Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hey, my name is Maya. I'm a Canadian illustrator and designer and I love to create bold and colorful images. I usually work in the fields of advertising, publishing, packaging, and editorial illustration. In this class, I want to show you how we can explore the animation features on Procreate. You'll see just how quickly we can create a family of fun GIFs and take your artwork beyond still images. You can then use your GIFs to send to your friends and family or to spice up your online presence like I love to do on Instagram or Facebook. I just love the idea of being able to animate directly onto the iPad without having to touch another software or even a computer. That means you can be animating at a cafe or at the beach or at your kid's soccer game or even in the bath, although I wouldn't necessarily advise that one. This is possible thanks to the Animation Assist features on Procreate. It's a very simple and practical tool that we as artists can use to quickly bring our ideas to life and to explore basic motion principles. In this course, we're going to be going over three of my animation basics, the wiggle technique, the flashing technique, and animating flow technique. You're going to learn to create or imply movement from your own sketches and I'm also going to be giving you some extra exercises that you can work on to get comfortable with the Animation Assist interface and workflow. You'll see how these three simple techniques can be stretched into a myriad of different animations and give you the confidence to explore more advance animation techniques in the future. We're also going to be covering all the technical details like how to set up your canvas, how to pick your color palette, how to export your GIFs, and how to use them outside of Procreate. Plus, if you're active on Instagram, I'll also show you how you can apply for a Giphy artist profile so that you can make your GIFs available for everyone to use online. This class is for anyone who's played around a little bit in Procreate and is looking to explore beyond drawing. You do not have to be an animator at all to take this class. In fact, I'm not one. If you're interested in making some magic happen in just a couple of animation frames, meet me in the next lesson and we can get started.
2. The Project: In this course, we're going to be creating a family of animated GIFs by exploring three different frame-by-frame animation techniques on Procreate. The first thing you're going to be handing in or some sketches and some color comps based on the palette we picked. Your first project after that is going to be a wiggle animated GIF, then we're going to move on to the flashing animation, and the flowy animation, so at that point, you'll have a series of GIFs. I'll also show you how you can apply to GIPHY and make your GIFs available for other people to use. I wanted to make this course because I recently discovered the animation assist features on the iPad and I was absolutely amazed at how quickly we can turn a flat sketch into something fun and exciting. I love to use these GIFs to make my online presents more unique and personalized. I also wanted to share some easy ways that you can explore different creative avenues, if you're an illustrator or an amateur artist. Before we begin, here's a little tip. I want you to keep in mind that all the lessons and techniques that we're going to be going over in this course are pretty simple and you can apply them to virtually any idea or illustration that you may have. Keep an open mind and please don't be shy and share your projects in the class projects below, because I'm really curious to see just how far you can take these very simple concepts. Also, if you want to take full advantage of this course, make sure to download the extra exercises that you can find in the project resources. This is so that you can get really comfortable with the software before moving on to more advanced techniques. Now that you're all set, let's get started.
3. What Are GIFs?: Before we get into animating, let's talk about GIFs and what they even are. A GIF is basically a file format in which we can store images. In the context of this class, our GIFs are going to be made up of a bunch of different static images that when played pretty fast one after the other in a loop, are going to create a simple animations. To give you a more of a concrete understanding, let's dissect a GIF on the computer using preview so that we can see each frame that makes up the whole animation. I saved this cool GIF by Spanish illustrator Magoz onto my computer. This is what it looks like. If I open it using preview, we can see all the different frames that make up this animation. If I click on each one of them, one by one, you can slowly see a little bit of movement in each image. When I preview all of these frames really quickly by pressing the down arrow key, you can actually see most of the animated loop. If this graphic was our GIF, every single one of the white circles would be a frame of the animation. When we play them quickly, one after the other, we can see the movement that we created with our illustrations. Now that we know exactly what GIFs are and how they work, you can meet me in the next lesson and we'll have a look at how we can create your own color palette for our family of GIFs.
4. Color Palette: I personally really love color and it's a huge part of my illustration style. I think that if we're going to be creating a family of animations, I would want them to feel like they belong together. This is going to give a project a homogenous and consistent field, and I think it's going to make our gift family look a little bit more professional and curated. There's many different ways we can go about creating our palette. We can search for inspiration and the things that surround us like it could be your home decor, it could be the outdoors, some photos you recently took, or maybe even your outfit. Now, I personally like to pick the colors that I'm going to be working with even before I get into the sketching. Just because it's going to take my mind off of the colors, I won't even have to worry about it and I'll be able to concentrate on the sketch itself. Also, it's going to give me an idea for the theme that I maybe want to go for or the style that I'll go for. For this specific project, like I said, I'm inspired by the colors of my markers here. What I'm going to do is just snap a photo of them real quick directly onto the iPad, just like that, and then I have to be perfect because we're going to be tweaking the colors anyways. I'm going to go ahead and open Procreate, hit the plus sign to create a new canvas, and just do screen size for now as it doesn't really matter. All we're doing this for is to create our palette that is going to be integrated into Procreate. I'm going to bring in my image by hitting that little icon here, the action icon, inserting a photo, grabbing, remark your image, might have been a little bit overexposed, but we're going to work with that. This is a pretty good start, but I am looking to maybe add some colors. What I'm going to be doing is just hopping onto Google, searching up a couple of things that maybe inspire me or I think could work with these, and adding them onto this canvas, and then I'm going to be color picking from everything. Hopping onto Safari, I just did a search for turquoise ceramics because I feel like this palette could use a turquoise element. I'm having a hard time zooming into a photo, so I'm just going to take a screenshot, crop it a little bit smaller so I can get a variety of hues, and save to my photos. Then I was also looking up these watermelon radishes that I recently ate in a salad, and I just thought they were so beautiful. It really inspired me, so I'm going to just copy this photo by holding onto it, and then I'm going to hop back into Procreate. I will hit the action icon again and paste this one. Here we go, we got the radishes. I'm going to go back into the Action menu, tap Insert a photo and bring in my turquoise hues. There we go, that should be enough for us to at least start working on a pallet. In order to do that, I'm going to hit my layer button and I'm going to create a new layer on top of these. This is what I'm going to be trying out colors in. The way I'm going to go about this is basically by color picking, and the color picking icon on Procreate is this little rounded corners square over here. If you tap on this one and then you click on a color, you're able to match them directly and it will set it as your paint color. I tapped on the icon, I held the pencil down and I'm just going to hit this red over here. Then in order to tweak that color, you can just click on the color up here at the right. Just going to go to the classic view down here to the bottom, and here I'm able to tweak that color and bring it to something that I like. When it comes to color, I'd suggest picking something around five or six main shades to go with. A good way to go about creating your palate would be to look for some warmer colors, some cooler colors, and then some neutral and some dark tones. In this specific case, I want something that's going to stand out on social media, so I'm going to go with very strong colors and I'll go 50/50 with warm tones and cool tones. I think I like where this is going. We have some warm tones, we have some colder tones, and now that I have my swatches, I'm going to be able to turn them into a palette. In order to do that, when I click on my color icon again, I'm going to go to Palettes. I hit the plus button here, create a new palette, should be at the top here, I think I might have made two, and I'm going to set it as default. I'm going to go back to my classic view down here, and what I'll do is I'll color pick each individual color. I'll hit the color icon again, and I'm just going to tap one time in the palate area. Each time I tap it's going to add a color, so I'm going to do that with every single swatch that I picked out. This, of course, if you want to change your colors, you can always do that. You'd just have to hold on it for a second or two and then it's going to ask you if you want to delete it or you can reorganize them by holding onto them and dragging them. I did the warm tones first, now I'm going to go ahead and do some darker green hues and I'll finish off with the blues. You don't have to use every single color, of course, but I think it's good to have them as a reference in order to make sure the final project looks nice and cohesive. Here we have our pallet and when we click on the color icon and go to the palette section, it's the one at the top. I'm just going to click on Untitled and rename it GIF collection. Now, you can always go back to the classic view, but you'll have your palette set as default and so you'll easily be able to access it as you animate. Now, this is not the file that we're going to be working off when we animate, but the cool thing is that whenever we create a new canvas on Procreate, we'll still be able to access this very palette because we set it as default. We're now ready to move on to the next step where we can start sketching out some ideas and figuring out a theme for animations.
5. Sketching Ideas: Cool, so we have a color palette now, so we're ready to start sketching. Right off the bat, I would like to think of a theme for my little gift collection just because it's going to make them look nicer together. I think it's going to give them a little bit more of a purpose. My theme is going to be Nature and Love, so let's see what we can come up with. In order to start sketching, I'm just going to go to my layer panel. I'm going to delete this images because I don't need them anymore and the color palette I can keep it up here if I want. But you could also delete it as we do have it as our default palette in our color tab. In order to start sketching, I'm just going to create another layer with the plus sign over here and I'm just going to get to it. I think it could be really nice to do some very simple elements, because one thing that we do have to think about right off the bat is, what are we going to be animating in those sketches that we're going to be drawing? You have to make sure that whatever you draw, there's something that you could possibly see moving in that sketch. I'm going to start off with something really simple. I'm just going to sketch with maybe like a dark brown color and I'm just going to zoom in here. The way I'm going to do this is just sketching out all kinds of different elements on the same page, which I'm then going to be bringing into a different composition once we get to animating. This color really makes me think of leaves, so I'm going to start with that and maybe do some branches. That's a pretty good start. I'm going to go ahead and sketch a different element. Maybe we can do some cherries or something like that. Also really simple, anyone can draw that. I can easily see those moving with a little bit of swaying or a domino effect when one makes the other move or something like that. I found that this cherry was a little bit too large so I just went to the selection tool up here and I'm using the free hand selection. I just go around it with my pen and I hit the transform tool with the little mouse icon. Then I just scale it down to whatever works for my composition. I'm moving it over here so I have enough room to sketch other elements. Since the animation techniques that we're going to be working with are pretty simple, I'm not going to over-complicate this drawing. This is a rainbow, but I'm just going to do two or three color stripes, something like this. Once again, I'm going to select it, reduce it. It would be fun to do some techniques with wording. I'm going to do a little bit of a word here. I'm going to write, good morning. Now, I said I wanted to do some stuff about love also, but I haven't touched on that already. I'm thinking maybe a little envelope with a heart or maybe a flower in here, then maybe some snowflake. I really like drawing flower pods or vases. I'm going to try and do one of those. Keeping it simple because this is likely going to be one of the more complex animation. I think I can work with this. What I'm going to be doing now is simply taking this layer, bringing the opacity down here in the layer panel to maybe 50 or so, creating another layer on top and just going over my sketches with a cleaner line. I'm going to spend a little bit of time redrawing these until I'm happy with the shapes and then we're going to be moving on to creating our first canvas for our first GIF. If you're getting confused with whatever sketch you have underneath, you can always change your drawing color so it stands out a little bit more. Lastly, I'm just going to retouch a little bit the arches of this rainbow. This is a cool trick, by the way if you ever need to do some rounded shapes or square shapes, you can draw your curve and if you hold onto it, Procreate will correct the shape to something that's a little bit more equal. This is still pretty messy, but it's going to be good enough to serve as a guide for my animation for sure. I'm going to go ahead and hide my initial sketch layer. I'm going to duplicate the one I drew in blue just so it's a little bit more bright. I can merge down those two and cool now I have my more refined sketches and I'm going to go ahead and save this by hitting the Action menu, Share, just a JPEG and I'm going to Save Image. That'll just save it onto the iPad itself. I'm basically just going to be creating really quick small color comps so that I know what my GIF is going to look like before I start animating it. In order to do that, I'm going to hit the layer panel, go right underneath my blue sketch layer. I'm going to name this one, so I'm going to keep these hidden and I'm just going to go ahead and add a layer in between those two. Right under my sketches, I will have this layer that I'm going to name Colors. Canadians write it with u but do as you please. I'm going to keep the same brush which is the chalk brush and I'm going to go ahead and color pick colors directly from here or you can go from your palette down here. I'm just going to apply them to my composition to have an idea of what my GIFs will be looking like. I'm going to start with this pink over here. This once again is just a reference, so it really doesn't need to be perfect as you see. I'm not that great at coloring within the lines, but that doesn't even matter. Another cool thing you can use is the auto-fill feature on Procreate word. If you draw the outline of a shape, you can just drop a color in it directly from your color tab and it will fill that shape as long as it's a closed shape. I really like the juxtaposition of pink and red, it's something that I use often in my work. Some people really don't like it, but I think it's super fun. This is what I'm going to be doing all over my sketch so that I have an idea of what I want my final GIFs to look like. I'm going to speed up the process of me doing that and I'll meet you in a second when I have all my color comps ready. Hey, I think this is good as far as color comps go. It's pretty rough, but it's just to give me an idea at once I do set up my canvas and I want to start animating. Now, what I'm going to do is simply go to the Actions menu again and once again save this as a JPEG onto my iPad, so that I can quickly bring it into my future compositions and circle out any elements that I'm going to be animating. We've got a color comps, we've got our sketches. We're ready to actually set up our canvas and start bringing in some motion to our project.
6. Setting Up the Canvas: We got our sketch, we got our color comps, now it's time to set up our canvas so we can start animating. How we're going to do this is, we're going to hit "Gallery" and go back to our different canvases, and we're going to create a new canvas. For this one, I'm going to do a custom size by clicking on the little plus, and we're going to do 1,500 by 1,500. Then I'm going to keep the 300 DPI, and I'm going to hit "Create". The reason I'm making such a big canvas is, gifs are often used in pretty small formats, but you never know what you're going to be using it for, maybe you'll even like it so much that you'll want to print a still of it, or maybe you want to use it onto your website. It's always good to have a larger resolution because you can always shrink it down, but it's a lot more difficult to blow it up and you'll usually lose a lot of quality there. We're working big, it's not going to be a huge file anyways, and that way we can really zoom in and work with an image that's pretty sharp. I have my Canvas and now we're going to be able to turn on animation assist, which is the most important part about this whole process, because without animation assist, we basically could not do any animation onto the iPad. In order to turn it on, I'm going to hit the wrench here again at Action. I'm going to go to the Canvas tab that I was already on, and I'm going to just go ahead and turn on animation assist right there. Now, this is going to bring up this bottom bar right here, and this is where we'll be able to see all of our different frames. Here's a key notion. What animation assist does is, it brings up this timeline and each layer of our document becomes one frame of our animation as you can see here. So remember what we looked at when we were looking at a dissected GIF into preview and we saw all the different frames, well, these are all the different frames of our animations. We can add frames by clicking here on the bottom right, Add Frames, or by just adding a layer here like I just did. I'm going to erase all of these since it was just to show you. In Settings, we'll also be able to play with the speed of our animations, with the Frames Per Second, and whether or not we want it to Loop or to Ping-Pong, which means going back and forth and back and forth. We'll also be able to see our Onion skin preferences, but I'm going to talk about all of that in a minute. The first thing that we're going to be doing is, picking our first animation and bringing in our sketch. Now, our canvas is set up. We have our animation assist timeline, we have our Canvas, and the last step that we're going to do is import the first sketch that we're going to be animating. In order to do that, I'm going to click on the wrench again, the Action button. I'm going to go to Add, Insert photo, and I will be selecting the sketches that we worked on. Now, what I'm going to do is just grab the Select tool with freehand once again, and I'm just going to pick this guy over here, and I'm going to hit Copy Paste so it will be on its own layer, and I'll just delete the original sketch layer. We always have it in our iPad file, so it's not going anywhere. Now, I'm going to go ahead and make this one larger in my Canvas so that I can easily work on it. It's a little bit pixelated because I blew it up, but that doesn't really matter since it's really just a guide. Now, this is what I'm going to be referencing in order to create my animation. Now, all I'm going to be doing is tapping onto this frame on my timeline and I'm going to set it as the background. What this is going to do is that every time I add a frame, either here or here, I'm always going to see my very first reference frame. Now, I reduce the opacity so the colors aren't the same, meaning I won't be able to color pick from here and get the exact color from my palate, but I will always be able to reach them through the custom palette that we created and we set as custom over here. All right, so our file is set up, we're ready to move on to the next lesson and actually start creating movement.
7. Wiggle Technique: For our very first GIF, we're going to be exploring the jitter or the wiggle technique. This is one of the simplest ways that we can animate an illustration because it doesn't really involve much motion. This technique is more to bring a little bit of life to static images or static objects by implying movement more than anything. Let's begin. We have our sketch placed as our background layer, which is a reference. Now we're just going to add a layer and we can go do that. Add frame over here or in our layer panel. I'm going to draw on top of this and I'm just going to be using a monoline brush and filled shapes. I'll just use the same green. It's nice and deep. I can just start sketching directly on top of my reference. I'm going to use the filling technique that I talked about earlier. This works really nicely with the monoline brush because all the spaces are really closed shapes. One of the reasons that I'm using the monoline is because I'm going to be redrawing this exact illustration a couple of times, and that's going to be a lot easier to do if I don't have to change the size of my brush too much. I did these little movement lines, I don't mind them. I think they're cool. Now I just want to add a little bit more detail to my leaf, so I'm going to be selecting it by clicking on the layer. I'm going to be using the same green that I used for these guys. Just to bring a little bit more detail, like that. Our first animation frame is ready to go. At this point, I don't really need the reference anymore for the sketch, so I can go ahead and hide this one. This is our first frame and in order to bring this illustration to life, we're not going to need that many frames. With two or three, we should be good to achieve that jitter effect and that vibrancy. What I'm going to do is just go ahead and add a layer. As you can see, I can't see what I worked on in the previous frame, but I can turn on something called onion skin and this is what will allow us to see what we already did so we can plan what we're going to do next. Here, as you can see, my onion skin frames are set to none. But as soon as I bring them up to one, I can see what I did one frame back and if I had many more frames, I could set it up to 2, 3, 4, etc. I'm going to set it up to one for now since I only have one frame. I'm going to go ahead and change the opacity also because this is another thing that you can work with. Depending on what's more comfortable for you, you can change the opacity of the onion skin so you can see what you're working on. I've got my second frame. I'm going to rename it so it's clear. I see what I worked on previously. Now what I'm going to be doing is literally just recreating the exact same illustration with the same colors and the same brushes. I'm not even going to try and make anything move but because it won't be exactly perfect, it's going to create a little bit of a discrepancy and that's what we'll create, the vibrant effect or the wiggle effect once we add two or three frames of this. Let's get started on recreating this illustration and we'll see in a minute what it looks like. I'm grabbing the exact same green that I was working with for the other one and I'm just redrawing. You don't want this to be perfect but you don't want it to be too far off. Here, for example, you can see, it's not exactly lining up, but this is exactly what we want for this specific technique. Now we have two frames of this animation. As you can see, when I click on them, they're already starting to move a little bit. In order to preview our animation, even though we only have two frames, we can still see some movements. The first thing I'm going to do is just set the frames per second to something really low since I only have a few frames. I'm just going to hit play in order to preview my animation and as you can see, it's moving. That was pretty simple. Only a couple of frames and we just redrew the same image twice. If I played with the frames per second and brought them to something really high, it starts to look a little bit crazy but if you have a lot of frames, that's when you're going to go with something high because it'll make your animation extra fluid. Now I'm going to bring it back to something a little bit slow, like four frames per second. To complete this GIF, I'm going to go ahead and do the exact same thing one last time, where I add a new layer on top of the second one. I'm going to call it Frame 3 and I basically redraw exactly what I did in Frame 2 and Frame 1. I just finished redrawing the third frame and I'm just going to bring it up to full opacity. Now I have my first frame, my second frame, and my third frame. If I go ahead and play with my three frames, my leaf is moving and we've animated it. Now this is a little bit slow, so I'm just going to bring the frames per second ratio a little bit up. Now, this is at six frames per second and I think I like how this looks. As you can see, it's vibrating, wiggling. I was really not that precise with how closely I followed my initial frame so that's why we have this fun wobbly effect going on. I think that this is a really fun, simple technique that you can apply to virtually any illustration or sketch in order to make it move a little bit. This is really fun for text treatment also or anything that would just normally be a flat image. If you just want to bring a little bit of fun into it, you can really easily create an animation for it. We're done with our first technique. We've now learned how to animate a very simple illustration onto the iPad, directly onto Procreate using Animation Assist. We did all of that using only three frames. It wasn't that long or complicated. This was a great introduction and I'm excited to get into the second technique, which is going to be some flashing with only two frames.
8. Flashing Technique: We made our first couple of GIFs and it went pretty well. Let's try out another technique. This one, just like the other one, we're only going to be using a couple of frames, so it's just as easy, if not more. I'm going to be calling this one the flashing technique. This is what we're going to be making for this lesson. To start working on this new technique, the first thing we're going to be doing is getting out of our first GIF, and we're going to simply duplicate it. Go into our new one, and we'll just start by deleting the frames we created, just so we start with the same canvas and we already have our animation assist ready. Now let's bring in our sketch. We're going to be selecting what we're going to be animating just like we did in the other technique. I'm going to go ahead and insert photo from the tab app, select my sketch, blow it up a little bit since this one is the one I'm going to be animating, the one with some text. With the select tool on freehand, once more, I'm just going to simply go around it, hit copy-paste. Now I have my good morning text on a new layer, and I'm just going to delete the initial one. Then I'm simply going to center this more or less in my frame so that we can start animating it. For this animation, I'm choosing this simple text-based sketch. The first thing we're going to be doing is creating a new layer, and then I'm going to hit this one and set it as the background once again. I am going to reduce the opacity of my sketch just a little bit and now we can start working on our very first frame. For this sketch, I'm going to be using the dry ink brush from the inking category in the brush library. This one also comes with Procreate. Basically, what I'm going to be doing is going around all of my letters and start rendering them. I'm just going to reduce this a little bit further. In order to create this custom type, I'm just going to be drawing over my sketch pretty loosely, and then I'll be refining it with the eraser. That's basically how I create simple custom text. Then I'm just going to grab my eraser at a pretty small size. This one is a studio pen, also from the inking category. Then you can just go in and refine your letters, and do that for every single letter of whatever phrase you're animating. For this first frame, I'm going to draw the entire word on the same layer. It's all going to be on one frame. I'm going to add details afterward. You can always hide your sketch layer if you want a clearer look at what you're currently working on. If you're a little bit lazy like me, you can even select part of your sketch since we're going to be drawing the O two times. I'm just going to copy and paste it, and I'm going to hit snapping and magnetics, and I'm just going to move it slightly to the right so that I can create my second O without having to redraw it. Now at this point, these are in two separate layers. I'm just going to go ahead, tap on the top one, and merge it down so that they're back on one single layer. As you can see, I'm really not being too precise with my sketch. I'm coloring around it. I'm moving stuff around just because I'm using it as a reference more than anything else. When you're drawing texts, you can always set guides for yourself as well. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to change color. I'm going to pick a gray tone. I'm going to hit the layer that I just created underneath my first frame, and I'm going to fill it. Then I'm going to hit Freeform transform and just come and place it underneath my text and lower that opacity just so I can have a guide to make sure my letters are more or less aligned. But I'm also wanting this to look a little bit fun and quirky, so I'm not going to be too precise about it either. Now in order to see the frame that I was working on, I'm just going to hit the frame that I'm working on, hit Settings, and turn my onion frames to two or so. That way, I'll be able to see my sketch and the onion frames because these are the two layers before the one I'm working on. But then again, I don't want to be too precise with my lettering either because I do want it to look handmade and a little bit quirky. Now what I'm doing here is just adjusting my letters using the Select tool. I'm just selecting the parts I want to move. That way, I'm able to align them to the box that I just created. I'm copying that N once again and merging it back down onto the same layer. We have our basic illustration for our first frame. Now what we're going to be doing is instead of creating a new frame on top, first of all, we're going to be deleting that gray thing that I had at the bottom to guide my letters. I'm going to hide my sketch, and I'm just going to be sliding this layer to the left and duplicating it. Now, I'm going to go back to that first frame. I'm going to tap on the layer, hit Select, and I'm going to start coloring some parts of it. In order to achieve the flashing look, I'm going to basically color some part of this with a different green. I'm going to start by selecting this green I have. I think that these greens are not bad, but the ones in my palette might be a little bit too strong and it might make it hard to read. I'm just going to go ahead and select my word and work a little bit here with the color selector to figure out a green that I prefer. Even if you do have a palette, you can always rework it and add colors as needed. I think this is good, this darker green. I'm just going to add it onto my palette down here. What I'll do now is reduce the size of my brush. I'm basically going to color every other letter. If I start with this G over here, I'm going to skip this O, and I'm going to come coloring this one here, and I'm going to do the same thing for the bottom word. That was quite simple. Now, what we're going to be doing is going to our other layer and simply coloring the reverse letters. I'm going to select that same green and do the very same thing. Now we've colored all of our letters. If we go from one frame to the next, as you can see, it's already flashing, which is why I named this technique like this. I'm going to lower their frames per seconds, and I'm going to hit Play so we can see the effect in motion. This resembles the glowing neons that are sometimes outside of stores and such. Just by switching the colors in the two frames, we can create basically the illusion of motion. In order to add some details, I'm just going to go ahead and create another layer right above my sketch, and I'm able to see the letters thanks to the onion skin settings. I'm just going to draw an arc, holding it at the end so that Procreate can correct my shape, just to use as a guide once again. I'm going to draw a guide in the middle and the sides. These are just some guides for what I'm going to be adding onto my mainframes. Now I'm going to hop on to the first frame of my animation. I'm going to draw directly on here using this darker green. Basically, I'm going to add arc details or flashing details. Because this is a good morning GIF, I want to make something that maybe imitates the sun a little bit. I'm just going to be drawing simple stripes. Now I can go ahead and delete the guide layer that I created, and I'm going to hop onto my second frame. Now, I'm going to be grabbing the lighter green that I started with initially. I'm going to be drawing the exact same motif, but in all the negative spaces that are left. Now we can go ahead and preview our animation to see how it looks. I'm just going to hit Play, and here we have it, a flashing motion. Now, this is a little bit fast. I'm just going to go ahead and turn the frame per second down to four or so. Here you have it. This is the flashing technique once again, a really simple one where we're able to create this marching end effect, and flashing look, and illusion of motion with only two frames. Check out the next lesson where I'll show you some other applications for this technique.
9. Animating Flow: Now that we're familiar with the animation assist timeline, Let's try it one, third and final technique. This one is called animating flow, and we're going to be making this rainbow. Unlike the other two techniques we've done so far, this one is actually going to be bringing some elements to life and we're going to be creating movement out of nothing. This technique is not necessarily harder. It's a slightly different approach. It resembles more frame-by-frame animation like traditional 2D animation that you would see in all Disney movies, for example, or stop motion animation. What we're going to be doing is leaving this one. Once again, just duplicating the last one we did so that we can go in on Canvas and have all of our setup be already ready. I'm just going to go ahead and delete those two layers so we can start fresh. Just like with the other techniques, I'm going to hit the wrench, insert a photo, get my sketch. For this animation, we're going to be working with this rainbow. I'm going to select it, copy and paste it and make sure it's centered in my composition. Fantastic. We have our sketch ready. Oops, I forgot to delete this layer, so I'm going to go ahead and do that. Now, tap my rainbow and set it as my background. Once again, I'm just going to lower its opacity and create a new layer on top. We're going to start with basically making the clouds appear from nothing. I'm creating a new layer on top of my sketch. I'm grabbing the same dry ink brush and a pretty small size. I'm just going to start with a couple of dots. Something like this. Nothing crazy, but we're going to build them up over time with different frames. What I'll be doing now is simply adding another frame. Thanks to my onion skin, I can see what's happening down here. I'm going to start building off of those two dots that I already made. I'm just basically trying to mimic a little bit the shape of my sketch, but in a miniature size. Just like that. For now, I'm just focusing on the left cloud because the right one, we're going to be drawing more as the end of the rainbow reaches it. From here, let me just go ahead and create a new layer and do exactly the same thing. Basically, build your shapes slowly to match your sketch. Then from here, you guessed it, we create a new layer and we just keep going. This is what I mean by creating something out of nothing. It's really building the cloud starting from a couple of dots. If you want to see what your shape looks like, you can always hide your sketch and refine it. I'm going to do one more for good measure. If you want to have a look without the onion skin, you can either turn the opacity down or turn the amount of frames you see down so that you can see just what you're working on right now. We have the basic shape of a cloud set. Now, we can start bringing in our rainbow. In order to do that, I'm going to create two new layers and I'm going to group those. This is because we're going to start using groups and that is another key notion of this course. So far, we've only been using single layers as frames. But when you're using animation assist, if you're making a slightly more complex animation that needs more layers, you can group two layers, and the program will see a group as a single frame of your animation. For example, I'm going to start here by turning my onion skin back on and the opacity as well. I'm going to turn off my sketch because I can't just work off what I had. I'm going to redraw my cloud exactly the same as what I drew in my last frame. I drew my cloud. If I was to start bringing in my rainbow on the same layer, it would be pretty tricky to draw, to shape it perfectly to my cloud. I would have to erase or go over with the blue. That's why we're using layers. The layer underneath the cloud is the one that I'm going to be starting my rainbow on. I've got my red selected from my palette. I'm basically going to start bringing in the read slowly. Like a little warm peaking its head. That's our very first group layer. What we're going to be doing from here is adding more groups, so I'm creating two more layers. Once again, I'm redrawing my cloud. I'm going to turn my sketch off for this. Now for my second group, I'm basically going to do the same thing as I did with the cloud. Turn my sketch back on and basically add a little bit to the rainbow. Now, we've got our red in and we'd advance it a little bit further, but on this second group, I'm going to go ahead and create a new layer, bring it underneath the red one. I'm going to start bringing in some pink. I'm going to select the pink from my palette and start bringing it slowly like I did with the red in the last group. As simple as that. We close this group and you guessed it, we create another one. First one, I'm drawing my cloud again. Now that I've drawn my cloud, this bit, we're also going to be introducing the other end of the rainbow. I'm going to be turning my sketch back on. On that same cloud layer, I'm going to start just like I did with this left cloud and do a little ball over here. Now, I can continue the red and then pink. That's our third group complete. Moving on to our fourth, it's basically the same process. This one, I'm going to create three layers, because like the other one, we did the pink, the red, and the blue. I'm basically redrawing this exact same thing. I'm going to add on to the cloud. I'm going to add on to each stripes of the rainbow. We now have four groups in our animation. Let's see what it looks like when we play it back. For this, I'm going to hide my sketch, my background. I'm going to go ahead and remove the settings to six frames per second and hit Play to see what it looks like. It's coming together. We can see our cloud slowly appear. If we bring it up a notch and move it to 10 frames per second, it's starting to make sense. Let's keep going with some more groups until our rainbow is complete and our clouds are fully filled in. We have a bunch of single frames now and four group layers. We're just going to add probably a couple more groups where we just go over the very same process. I make three layers in a group, start with the clouds. I'm sure you know the drill by now. I've just finished drawing the next elements for this group. As you can see, I'm almost done finishing this cloud and these have almost reached the cloud. I'm thinking one more group and we will be ready. But if we play it so far, this is what it looks like. Let's go ahead and create that last group so that we can start adding some finishing touches. We're done, our last group of layers, which is going to be our last frame. This one, you have to make sure you really like how it looks because we're going to be pausing on this one, since it's the end of our animation and we want to put a little bit more emphasis on it. How do we make this frame last longer than the other ones? Well, there's a couple of ways we can go about this. You can either duplicate the group a couple of times, or you can select it, click that specific frame, and set how long you want it to hold for. As you can see when I'm moving the cursor to the right, it's adding more frames. If I want it to be only one or two frames, I move it to the left. For this frame, I think I'm going to make it last four frames. We're going to see how it looks. Now, before we do anything else, I also want to add a couple of blank frames at the beginning of my animation. We can really gradually get into the clouds building themselves rather than jumping in it straight away. I added three blank frames right over my sketch, I hid my sketch. Let's see what this animation looks like. This is what it looks like so far, it's not bad. It could be a little bit more fluid, so we're going to be working on that. But it's not a bad start at all. How do we make them more fluid? Well, we can always go into each one of our frames or groups and tighten up our sketches, make sure our lines are nice and crisp. Since this animation is a rainbow, I think it would look even better if we go into settings and we change it from loop to ping-pong so that the rainbow can revert back onto itself. Let's give that a go and see how it looks. That's much better already, I'm going to make the frame rate a little bit higher, maybe 12 frames per second, and see what it looks like now. That's pretty fun. Now, from seeing it a few times, I'm already thinking that I can add a little bit of cloud coming in earlier on this side. We can even go and add in a third color if we wanted afterwards. All you'd have to do is just go back to either one of your frames and start adding a new color, either on a new layer or on one that you have inside of your group already. I'm going to add some stars and sparkles to that animation. To do that, I'm going to go to the last cloud I drew before we jumped into the groups. I'm going to make this one into a group by adding a layer on top and combining it down. I'm going to grab this green from my palette, and I'm going to do four dots over here and across over here. As you'll see, these are going to become stars in the next couple of layers that we're going to be adding. Now from this layer, we're going to be jumping on to the group just above and creating a new layer. This one is going to become the outline of a star. We're going to do spiky bits for this one. Now moving on to the frame above, once again, I'm creating a new layer. Now, this guy is becoming a star. This one is only going to be the spiky bits. We're going to be ending this cycle on this group above, where this one is going to become the cross in the beginning and this one is only going to be the few dots. The reason I did reverse cycles on these is so that they're not going to be shining at the exact same time. That way, it'll create variety in the movement. Let's see what it looks like when we play it altogether. Our stars are shining and they're sparking at reverse timing, which I think looks nice. This is our final animation. I hope you like this technique. It was a little bit more advanced than the one we've seen before, but it was a lot of redoing the same thing. I hope you'll learn something, and that you enjoyed it. In the next lesson, we're going to be looking at how we can export our gifts and use them in various contexts.
10. Other Applications: Congrats on making it this far. At this point, we've learned all about three different animation techniques, ranging from using just a couple of frames to full-on layer groups. Well, done and I hope this is inspiring you to create many more animated GIFs. Before we jump into how to export our GIFs, I wanted to share with you a couple of extra exercises that you can do to really get comfortable with those techniques and to see how you can apply them to different kinds of artwork. This is a little envelope animation that I created recently based on exactly the same principle. Basically the first frame, I just drew this envelope, and the second frame, I simply moved it using the arrow tool over here, just moved it slightly to the other side. It was initially here, as you can see with the onion skin. When you play that, once again, you have very slight motion but all of a sudden your image is animated. It's basically a variation of the very same technique. I'm going to be leaving these files below in the class resources if you want to download them and have a look at how I set them up, or if you want to have a go at trying these exercises yourself. This one is also another one where I use the same technique where I simply change the colors from one frame to the next. As you can see, there's only two frames. This guy and this guy. All I did was change the colors from one frame to the next and slightly rotate each element by selecting them and pressing the arrow tool and just moving them slightly to one side or the other. Whenever you play the GIF, even if it's only two frames, it looks like there's a lot more happening. Let's have a look at one more bonus exercise. This one is a simple sway and I just used the same technique as animating flow. This is the GIF that I came up with. Now let's have a look at the layer structure. As you can see, there's about six frames in this animation. Basically from one frame to the next as you can see, the only thing that's really moving, are the leaves and the flowers. Now, if I was to turn on the onion skin and the opacity to really show you all of the animation, you'll see that the vase really stays the same and the flowers are what's moving from left to right. This is a cool way to preview your animation and to see just how fluid do your movement actually will look. Another interesting thing you can do is ask Procreate to hold on a particular frame. This helps with momentum. It can help you time your animation and also add emphasis at the beginning or the end of it. This is what I did for the last two frames so that there would be a little bit of a pause before bouncing back to the beginning of the animation. Here's another tip. If you're looking to create an animation that has a lot of different elements, or maybe that's a bit more complex, don't hesitate to use the group feature. As we talked about before, each group equals to one frame of your animation. This is actually what I did initially for this GIF. In each one of my groups, I have the vase, I have the flowers, and I have the leaves on a separate layer for each. This made it easier to plan out my movement and I didn't have to be as careful when I was drawing it. When I was happy with it, I just flattened it. You don't have to flatten it, of course, but I just want my layers to look a little bit more clean, for this example. I went ahead and added all of the Procreate files for these exercises into the class resources so that you can download them and open them up and procreate, see how the file is structured and you can recreate them if you want. You don't have to redraw the exact same designs of course. You can just flick through the frames and apply that logic to any illustration or sketch that you might have. Now that you're super familiar with frame-by-frame animation, let's see how we can take these GIFs outside of Procreate and use them in different contexts. In the next lesson, we'll have a look at how to export our GIFs and how they can live outside of Procreate.
11. Exporting: All right, we made some pretty cool GIFs. Let's go ahead and export them so we can actually use them. Let's go into our first GIF. In order to do that, I just clicked into the first GIF that we made. I'm going to tap that wrench and go on the third tab to share and hit "Animated GIF" in the shared that your options here you'll see your GIF, a preview of it, and you're able to modify the amount of frames per seconds that you want it to be in the export. For this one, I think we're going to go with six. You can also choose to have it with a transparent background, which is what I'm going to go for for most of these GIFs for now. Now, this is the max resolution GIF. You can also get it in a web ready format, which is going to be a lot lighter. If you want to send it through messages or something like that, this might be a good option, if you want to showcase it on your website or if you want to maybe use it on Instagram or something like that, I would go for a larger max resolution export. I'm going to go ahead and hit "Export" in the corner here, and from here, you can AirDrop it to one of your devices. If you use other Apple products, you can also send it through text message or send an email to someone with it. Why not, and you can also share it through messenger to one of your friends. But for now, I'm just going to go ahead and hit "Save Image" to save it onto my iPad. Now you can do this with every other GIF you've created and start using them if you want to. Meet me in the next lesson where I'll show you even more ways to use your animations.
12. Using your GIFs: We have a nice collection of GIFs. Now, let's see what are the fun ways that we can use them. One first idea to use your GIFs would be to send them to your friends and family through either a message or messenger. Those things you can do through your iPad directly, or you can export your GIFs, send them to your mobile, and use them from there. Here as you can see, I copied to give onto my phone and I'm just pasting it into the message area and sending it to my mom to wish her a good morning. Another really cool way to use them would be to copy and paste them into your Instagram stories. They'll appear as animations overlaid on top of whatever image or video you're trying to publish. Here I'm just copying my GIF from my mobile and I will be heading into the Instagram app where I already have a photo, then I'm ready to post to my story. I can either use this Add Sticker button or I can use the text tool and simply click on the text and paste my GIF into place. Like so. As you can see, it appears in my story fully animated as we created it. I will do another example with this good morning GIF. Once again, I'll just copy it from my phone, head into Instagram, where I have a plain background and I'll just paste it from the text tool here. Here I'm able to resize it and place it where I want it and then I can add some other interface elements if I want to my story. If you're interested in having your GIFs be more publicly available on platforms like Instagram, for example, I'm going to quickly show you how you can apply for a GIPHY artists profile, which you're able to upload your GIFs onto the platform and have people across the world use them by searching your name.
13. Applying to Giphy: If you want your GIFs to be available publicly through GIPHY, you can also apply it to be a GIPHY artist like I have. You want to head over to giphy.com and either log in or sign up for an account. Once you're in, you'll have to upload a minimum of five GIFs to be considered for an artist's profile. You can select your GIFs, and you'll be able to put some tags and also a source URL in case people want to know who created the GIFs, they'll be redirected there. For the tags, if you have an artist's name or a specific handle, make sure to put it there because this is how people will be able to find you. If you want to add individual tags for each GIFs, you'll have to upload them one by one. Then go ahead and hit ''Upload'' and now you'll see your profile with the GIFs that you've just uploaded. At this point, you got to go to giphy.com/apply. Go into the artist's section and click the button, "Select Artists." You'll have another form to fill in, and then you can submit your application. Hopefully, a couple of weeks later, you should be able to receive an email like this letting you know if you've been accepted for an artist profile. At this point, your GIFs will be available for everyone to use on TikTok or Instagram or Facebook just by searching the different tags that you put in. I put in my handle, and as you can see when I searched it up on Instagram in the sticker tab, I'm able to find the GIFs that I created and I can add them to my stories. There's one last thing I wanted to show you regarding the Instagram GIFs. If you put in a GIF in your story and you hold it for a couple of seconds, you'll be able to pin it in place. This will add a tracking feature onto it and a second layer of animation where it will follow whatever is happening in the video. There you have it, this is how you can also become a verified GIPHY artist and have your GIFs be used by millions of people worldwide.
14. Wrapping It Up: Congrats you made it. In this course, we covered everything from setting up your canvas to creating a full-on rainbow animation from scratch. If there's one thing I hope you take away from this class, it's this: Bringing your illustration to life doesn't have to be complicated. You can make that happen with only a couple of animation frames. I hope that you keep these techniques in mind and that you go ahead and apply them to any drawing that you want to bring to another level. I would really love for you to share what you created in the project gallery. If you did apply for a GIPHY artist's profile, make sure to share it as well. I'm really excited and curious to see what you came up with. I would really appreciate it if you can leave a review on this course and let me know what you thought. I also have another procreate class all about illustrating portraits on the iPad. You can also follow me on here to find out updates and when I post new classes. Thank you again so much for taking this class, and see you next time.
