Create Your First Character Animation in Procreate

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] I know animation can seem a little bit intimidating, but it really doesn't have to be. Once you understand the basics, you'll see a world of endless possibilities and you won't be able to look back. Hi. I'm Anya Perepelkina, and I'm a digital illustrator and animator. As a freelancer, I've worked with brands like Adobe and 99designs, and I've done editorial and brand illustration, design promotion, and other awesome projects. I've been doing frame-by-frame animation for a while now, and it still amazes me every time. There's always something new to learn about it, and always new things to explore and create. It has redefined my art and my practice in so many ways. Having basic animation skills can be a great asset to you, if you're already working in the creative industry, or if it's something that you want to do in your free time. A new skill has the power to transform the way you look at your work. Also in my personal experience, learning new things is the best thing you can do if you ever find yourself in a creative slump. Because it's always just so exciting when you try something different and suddenly you have all these new ideas in your head. Best feeling ever. In this class, I will show you how to create your very first character animation in Procreate. We'll start with a couple of exercises to help you understand the inner workings of frame-by-frame animation. Next, I'll give you tips on how to choose what to animate and get a reference for it. Then we'll sketch your character and work on creating a draft. Later, we'll add color and finally, export your character animation. A lot of time and care goes into creating a frame-by-frame animation, because you essentially work on every single frame separately. Even though it's a challenge, trust me when I tell you that all your hard work will be worth it. You'll be so proud of yourself. I hope you're ready to jump into this class and learning new skill. I'll be with you every step of the way. We're going to have so much fun. Let's get started. [MUSIC] 2. Class Project: [MUSIC] Today, we will create your first character animation in Procreate. I'll be honest with you. Before I started learning about frame-by-frame animation, it seemed way too complicated and so I thought I'd never even try it. I'm so glad that I was wrong. If you're here, I'm hoping that you're somewhere on the brink right now as well and trust me when I tell you that you're going to be so glad you took the leap. I usually illustrate people, so I naturally started with character animation. When I say character animation, I don't mean just people though. You can, of course, explore drawing animals or made up characters if that's what you prefer. Characters just give you a lot of room for exploration since there are a lot of things that you can move, be that facial expression, hair, limbs, clothes, and so on. This class was created specifically for beginners. That's why we'll start with a couple of exercises to help you better understand the whole process of frame-by-frame animation. If you're not a beginner, this class will be great for you if you want to brush off on the basics or streamline your process and make it more effective. I will help you choose a movement to animate that is going to be easy and effective. Then we will begin sketching and planning out the whole animation and you'll be left with the draft of your future piece. Then you'll be able to choose your own colors or use one of the color palettes I've created for this class and with that, bring your animation to life. In the end, I'll walk you through exporting your animation, and to show you how I turn it into an MP4 file that you can share anywhere. For this class, you will need an iPad, an Apple pencil, plus Procreate. You should have some working knowledge of the app, because I won't be going too far into how to use it besides the animation features. Procreate has a really simple and clean interface for animation, which is why I think it's so great for beginners. But there are alternatives. I'd say that generally any software with basic animation features would work just fine. I also want you to keep in mind that frame-by-frame animation is quite a time-consuming process. I know I can see at my table for hours on end working on an animation and that's not great. Please make sure that you take some breaks to drink water and to walk around your table while you're working on your animation. With all that said, I hope you're excited about this class. Let's jump right into it. 3. Understanding Frame-by-Frame Animation: Before we jump into the main part of the class, we need to take some time to better understand the basics of frame-by-frame animation. A simple explanation of frame-by-frame animation, also known as cel animation or 2D animation, is that it's a bunch of separate frames showing one after another to create a moving image. Frame rate of an animation can be different, but 12 and 24 frames per second are what you would usually use for the type of animation that we're going to be making. If an animation is 12 frames per second, it means that it's showing you 12 frames in the span of one second. This also means that the same animation will be slower at six frames per second compared to 12. Let's look at the animation features. First, go to Settings, then select "Canvas" and turn on animation assist. You'll see this little window popup at the bottom here. Click on "Layers" and let's make this layers. I have visible. Every visible layer also pops up at the bottom here as a frame, and they go in reverse. So the first frame at the bottom is actually the last layer in the layer list. If we click "Play", they'll be showing as an animation one after another. Then in Settings, you'll see different plane options. Ping-pong here shows you animation from first to last frame, then in reverse, one-shot displays it once. I usually have loops selected for all of my projects. You can set frame rate right here just by dragging the handle. The best thing to do here is to just take your time, change the amount, play around and see how it works. Then last but not least, it's onion skin. Let me turn this all the way up and you'll see. Basically, onion skin allows you to see all the frames that come before and after the one you have selected. The frames that come after are green and the frames that come before are red. This is the most amazing thing that you'll be using a 100 percent of the time. You can also change the opacity of the color frames. I usually keep it at around 60 or 70 percent. Now that we've hour that I want us to practice together to help you better understand the whole process. I've prepared some practice files for you. You'll find them in the section below the class. Go ahead and download them. To open the files, click "Import" on the main screen in Procreate, then find where you saved them to and choose the one titled flower first. I already have them right here, so I'm not going to import them again. The first file has six frames. They should already be selected and visible. Let's play the animation first. Now we will recreate this animation together. Let's delete all the numbered layers first. Make sure to keep the stem and reference layers because we will absolutely need them. Now, turn both of them on, then lower the opacity of the reference to whatever you prefer. Now because it's the first frame, you can set it as background. This way it will remain in the background of every layer. Now rename the stem layer as number 1. Organization is the most important part of animation, and I want you to make it a habit right away to rename all of your layers. Let's make the first layer now. To do that, we just need to retrace the first petal of the flower. Now duplicate that same layer and rename it as number 2. Then retrace the second petal. We're getting there. Let's do the third layer now. Once again, duplicate second layer and retrace. [MUSIC] For the next two layers, I'm drawing the whole petal so it doesn't look like there's a chunk missing. [MUSIC] Let's play the animation now. Awesome. That's the first exercise done. Second exercise is the file title, Cherry, and we're taking it up a notch here. You'll see just three layers here. We'll be creating this animation almost from scratch. The cherry on the right and the leaf are going to be moving along these guides. Make sure that the one called guides is the first frame here at the bottom so we can set it as background once again. This layer we will use as a stencil, so let's duplicate it and rename it as number 2. We already have the first frame in the file. Now click on this icon right here. It will bring up this rotation control panel. Let's set it to five degrees. You can also set this to nearest neighbor, is going to help with the distortion. Now let's move it along the guide just a tiny bit. Now again, duplicate this layer, rename it right away, working hard, and creating a habit here. Rotation and move it along the guide. Now you can continue doing it this way, or if the image distorts too much and it bothers you, you can duplicate the initial cherry layer five times, and instead of rotating it by five degrees every time, you can do five, then 10, then 15 degrees and so on. [MUSIC] Now that we have six frames total, let's put this first layer at the bottom. Once again, last layer is the first frame and move on to the leaf. What we're going to do here is put a dot along the guide to mark where the leaf is going to go. Make sure you're selecting a different frame every time you draw a dot. Also, try to space them more or less at an equal distance from each other. Now we can start joining the leaves. The last thing to do here is to redraw the second cherry in each frame. Make sure that second stem is also moving along with the cherry on the right. There you go. We'll be using rotation to create our animation later in the class. That will definitely come in handy. Now, in that last file titled Cat, you'll see one single frame. That's because in this one you're going to use all the information that you just learned to create your own animation based on this one frame. Let me show you what I had in mind for this one. In my case, there are six frames total, and this is what the movement looks like. You can use it as a guide. There are three different points of movement here as you can see. Well, do something completely different. You know what to do now, so it's time to put your skills to practice. Now, go get those practice files and try it yourself, especially if this is your first time doing any sort of animation, I strongly suggest that you actually take your time and do this. It will really help you understand how animation works, and that is definitely going to make it easier for you further down the line. In the next lesson, we will choose a movement for your animation and figure out ways to get a great reference for it. 4. Choosing What to Animate: [MUSIC] Now you hopefully understand the basics. The next step is choosing what to animate. When I work on a new animation, a lot of times I actually don't know what the movement is going to be when I begin. That is not the wisest place to start. Today we're going to be responsible and we're going to plan ahead. Now, since this is all about making your first character animation, I would definitely suggest starting with a really small movement that would be easy to do. For the animation that I'm going to be doing in this class, I've chosen a simple movement that involves moving one arm and interacting with the flower. The idea is that the character will raise the flower to her face and smell it. To make sure that you can follow me easily, I'd suggest movements that also involve raising an arm or a leg. Consider adding an element that the character can interact with in some way. That will make your animation more engaging and fun. Try to avoid something that would involve the whole body and especially bodies moving through space like walking. That's a little too complicated for the first time. When I was just starting out, one of the main problems for me was that I could have an idea but I could never imagine certain movements without a reference. I've had to figure out ways to get those references and now I'm sharing them with you. First thing I do when I get an idea is I go on YouTube or just google extremely specific keywords like happy woman running or a cat smelling flowers or insert whatever you're trying to find here. If you're in luck, there'll be stock footage or other useful videos. You can watch them over and over again when you're trying to figure out the movement. That's one thing you can do. But my number 1 tip is actually very, very simple. It's just filming yourself when you already know which movement you need is the most flexible solution. I did this for my illustration work all the time too. I know it can be awkward to film yourself doing ceiling movements like that, but honestly, you only needed to figure things out. So it obviously doesn't have to be perfect or polished, it's just for you. Lastly, it's always great to surround yourself with great examples. I always recommend finding people in the field to follow on Instagram, Behance, and other platforms and not just for animation. Now that you know the way frame-by-frame animation works, you can watch your favorite animated movies, TV shows or cartoons, and study the movements there. Also even though it's great to plan everything meticulously, it's still a creative process. Make sure to leave some room for experiments and spur-of-the-moment decisions. A reference is a great and a very helpful thing for studying the movement and maybe figuring out the composition, but it doesn't mean that your animation has to look exactly like it. Now it's your turn to figure out which movement you're going to animate, but also feel free to follow me and do the exact movement I'm doing. There is no pressure at all. In the next lesson, we'll start sketching our character. 5. Sketching Your Character: [MUSIC] Now that we have a reference, we can start sketching. Let's create a new Canvas first. On the main screen, click the Plus icon, then this one right here. I usually go for a square 2500 Canvas, 600 DPI for better image quality, and you can also see the number of available layers. Then make sure that your color profile is set to RGB. It's the first one here. You can also rename your file. As for brushes, I recommend this True Grit Texture Supply set. It's called a Stipple Studio, and it has a ton of gorgeous brushes. My favorite brush here is the rough liner. It's amazing for animation because the texture of the brush will give you beautiful movement in every frame. Last thing before we start, let me show you one more incredible feature. When in settings you can select this ''Reference'' option. It will bring up a window where you'll be able to see your reference. You can also zoom into the image itself and then you can move the whole window across the screen so it's a useful little tool for sketching. Now we can finally start. I'm drawing a line to help me with the composition, since my character is going to be sitting. I did choose a particular reference here, so I'm going to be using it a lot to figure out where the legs and the arms should go. [MUSIC] Now I have my rough sketch and if you watched the footage, you saw that it was a lot of trying things, this and that way, to you see what works best. I keep every part of the character on a separate layer so I can change things around if I need to. I try to keep these things separate for as long as I can, honestly up until the point I'll start actually animating, so I can give myself a chance to move things around. I'm going to lower the opacity of all these layers to around 20 percent so I can see beneath the new layers and start cleaning my sketch up. [MUSIC] The sketch is now ready. Next step is creating the second extreme. Extremes in animation are frames where the movement reaches its peak. In my case, I already have the first extreme where the arm is down, so I need to create a frame where the arm is raised and we'll change the flower as well to match the movement of the arm. I'm going to redraw the flower head now so I can move it. I do want it to be slightly different in this frame, so I'm changing the petals just a tiny bit. [MUSIC] Now I can rotate it slightly and move it closer to her face. There's honestly no scientific method to this. Just make sure it's not too far from the first frame and that it makes sense to be there in the new frame. Now let us draw the new stem. Since the flower head is higher, the stem would need to be stretched out. [MUSIC] For the arm, I've drawn these [inaudible] guides to help me see where the hand needs to go. Now it's totally optional, but I do think it helps. I've duplicated the layer with the arm in it. I'm just going to erase everything I don't need. Now we can use the Lasso tool to select only the hand. Just going to rotate it a little and move it according to the guide. Also making sure that it aligns with the flower that we have. [MUSIC] Now we can redraw the arm to match the hand. [MUSIC] There you go. Here are the two extremes that we'll need to create the animation. I'm still keeping everything on separate layers at this point. Each group acts as a single frame here. It's time for you to go and sketch your character, and remember that we're going to animate it later so make sure you're sketching with your plan movement in mind. In the next lesson, we will start developing our animation. 6. Drafting Your Animation: This is where we start drafting out the actual animation. That is definitely the most important part of the whole process. Think of it as the foundation for your piece. Once you get this done, it's all easy sailing from there. Let's roll up our sleeves and get to work. Before we start, let's look at the two extremes we have now. We need to determine exactly which parts are going to be moving. For my character and the way I planned it, first, she's going to move her arm up and with that, the flower also goes up. Once the flower is close to her face, she's going to lean in and smell it. Because she's moving her head, the hair on her head is also going to move. In my case, it's the hand and the arm, the stem and the flower, her head, and the hair. It's important to sort the movements into sections like that and determine the right order as well. It will help you feel more organized and less overwhelmed. Let's start with the first movement. One one that you need to remember here is that a movement like this will follow an arc. To help you and to help me understand, let's do the whole thing in a very rough sketch version first. I'm just drawing a circle for the elbow, then a line from the shoulder to the elbow, and another line from the elbow to the wrist. Then on a different layer, same for the other extreme. You can also add bigger circles for hands. Just going to turn all the other layers off for now. Next, we'll do the one that's exactly in the middle. Once again, make sure to put it all on separate layers. I'm going to turn Animation Assist on so we can see everything. The whole movement, I would say, should be able to fit within seven frames. Now we can add the frames in-between. Now, if you look at yourself in the mirror doing the same movement or if you film yourself, you'll notice that the speed at which you're moving is actually not consistent throughout the whole thing. It starts slowly, then it should be faster in the middle, and again end slowly. We're going to replicate that. Because of that, the next frame should be closer to the extreme than the frame in the middle. If we were to put all the frames at equal distances from each other, it wouldn't look natural at all. Now let's mirror that on the other side. Then lastly, let's squeeze in an additional frame on each side in between these two. Now we can play it. I'll admit it looks weird because it's just sticks, but now you know the principle. A little trick that I use to help me on this next step is I connect every point of these two extremes to give myself guides that I can follow with each new frame. Here I'm connecting the knuckles, then this point between the hand and the shirt. All of these guides also need to follow an arc, just like the movement itself. Depending on your character and your sketch, take a moment to try to determine all of these points that are going to be moving. All of these can be done on the same layer, by the way. You'll be able to see it because of onion skin. I've taken a moment to organize things a little bit here. Now I'm just going to turn these stick guides off. We can always go back to them if we need to. We have our first frame already, it's the first extreme. Let's start on the second frame. We're following the guide here. Remember that this frame should still be very close to the first one. These guides make the job a lot easier. [MUSIC] It's time for that frame in the middle and it's easy. We just need to position it right in the middle of the guides. It might take you a bit of time to get through this step. Reference the stick movement that we did before if you need to or it might just be a case of trial and error to understand what you need to do here. It's all a part of the process. [MUSIC] Now that all that's done, we need to redraw the rest of the body to match those frames. The only thing that's changing here from frame to frame is the part of the arm from the elbow to the hand. Let's play this. It's starting to look like something. Now, if I can give you one single piece of wisdom, I tell you to number your frames. That's what we're going to do now. After that, we will need to redraw the rest of the character to match all of the seven frames. [MUSIC] First step is now complete. Let's move on to the next, which is the stem and the flower head. In my design, this stem does have that loop. Basically what I'm going to do here is draw the middle frame first, which is the point closest to the loop almost disappearing. [MUSIC] Then from the first frame to that middle frame, I'm going to make that loop smaller and smaller, and from the middle to the last frame, I'm going to make it a little straighter. It's also important here to align the stem with the hand that's holding it. The stem is now ready. I think we can move on to the flower head. I searched for flower videos on YouTube here to help me understand the movement. I'm imagining the flower petals to be really light and bouncy, which means that they're not going to remain in the same position throughout the movement. They will move closer to the stem as it travels up. Let me show you what I mean here. I'm not a scientist, so I'm not even going to try to explain the forces at hand here. You're going to have to trust the process here a little bit. [MUSIC] I added two additional frames here for that bounce at the end. That's one frame for the petals to go a little higher than the extreme. Then one frame for it to go back to the original position. Flower head is done. Here's the complete and finished flower. Next, we'll animate the head. This part is exactly why I was saying that you might want to keep everything on separate layers for as long as possible. We're going to take the layer with only the head in it and we're going to create the movement by dragging the layer at tiny bit towards the flower. [MUSIC] The amount of frames here will depend on the distance between the head and the flower. It took me three frames. Depending on the type of movement that you chose, you might get away with just dragging your layer. But in my case, I think it doesn't get across that she's leaning in. I'm also going to add rotation to each frame. You can try different things here and see what works for you. Let's see now. I do actually think it looks a lot better with the rotation. I've duplicated the last layer three times to give me room to close her eyes. I think there's going to make it clear that she's enjoying the smell of the flower and give the animation more of a peaceful life. Now to emphasize that I'm going to duplicate it a couple more times. This is something that you're going to have to decide on your own in your animation. See what makes more sense. I definitely recommend duplicating your frames at least a couple of times after one movement finishes and another begins. People tend to take a moment between one thing and another. That's going to make your animation look more natural. Now for the last part, the hair. Looking at my character, I'm seeing a couple of places where her hair could move. That's the lock of hair in front of her ear, the bun at the top of her head, and then the back of her hair. Since she's moving forward, the bun needs to move backwards. Same goes for the bow here, and it's the same thing with this lock of hair as well. Just moving everything a tiny bit to the left. [MUSIC] When it comes to the back of her hair, I think it doesn't need to move too much at all. Just a slight raise of the waive should look nice. [MUSIC] Now, we did use rotation, which lowers the quality of the strokes a little bit. We duplicated a lot of frames here as well. That's going to look weird in the final. We need to redraw all of those frames to make sure that there is still movement from frame to frame even if the character is not moving. This is why I recommended a textured brush like the one that I'm using, because it's going to make sure that there is still movement in the lines, even if it's essentially the same frame. [MUSIC] Remember what we did with the flower to make it balance at the end? Let's do the same thing to the hair. We need to add two more frames. One for it to move forward and one for it to come back to the original position. Let me show you the layer breakdown for the hair movement. Frame number 10 is where it all begins. Frame number 15 is where the bun does the bounds. Next frame, it comes back, then the lock does the buns on frame 17. Next frame it comes back as well. It's a miracle, but we're done with the hard part now. The draft is finished or almost finished. I'm going to give you a little more of a challenge in the next lesson, and we're going to take this even further. You can also leave it here. You've done an amazing job already. There you have it. Time for you to work on your draft now. This is the part that will take quite awhile. I'm not going to lie. Take it easy, remember to rest and I'm sure the result will be amazing. In the next lesson, we will work on turning your animation into a loop. 7. Making the Loop: [MUSIC] If you're here, it means that you've decided to brave it out and make your animation loop. I'm so glad that you did. We're going to be using all the same techniques that we've already used. It's just going to take you a little more time but the result will be worth it. Basically at the moment we have half the movement figure out. We're going to reverse it by duplicating frames so we need to figure out which frame we need to start from. Take a look at your frames. In my case, I think it all starts around the frame 11. Her head is still close to the flower until the last frame. Next it needs to lean back. That means that we need to start duplicating from the moment she finishes leaning into the flower, which is once again frame 11 in my case. I'm dragging it all the way to the very top. Next, I'm going to duplicate frame number 10 and drag it on top of frame number 11. We'll continue doing the same with the rest of the frames. With all the frames duplicated, it obviously looks funky because we spent all the time on the flower and the hair. To make sure that it looks nice in reverse, that's what we need to work on again. I already named all of the new duplicated frames and you should absolutely do the same. Let's see here. Frame 25 is where she starts to lift her head back up. With that, her hair needs to move forward. Let's do the band first. We need to move it slightly to the right, just like we did last time, but in reverse. This lock of hair also needs to move a little bit to the right. Then next frame, again, band slightly to the right. The bow is moving along with it too. I'm looking at the previous frame to make sure it's not too hectic. Honestly, we're doing the absolute same thing here that we did for the initial movement. Only this time we're moving things the opposite way. You might have very different hair or very different moving parts on your character. Just look over your animation, play it over and over again and see what things need to be changed in order to complete the loop. Here's the layer breakdown of the movement once again. Frame 25 is where it all starts. Frame 28 is where the band does the bands. The lock of hair took a little longer to bring back, so it bounces in frame 31, and then the movement is complete. Let's play it, see if anything needs changing. I think it looks pretty smooth and the loop is seamless. We can move on to the flower. It starts to go back down in frame 28. Let me just erase the petals from those frames. [MUSIC] This time around, the petals need to go up because the flower goes down. Once again, there's absolutely no rule to this besides just trying things out and seeing how they look. All these individual frames will look so weird, but you already know that together they will look great. [MUSIC] It's almost unbelievable that we're practically finished. I just want to add a couple more frames at the end to help the pacing. Since it's a loop, I'm duplicating the first two frames and I'm dragging them on top of the last frame. That should make the movement less rushed. Now that we're finally here, let's look at the draft. I think it looks great and I'm sure yours does too. See that wasn't so bad. Now that you know how to do it, go and make your animation loop. In the next lesson, we will add color and work on finishing the animation. 8. Working on the Animation: [MUSIC] Finally, with the hardest part done, we can relax. Since we're focusing on the animation part of the creative process in this class, I've prepared a couple of color palettes for you to use in your project so that you don't have to think about anything but leveling up your skills. You can access them below the class, and you can obviously use your own color palettes for this as well. I've duplicated my file, and deleted all the frames besides one. Now add a new layer, and here you have to make sure that all the new layers are below your line work. We're going to be creating a color composition. This is a step that is 100 percent essential in my process. I'm going to use one of the color palettes I created for this class. I'm just going to add a background color now, and then start working on the color composition. A color composition is basically a very rough sketch, but for colors, I usually make the brush bigger, and just go for it. I'm not worrying about being neat at all. This is an extra step, but it allows you to try all the different color combinations before you start actually working on the final frames. The only important thing here is to keep every single object on a new layer, or in my case here, I know that her face, and her hand are going to be the same color. I'll do both of them on the same layer, and then add new layers for everything else. [MUSIC] This is my color composition. I know it looks rough, but I've tried all the different color combinations, and I like this one the most. Now I can use it to start working on the final frames. I've inserted the color composition as a single layer here so I can reference it quickly. I've also added empty layers, and grouped them together. I have a layer with line work, and an empty layer in each group now. We're all set to start coloring the first frame. We're working on that empty layer now, and I'm using the same brush, and the same size. There are actually many different ways to go about this. I find coloring like this quite therapeutic actually. But if you want to speed up the process, you can draw out the shapes, and then fill them with color. If your art style is a bit more flat, and you don't use line work, it's time to maybe try it out. Otherwise, you're going to have to create every single frame from scratch. That can, and probably will drive you insane, especially if this is your first time doing frame-by-frame animation. [MUSIC] One thing I love to do is use textures as an additional moving element in the animation. What I had in mind for the pants is make the brush a tad smaller, and start coloring them very roughly, leaving tiny gaps. You can also click on the brush to bring up the settings, and set this streamline amount to zero. This way the brush will feel more natural. [MUSIC] Now the pattern on the shirt can also bring a little bit of movement. I'm using a clipping mask and with the same brush, just to make it a little bigger. I'm going to create a pattern that I had in mind. If you're also doing a pattern, I'd say something simple will go a long way. [MUSIC] That's the first frame ready. Now you can continue just like that, coloring each frame, but it's going to take you a long time. One thing we can do to speed things up a little bit is to duplicate the layers that are not moving, like this stem here. [MUSIC] Since the brush has texture, you'll need to go in and fill the gaps there, but that's a lot faster than coloring in all over again. [MUSIC] Depends, we do need to color from scratch because we want them to be moving from frame to frame. Those tiny gaps will create that movement because they will be different in each frame. Same thing goes for the grid pattern. I've just turned out the layer with the shirt color so I can see the previous pattern with our old friend, Onion Skin. I'd say try not to move it too much because we don't want to take an attention away from all the other movements that we've worked so hard on. But that also depends, like if you don't have a lot of contrast between the colors of the shirt and the pattern, I think you could get away with a little bit more movement. Definitely give it a try. It's all about experimenting. [MUSIC] Now we have two first frames. From here, you can continue duplicating frames as you go along. As the movement changes, you're going to have to erase a little bit here and there and fill the gaps. Now as for the pens and the pattern, you're going to have to duplicate every other frame. They will be alternating between each other and creating beautiful movement. I'm going to go even further and duplicate every third frame. You're welcome to do the same. Since we have a lot of frames, it will just introduce a little bit more variation. Keep in mind that for that, you need three unique layers for the pens and for the pattern. You're going to have to create one more layer for each of them. [MUSIC] Here are the first three frames done. Look, those three frames create beautiful continuous movement, and it just adds a little extra something and same goes for the pattern. Now for the fourth frame, I'm taking the pens from the first frame. [MUSIC] There's a bit of a gap here. I'll just go in with the smaller brush again and fill it in. Basically from here, we'll have to continue doing the same thing again and again until we have all the frames colored. [MUSIC] That took quite a while, but it was all worth it. Wasn't it? Let's play the animation. I'm actually really happy with the result and I can't wait to see what you created. [MUSIC] Now, I'm done. Now it's your turn to design your frames. It's only the fun part left. Here you can let your creativity run wild. Try some new brushes, or experiment with your color palette. In the next lesson, I will show you how to export your animation. 9. Exporting Your File: We're finally here. It's time to export your animation. Exporting is actually very, very easy. In settings, go to the share tab and then we need two main things, a GIF file and an MP4 file. Let's click animated GIF first. Everything is as simple as it gets. The most important thing is to keep frames per second here the same as your animation. Then, if you click "Web Ready", it will make your GIF smaller in size. You shouldn't really concern yourself with all the rest, so then just click "Export." Here's your usual thing. Different sharing options. We're just going to save it. That's it really. Let's do the same for animated MP4. Here, the only thing, again, is to keep frames per second the same as your animation. Let's export it. Same thing here, just save video. Let's see now, here's your GIF file. It's playing on a loop over and over again, and here's your MP4 file. Now, the thing with this is that it's really short and it's only going to play once. Sometimes I want a longer video, so let me show you how I usually do it in Photoshop. The reason why I use Photoshop in particular is because I already have it on my desktop and I feel like there's a good chance that you have it too. If not, I reckon you could use any video editing software. First, you're going to want to open your video. You can do that in File then Open, I already have it ready to go. Since it's an MP4 file, it's going to bring up the timeline at the bottom. If that didn't happen, you can find it in Window, then Timeline. Things are pretty straightforward from here, I'm going to copy the video group and past it a couple of times. You can do any number that you want. Now, moving to timeline, just click and drag every group so that they go one after another. Now go to File, then Export, and choose "Render Video." Here this should be the format. This is just an MP4 file. You can choose high-quality here. Then 1080 by 1080 is what you would need to post on Instagram, for example, so let's do that. Document frame rate, again, same as your animation. Make sure that you enable Color Manage, and then just click "Render." There you go. Here's your slightly longer video. I'm so proud of you. This was not easy, but you made it. Now go and export your animation and I'll see you in a second. 10. Conclusion: [MUSIC] That's it. I'm so glad that you decided to take this class with me and I have no doubts that your animation looks amazing. This was quite a journey, we did everything from learning about frame-by-frame animation and choosing a movement to drafting your animation and then working on the final frames. I hope you learned lots of new things and that you're bursting with new ideas for future animation projects. One thing I want you to remember from this class is that animation is fun. Once you get over the initial fear of the unknown and put in some effort, you will be so impressed by your own work. This is an incredible new skill that you have now and I hope that you continue your animation journey. I cannot thank you enough for taking this class and I hope it was worth your time. I encourage you to share your work everywhere you can but especially here on Skillshare. You can talk about your process, share initial sketches, references or inspirations, and of course your final animation in the class project section. If you're sharing on Instagram, remember to tag me @Wildanya. I can't wait to see your creations. This has been such a great time, thank you so much for joining me today. Bye.