolating images.
5. Isolate Your Image: Welcome back. In this lesson, we are going to isolate an image from its background in Procreate. We are going to start by downloading the image, and this one does not have a larger image available, so we are going to hit tap this arrow right here, and it offers a variety of different sizes. I will always download either the original or the larger size. The original is often the larger size, but not always. I'm going to tap on original, I'm going to download, and then it's going to be in my files. Let's go over to Procreate and I'll show you how to isolate that. Now that we're in Procreate, I'm going to hit Import and it's going to go right to my files here. Here are my three women at the football game. Again, I have these isolated women for you, so you don't have to do this, but I am going to show you how to isolate one of the women so you can know how to do that in Procreate. We do that using the free hand selection tool. If we go to the selection ribbon, we're on free hand, we're just essentially tracing around the woman right inside. Let's just start at the bottom of her shoe here. What you can do, again, it's ribbon free hand, you can trace along just inside the image and you want to do that so you're not including the background in there, or if you have a relatively straight line, you can do something different here. I'm going to go around her knee and then I'll show you. I'm right here and if I go up here, that will create a straight line, again you can trace or just dot for straight lines, and that is sometimes an easier way to do it. I'm going to undo that, two finger tap to undo, and I'm tracing around her purse, and now that I'm at her hand I'm going to start drawing again. Sometimes it's hard to see what's going on right there, and so it helps to zoom out a little bit. I'm not taking very long strokes here because sometimes I will want to undo what I did, and if I do a long stroke and then undo it, then I'm losing a lot of my work. So I am lifting up my pencil somewhat frequently here. Sometimes I spin my canvas around just, for know what, it just feels easier sometimes. We are almost done here, we are coming back around to the bottom of her shoe where we started. Once you've connected that line, you can see these little diagonal, it's hard to see here, but you can see there's little diagonal lines on everything except her because she's what we isolated. To further isolate her, we're going to do a three-finger drag down and we're going to hit cut and paste. Now the screen looks exactly the same except it's different. We now have two layers instead of one, and we have the background and the two women, and then we have the one woman that we've isolated here. We have one more thing to do here, we're isolating now this little center bit with the same technique. So free hand selection ribbon, trace around, three finger swipe down, cut and paste. I'm just going to delete that because we don't need it, and so here we have our isolated woman. What I do now as I zoom in then I look for areas that I might want to clean up. I do that using the Soft air that comes with Procreate. I will have that for you in the same kit as the rule of thirds brushes. This is the Soft Airbrush that's a default Procreate brush and I'm just going to clean up these little bits where the background got into the image. You don't have to be really precise about this if you don't want. I tend to want my images to be pretty clean, because if I like an image, I'll use it in a variety of different collages, so it's worth it to me. I'm not sure what's going on here, so I'm just going to do that. It's worth it to me to have a pretty clean image. If I wanted to save this as a PNG, that means it has a transparent background. So I can tap on the background color and erase that, and there's nothing on the screen now except for this woman. What I could do is save it as a PNG, so I would go to wrench, share, PNG and it would go into my camera roll. If we look at my camera roll, you can see here she is. Then what I would do from here is tap on this arrow and save it to my album of collage people and animals. I'm not going to isolate these three women because I've done that for you, and now that you know how to isolate things, you could isolate anything that you wanted. In the next lesson, we are going to begin creating our collage. I will see you in the next lesson.
6. Let's Create a Collage! : Welcome back. In this lesson, we are going to be creating our collage together. I'm going to be talking you through making a collage. I'm going to show you a couple of different variations of that collage. For your collage, feel free to follow my process exactly, or just use this as inspiration to create something totally new and unique in your style. Whatever you are more comfortable with, whatever you are inspired to do, go for it. What I'm going to do is use this once again as a portal. The portal is going to lead into this church and we're going to have our three Florida women looking at it. Also when we're going to be animating it, we're going to be using these doors as a sliding door animation and I will show you what I mean. Let's go back into Procreate. Here is my collage for this class, it is my three women from the football game isolated and they are standing on that structure; I don't know if it's a cave. They're looking into this church entryway and I also added some clouds that are from the website Rawpixel. Rawpixel has a lot of free images as well, and a lot of them are isolated from their background like these clouds are. This collage is more of a symmetrical collage as you can see. It has the doors in the center. It has that woman in the center. It has the two women balancing it out, it has the two windows on either sides, so this would be a good example of a symmetrical collage. But also, if I add a stamp, I believe this is an 8 by 10, if I go to my stamp and then 8 by 10, I'm going to tap it on there. I'm going to go to this arrow and stretch it out. These women fall along these lines right here, so there is that element of it. But it isn't actually a great example of the rule of thirds, but I did use it in placing the women to the side. I'm just going to turn off that layer. I'm going to show you other collage examples with these elements, as well as the animation for this collage. Let me tap onto here and I'm going to hit "Play" and we are going to see the sliding door animation. I'm going to teach you how to create this in this class. These are the doors that we looked at from Unsplash and what I did was I removed the center and duplicated them and animated them. This might seem tricky right now, but no worries, I'm going to talk you through every single step and you will be able to create this yourself. One of the reasons I wanted to do the sliding doors for this class was I wanted to do an animation that would work for a lot of different collages. You could use a variety of doors for this, you could get doors that were a different color. Let me show you an example of that. Here we have an entirely different type of collage using those doors. I don't like this one as well, I just popped it together as my first experience playing around with this door. But here it shows you how you can get an entirely different flavor of a collage just by putting something else behind there. Let's look at other examples of this collage. This is one that I created, I'm not sure, I think I like it. Again, it's a isolated rock, it's a different woman from Flickr and this one is an example of the rule of thirds here because this woman is standing along here, she's not symmetrical. I do like this one, I just decided. You can use elements in a lot of different ways to get entirely different results. I do officially like them. I just decided. I don't think I love this one either. Well, I haven't decided. This is a wall from the Ukraine I believe, and it's another Unsplash image. What I did was I cut every single little circle out of there, so you could see through there. I think I really do like these sliding doors, I'm not sure if I love what's behind there. But that would be another example of a sliding door animation. Again, you don't have to isolate every single circle, I have isolated it for you, and it is in the class project in resources. Let's go back. Like I said in this lesson, we're going to create the collage and the next one we are going to animate it. Let's create a new Canvas. I'm going to do an 8 by 10, so I'm going to tap on this folder here. I'm going to change it to inches here; a width of 10 inches and a height of eight inches. We are going to start with this isolated cave, which I have pre-isolated for you. I'm going to take this cave, I'm going to do a three-finger drag down and I'm going to hit "Copy". I don't know, I guess it wouldn't technically be a cave but I'll call it a cave. Three-finger drag down again in our new 8 by 10 Canvas, hit "Paste" and there is our rock formation cave, whatever it is. I'm going to create a shadow for this and I'm going to do that by duplicating this rock formation. I'm going to go to the bottom one, I'm going to hit "Alpha Lock", and I'm going to fill this with a dark gray color. Alpha Lock, Fill Layer, and then I'm going to unAlpha Lock it. Then I'm going to give it a Gaussian blur, which I do by going to Magic Wand, Gaussian Blur, Layer, then we have a new little menu at the top, it says Gaussian Blur - Slide to adjust. You can see here if you're watching, this percentage is going up, right now it's at 22 percent and you can see if I go down the shadow is less. I'm going to do a shadow of about seven percent for this one. I'm going to give it a blend mode of Multiply. Multiply is a great blend mode for shadows. To do that, you tap on your layer, it defaults to a normal blend mode and you can give it a blend mode of multiply. We'll be talking about blend modes a little bit more later in this class. But here we have our cave and I'm going to group these two elements together and I'm going to rename it cave. Now we are going to bring in the church image. I'm going to do that from my files. I'm going to go to Wrench, Add, Insert a file which is where my downloads are and I'm going to search Unsplash here and I'll see it. That way. Here it is. Here is our image. I'm going to tap it and then that will bring it in to our collage. We want this below the cave, so we're going to drag it down here. You can see here there's a little gap up here, so I'm going to grab that arrow tool and just bring this up. I want my doors to be centered, and if you want something centered, you can look for those gold lines. That centering the whole piece, but I want the doors centered. That looks good. Now that we have our background and let's look at our shadow again, and we might want to bring the opacity down. With shadows, it's hard to understand how it looks exactly, and away you can do that as turn it on and off to see how it looks. This is how it looks without a shadow, this is how it looks with a shadow. I'm going to bring the opacity down on that layer a little bit. That's something I often do to shadows. There is the opacity slider, so, I could slide it to about 50 percent. Let's see how that looks. That's just a more subtle, I think, realistic shadow. I have my shadow layer on multiply in that 50 percent opacity. Now we're going to bring in the three isolated women, and I have them saved to an album in my camera roll. Let's get that by going to Wrench, Add, Insert a photo, and I can go to this album here. I have my collage album that I've created in Procreate and here are my three women and they are saved as a PNG, so they don't have a background and you can see they're really little. We're going to make them bigger. That's the thing with these stock images, these vintage images, they're often a little bit smaller than we would like. I want the women to be in front of the cave because they're standing on it. I'm going to drag that layer up to the top and then I will place my women. I think I want them bigger, so I'm going to drag them to be bigger on uniform, which is good. If I was on uniform, if I was on free form, then it could make them look very different, which is sometimes an effect that you're going for, but not here. It's not what I'm going for here. I think they look about the right size to me. I just made them a tiny bit bigger. These women are all on one layer, but they are not working with this cave exactly. This one in the center is floating which is cool, but I don't think I want her to be floating. I'm going to start by centering that woman in front of the door. I'm going to tap the selection, One, and I'm on freehand and I'm just going to trace around her loosely, and I'm going to grab that arrow, so now I can move just her. How do I want her standing on these rocks? That works. Now, this other woman is levitating to the right. Let's add this rule of thirds stamps so we can space them out nicely. I'm in a dark color, I'm in a lighter color that's too big, so, I'll do the pressure lighter this time, go to this arrow, bring it to the corner, and then just drag it out here. You can bring down the opacity of this too if it's distracting you. I'm going to leave the opacity up so you can see it here. Here we have our other woman. I want to go back to my women layer, I'm going to go to the FreehandSelection, and I'm going to bring her down here. Here it looks like she's stepping into it which I think is cool. Let me turn this off. I'm going to bring her down just a tiny bit. This other woman in the flip-flops, I'm going to move her up a tiny bit. Again, selection, freehand, arrow, and I just naturally put her along that line. That looks good. For our next detail, we're going to add this clouds from raw pixel. I have them saved in this gallery, so I will bring them over. Here they are. I'm going to show you another way to move images from one Canvas to the other. I'm on my clouds layer, I'm tapping it, I'm holding it right here, and I'm bringing it over to the gallery. This takes a little bit. The gallery blanks and you'll feel like it's not working, but it is. Then we'll go to our new, I think I let go of it. I did. Thus the reasoning is copy-paste more often because it's more trustworthy, but this is another way of doing it and we are going to do it. Layer gallery. Gallery blinks a little, and you you your finger on that layer, which is what I did wrong the first time I think. Open this new one, I'm still holding that layer. I just smack the cameras, so excited. That's going to wiggle for a little bit. It's good. Here we have our clouds and we want the clouds to be below the cave, I think. I mean, or you could have it in front. It's a different effect, but I'm going to bring that layer down behind the cave. We have all the elements for our collage here. We have our women, which I will name women, we have our cave, we have our clouds, and we have our church. Here we have a finished collage, and like I said, you can duplicate this exactly. You can do whatever you want. You can use this all as inspiration and do something entirely different. One of the things that I love doing with collages is playing with blend modes. Now that we have our clouds in there, I'm going to tap on this n, it's not a normal blend mode, and we're going to play with the different blend modes here. This is a blend mode called luminosity. I like this a lot. What the blend modes are doing, it's interacting with the layers below there in different ways. The best way to learn about blend modes is just to play with them in my opinion. Here are different ones, here is linear light, that's cool. Hard light, soft light, lighter color. We're back to a normal blend mode. I think for this one I like luminosity the best. This is our completed collage. I'm going to save it by going to wrench Canvas, share, and save it as a JPEG in my camera roll. Now we have a completed collage. I would love to see your collage and the class project gallery, so, please pop it in there. The next thing we're going to do is create an animation which you can also share later in the class project gallery. I will see you in the next lesson when we create an animation from this collage. I'll see you in the next lesson.
7. Let's Animate Our Collage! : Welcome back. We are going to create our animation. What we're going to be doing is adding those awesome red sliding doors on top of here. I probably saved the doors to my collage album. Let's go to Wrench, Insert a photo, Album, let's go to my collages, scroll down and here are my isolated doors right here, so there we go. Just to refresh, we have our flattened image right here and we have our doors here. I want the doors to be on two separate layers because they're going to be moving independent of each other. I'm going to grab this ribbon and I'm going to, oops, I'm still in rectangular, I don't want that right now, I want free hand again. Three-finger drag down, cut and paste. Now my door is on a different layer. I'm going to stretch this door out. I'm on Uniform, so it reaches the top, and I'm going to do the same for this other door, so it reaches the top. I'm going to group my doors together, so I'm going to slide them to the left, hit "Group", I'm going to label them Doors. Sometimes, Procreate does not understand me when I scribble into here, doors, close enough. Then we have our left door. I'm just going to hit L and our right door, R. We're going to be doing a couple of things with the doors here. The first thing I'm going to do is center them and then align them up. To find the center, let me see if Procreate will help me with this. Yeah, there's the center right there. The gold line will help you know where the center is and I want to move it without changing the size because I want it to be touching the top and the bottom. Here is my right door. I'm going to bring that right up to it. I think I changed the size somehow in the right door, so be careful that you're not doing that. I'm going to nudge my right door over, so I'm going to grab this arrow and just tap in the direction I want it to be. That's a way to move something subtly. What I have here is this little gap between the two doors at the top, that's not at the bottom. I'm just trying to get rid of that. That's good. That's fine. What we're going to do is two things with our door here, we're going to create a shadow with our doors and we're going to create a window pane of sorts. Let's go to our left door. Let's duplicate it. Alpha Lock, grab that gray again, dark gray or black, fill the layer, unalpha lock it so we can Gaussian blur it. Magic Wand, Gaussian Blur, Layer, and we have this slider at the top again. It's the left door, you can see that here. Usually I make about, but for this, I want the doors to be the same, so I'm going to do a five percent shadow for that one. Then I'm going to go to my right, Duplicate, Alpha Lock, Fill Layer with the gray, unalpha lock it so we can Gaussian blur, Magic Wand, Gaussian Blur, Layer, and another five percent Gaussian blur, so they are the same. Now we're going to do one more thing. We are going to add a window pane of sorts. I'm creating a new layer and putting it below. I'll move it below the left one, so we're going in the same order. I have this dark gray, I'm going to go to the selection, and this time I am going to tap rectangle, and I'm just going to create a rough rectangle the size of the window, and I'm going to fill that with the gray. Here we have this gray that's behind the door and obviously, we want to see through it, so I'm going to bring the opacity down a little bit. I want it to be clear that there's a window, but I also want to give a peek through here. Let's try 55 percent. What we can do is duplicate this layer and drag it down below the right one, so arrow, and then move this over. We have now a left hand door, a left hand shadow, which I'm going to move to a blend mode of multiply because that's good for shadows. Again, the shadow back here, a multiplied blend mode for our right door, and then we have the window panes. Those are a little dark. I'm going to try 50 percent. I'm on the right one. Let's see. This is 50 percent, 44. I like repeating numbers, so we're just going to go with 44 for both doors. There we go. Now, we have our left doors and shadows and panes, and we have our right doors and shadows and panes. For the animation, I am going to be flattening these layers. But before I flatten something, I often will duplicate it so I can have an intact version of that so that way in the future, if I wanted to change the window pane to blue or something, I could do that because all the elements are on their own layers. I am going to rename these doors correctly, duplicate. Just flattening them so they look nicer. Duplicate. Drag the original down to the bottom below the canvas and turn it off. For these top ones that we're going to be animating, we are going to flatten the left ones together, and we are going to tap on the right, and we are going to flatten the right ones together. From here, we're going to duplicate them so we can start our animation. Here again, we have a left door. That's the thing with flattening is you lose your labeling. Left door, I'm going to duplicate that. I'm going to bring the new one to the left, and again, do that without changing the sizes and fix this gap at the top. They're overlapping a little bit and that's fine. I think that looks good. One more time, duplicate the left. Go to the top one, bring that over without changing the size. Oops, I did something here. This is something you don't want to do because once something goes off the side, you lose the edge of it. What I wanted to do is tap it over further, but then we would have a gap over on this side, so I'm going to delete that, delete that, duplicate one more time and bring it over, and before I drop it off the side, I'm going to bring it in here. That looks good. We have our left doors, which we're going to group together again, our flattened left doors, and then we are going to do the same thing with our right doors. Duplicate our right door. Grab that arrow, drag it over. That looks good. Duplicate it one more time. Bring a layer over. See if that's matched up, that's good. Again, group our right layers together. Now we are ready to begin animating.
8. Finishing Our Animation: What we're going to do for our animation is we are going to group this flattened collage with the doors, and we're just going to put those in the background. The original doors are turned off so we won't see them, but we just want them tucked in the background there. The things that are going to be moving in this collage are the doors. Once again, I'm going to do some flattening of the doors just to make it easier, but I'm going to duplicate it first. Turn off this original, tuck it in the background turned off. Then I'm going to flatten our left doors and flatten our right doors, so now we have our three doors together on each side. We do want to keep these two things separate. We have our doors, our three panels to the left, our three panels to the right. Now, we're going to turn on Animation Assist. We're going to go to Wrench, Canvas, Animation Assist, and we're going to toggle that on. Right away, your screen starts to look different. It has a new toolbar at the bottom that corresponds with the layers over here. There's some opacity going on here, like you can see these women a little bit. That's something called onion skinning that Procreate does. We'll explain more of that in a little bit. But for now we're going to have it look normal again by tapping on our background layer. Again, this corresponds with all of these right here. I'm going to tap on that, and I'm going to toggle background on. Now it looks normal. We're going to have our background holding steady while the doors move. What we're going to do is duplicate our doors again. We're going to go up to the second layer. Again we see the onion skinning bit. Onion skinning helps you see the other layers of the animation and what's going on. How I often like to do things is I will bring my onion skin frame to one, so I'm only seeing the layer that's before and after the one I'm on. Then I bring the opacity down to about 30 percent. Procreate will default to 15 frames per second. I know this is more like a five frame per second animation, so I'm just going to bring that down right now. Our background is holding steady. We have our original doors, above that, we have our new doors. We're going to tap on our left doors and we're going to push them over with that arrow one. It will be about a half of the window panel open there. Let's go to the right again, grab that arrow, move it over. Our window panel here is roughly cut in half. Again, we want to do that without resizing the door, so that is good. We have a little mini animation here. We can hit play and test it, and that's opening and closing. It's pretty fast, it'll slow down with more frames. We're just going to keep going. We're going to duplicate the top door layer. We are going to navigate to our doors, the left, grab this arrow. We're going to hide that one panel altogether. We're going to go to the right and do the same. Then we're going to duplicate the top layer, go to the left again, move those over to about a half panel, move the right over a half panel. We're almost done, guys. Duplicate another time, go to our left. You guessed it. We are going to hide that far left panel, go to our right and hide the right panel. Let's test our animation. That is still going pretty fast. One thing I want to do that will give it the illusion of slowing down is to go down to my Settings here. When the doors are closed, I'm on this layer with the first doors. I'm just going to flatten all these, so it might be easier to look at. We have our first door layer, which is the closed doors above the background, which corresponds to this down here, these frames. I'm going to give it a hold of about three frames. When the door is closed, they're going to stay like that for about three frames. I'm also going to go to the topmost layer, which is right here, and give that a hold duration. Let's try three frames as well. Let's hit play and see how that looks. Now the doors are holding for a few extra seconds in the open position and in the closed position. What that looks like here is we have a whole duration of the open doors and then you get these three grayed out frames right here. We have our top group, and that whole duration is three. Let's bump it up to five and see how that looks. We'll try six, because it's still looking a little fast. Let's also bring the frames for a second down to three and see how that looks. This is a loop animation. I'm just realizing I want it to be a ping-pong animation. This is another troubleshooting thing. When animation looks odd, you can change it from a loop to a ping-pong. There we go. That's what we wanted. Here's our animation settings right here. A loop animation loops the same little short video over and over again. It does the same thing. A ping-pong it'll go start to finish and then from finish to start. A one-shot animation just means it'll do it once and then it's done. I don't use that very often, it's pretty boring. It just does it once and it's done. Here's this animation as a loop. What I'm going to do is slow it down so we can really see what's going on here. If we go to frames per second, I'm going to turn the onion skin frames off because we don't need those anymore. I'm going to bring that down to none. I'm going to go to the beginning here, and I am going to hit play. It's going to go really slow. We can see what's really going on here. They are opening and then they just close right away. We don't want that, because we want them to close slowly again. If we go to Settings and do Ping-Pong, and start at the beginning again, and hit Play, it's still really slow. It's on that hold. No, I didn't hit Play, that's why it's so slow. That will do it. It's on the hold. Then the doors will slowly open, and then they will slowly go back after that hold. This is perfect. This is how we want it, except a little bit faster. I mean, you could have it really slow if you wanted. It's just really a matter of personal taste. Let's bring it up to three frames per second. It's like that hold at the beginning is a little bit long. Right now, it's a whole duration of six frames. I'm going to try four and see how that goes. I think we did it. Our next lesson is a bonus stand-alone lesson, and it's going to show you how to export your gifts or animations and save them, and share them on social media. Because once you've created this cool collage, I'm sure you're going to want to share it. I have two tricks for you on sharing your animations on social media, and we will do that next. I will see you in the next lesson.
9. Sharing Animations on Instagram: The question I get asked the most is, how do I share my animations on Instagram? I created this bonus lesson to show you two different ways to share your animations on Instagram. Here is an animation in procreate to a different one just so we have something different to look at. We're going to use this to walk through the steps together. The first step is to share your file. You can go to wrench Share, and here are some of the different options. The two options I'm going to talk about are animated GIF and animated MP4. I'm going to download both, and we're going to talk about the differences once they're downloaded. I have Share, Animated GIF. It has right here the estimated file size. It has an estimated file size of 4.7 megabytes. I'm going to tap "Export", and I'm going to save it to my camera roll. The GIF is saved, and now I'm going to save an animated MP4. This one is 47 kilobytes, so it's a smaller size. We're going to export this smaller MP4 to my camera roll. Now that they're in the camera roll, we are going to look at the differences. Here is our GIF. What makes a GIF different from a movie is that a GIF will just go on and on and on, and you don't need to hit Play. If I zoom in, let's look at her head, and look at the quality of it. I don't mean the quality of her head. I mean, the quality of the image. I'm guessing because the other image is smaller, that it might be fuzzier, or maybe it's just smaller just because it's not going and going and going. We'll take a look, we'll see that. Here is our three-second movie. She hits the disco ball once, and we are done. The quality of her head actually looks, I can't tell the difference, maybe you can. There we go. You would think that you might want to share your GIF to Instagram, but you cannot, because Instagram does not support GIFs as of right now. They support video files, which are MP4s. Here we're back at the MP4, and we just want to make it longer so it would repeat again and again like it was a GIF. To do that, we go into iMovie. Here's iMovie, and you can see that I have made different iMovies in here, but we're going to do a new one. We're going to hit "Plus". It's going to ask us if we want to create a movie or a trailer. I'm going to tap "Movie", and it shows us recent things in our camera roll. Here is our 1.6-second movie or MP4. I'm going to tap on that, and I'm going to hit "Create Movie" at the bottom. Here it is. This is a square file which is fine, it's fitting into the movie thing perfectly, but if it was a tall file, you would want to adjust it a little bit. Let me show you how to do that. We would tap down there, that becomes yellow, and then we grab this pinch to zoom thing. Let's say it was a tall image and it wasn't on the screen. We could fit it on there by going like that. Don't need to do it here, but you would need to if it was a tall image that you are working with. Back to this yellow box here. We can see down here at the bottom that it says duplicate. We're just going to hit "Duplicate" over and over until it becomes 15 second. Now it's 15.9, which is just a little bit too big for an Instagram story. An Instagram story would be 15 seconds as of now. In order to get rid of that last one, I would just tap on "Delete" down here. Now it's 14.8 seconds. Let's scroll back, and let's hit "Play". Here we go. She is hitting the ball over and over again. Here we have our almost 15-second movie. I am going to bring it into my camera roll. I'm going to hit "Done", and I'm going to hit the "Square" with an arrow that you're probably familiar with, and I'm going to tap "Save Video". It'll just take a moment, and then it will be in my camera roll. Let's go into my camera roll. Here we have the GIF that will go endlessly, our two-second movie or whatever that was, and now we have our 15-second movie. If we tap on this here, we can see that iMovie defaulted to a horizontal movie, which is what it does. But no worries, we can fix that pretty easily by going to Edit, tapping on the "Square", and then bringing it in. Let's hit "Done". This takes just a minute. Now it's ready to go. We have a 15-second MP4 that we could share in our Instagram stories and our Instagram posts. To do that, you would just go through the normal steps on Instagram. You would hit "Add" and you would choose post or story, and you would share it just like you would any other image. That is how you share an animation on Instagram by converting it to a longer iMovie. There is another way to do it, and there are pros and cons to both methods. The other way to do it is through GIPHY. GIPHY is a website for GIFs. Let me show you GIPHY. This is the GIPHY website. It's GIPHY.com. I am a verified artist on GIPHY. There I am with other artists, and it says I'm available for work. That is because GIPHY verified me, which is something that is an invite-only thing right now. What is not an invite-only thing on GIPHY is to create an artist channel or a brand channel. In order to do that, you could just Google Artist Channel GIPHY, and here we would apply for an artist channel. This is an application. When I first applied, it took maybe a couple of weeks for them to approve me. There's an application right here, and they have some suggestions here for how you would get accepted. One of the things is that they're looking for channels with 5-10 or more pieces of original animated non-commercial artwork already available. If you wanted to apply for an artist channel through GIPHY, you could do that. GIPHY is pretty good at providing a lot of information. There's FAQs and things to explore there if you want to go that route. Let's go back into GIPHY and look at my dashboard. Here I am in GIPHY, I have had 234 uploads, and 815 million views, which sounds wild. Here are some of my top GIFs, and stickers, and if you're not familiar with the difference between a GIF, and a sticker. A sticker has a transparent background, all of these are stickers, and if we keep scrolling, they are all stickers until we get to this love-it GIF that does not have a transparent background. If we keep scrolling, there's another GIF, it has a background, and another GIF, so this is what a GIPHY Artist dashboard looks like. It also gives you some information about keywords that brought people to your GIFs. This one is red heart, this one I assume is white heart in Spanish. I'm going to walk you through uploading a GIF through GIPHY. To do that, you would need to tap, "Upload", and "Choose file" "Photo Library" and here this first one right right is our GIF. The videos have time lengths, a GIF does not because it's endless. I always want to make sure when I'm uploading a GIF that my website is on there because I want people to be able to find me if they were interested, say, for example, in me creating GIFs for them. I'm going to make sure my websites in there, so I'm going to add that to the URL, I'm going to tap "G" as a rating because it's a G animation. The first tags I always add are Kellybb, and Kellybrenburke, and that is again, so I am searchable to myself, and other people. Next, I'll add some other keywords that might be appropriate to this, and once I start adding keywords like play pool, and pool, GIPHY will come up with some suggested tags for me. I'm going to tap on playing pool, oh, billiards that's a good one, I would've never thought of that, what is not as relevant as pool floaty and kitty pool. I'm going to add play billiards, collage, animated collage, and the more keywords there are, the more chances there are at somebody finding it. I'll do disco, disco ball, and now that I have that, there might be more keywords down here, I'll add art. Here's disco ball as one word, sure, I'll do that at the disco sure, disco dance sure. Now that I have my keywords in there, I am going to upload it to GIPHY, and that will take just a moment, so here it is. Here is our GIF in GIPHY. Now let's get this GIF off of GIPHY, and to do that, GIF will convert it into an MP4 for you, so you don't have to go through the movie process. In order to do that, you would tap "Share", and then tap "Instagram", and then enter your email address, and hit "Send via email", and it usually takes about a minute maybe, here it is. The email explains that Instagram doesn't support GIF files just yet, so here is the latest one, I tap on it, I hit "Download", and here it is in our downloads. If I wanted to get it to my camera roll like the other ones which I do, I would tap this square with an arrow box, I have to figure out what that's called. Probably just share I don't know, a square with an arrow box for now, and save it to my camera roll, let's go into our camera roll. Here we have our different files, this is the GIF, this is the 2 second MP4 from Procreate. This is the longer 15-second MP4 that we made in iMovie through duplicating. What GIPHY gave us was a 3 second MP4, which in this case is just 1 second longer than the MP4 that we downloaded from Procreate, so those are our options. One difference between GIPHY, and the iMovie way would be GIPHY makes files small to make them fit. Let's zoom in to her face here, and this is what her face looks like, it's fairly clear in the movie, and it's probably going to be blurrier in the GIPHY GIF let's take a look. When we zoom in here, easier said than done, her head is definitely a little bit blurry in the GIPHY GIF or rather the GIPHY MP4 because GIPHY will condense it to make it a smaller file. To recap, the differences between an animation and a GIF is that a GIF plays forever, and MP4 from Procreate is going to be just a one-shot animation, it's going to cycle through your animation just once, and stop. You can use iMovie to make an animation longer by duplicating an animation. You can also skip iMovie, and go through GIPHY to get a GIF, but in this case, she hit the disco ball twice on the GIPHY one rather than once from the Procreate one. The pros of an MP4 from Procreate, and iMovie is that the file is bigger and clear. The cons I guess, about the iMovie route is that it takes a few more steps than uploading a GIF to GIPHY, but not really if you're thinking about the whole uploading process. I would say it's ultimately the same. In my book, I used to do the GIPHY route all the time because it was the only way that I knew of until I realized that I could just duplicate an MP4 in iMovie, so I vote for the iMovie way. You get a clearer product, it's not too many extra steps. But I also do as an artist, and putting my work on GIPHY, so it can be found, and used by other people. Brands can find me there, and hire me to create GIFs for them. If you wanted to share any of this MP4s on Instagram, you would do it just the way you would share anything from your camera roll, just the regular plus, and you'd go through all the usual steps. I wish that this process was a little bit more simple, I'm sure it will be in the future, but as of now, this is how you do it. Now you can share your collages, animated collages as MP4s on Instagram. If you have any questions about this, please ask me in the discussions on Skillshare. Thanks, and I will see you in the next lesson.
10. Final Thoughts & More Goodies! : Yay, you did it. I hope this class sparked your creativity and that you have a newfound appreciation for what's possible with collage and animation. By now you know that I love looking at other people's collage art. Please share your work in the class project gallery. That's the best way to get feedback from me and others. You know I love seeing your work out in the wild. Please tag me on Instagram @Kelleybrenburke. I am already planning my next Skillshare class. I think it's going to be a 14-day challenge for either animation or collage, so stay tuned. I have four other Skillshare classes on animation, so Check those out in the meantime. For more resources and free assets, please check out my website, kelleybrenburke.com. Thank you so much for going along this journey with me. I'll see you soon.
Kelley Bren Burke, Artist & Educator
