Create Your Own Pack of Animated Stickers

1. Trailer: Welcome to the exciting world of animated stickers. In this class, we'll dive into the process of creating a pack of animated stickers that will add flare and personality to your digital presence or personal brand. Gifs and animated stickers are such a versatile format, they're fun, light, easy adaptable to any platform, and perfect for adding an extra touch of creativity to your content and for captivating your audience. Let's unlock the potential of animated stickers, and create together a cohesive pack that you can use to spice up your social media, make your presentations more engaging, or add some fun to your newsletter and websites. I'm Giulia Martinelli, an animator and illustrator, and I'm clearly obsessed with animated stickers. I think they are great for making a presentation pop or to liven up a newsletter. In this class, we'll explore the purpose and potential of animated stickers. We'll discuss how they can be used in various contexts and what are the ingredients that make them unique. At the end of this class, you'll have developed a pack of animated stickers from sketching ideas to animation. The class comes with handy resources that I share with you: an inspirational mood board tips for Ash tags, some fun, minimal color palette ideas, and full-time lapse videos of the animation process. This class is perfect for all you creatives out there who love illustrating small spot illustrations and want to bring them to life. The best part, you don't need any specific animation skill or software. We'll be using Adobe Animate and Procreate, but feel free to use any animation software you're comfortable with. I'll share some animation tips to make your illustration look alive even without crazy animation skills and tailored to different skill levels. Now let's dive into this exciting project. 2. Getting Started: Welcome to this class and this new creative journey. Today we talk about stickers, which are basically GIFs small animated loops on a transparent background. I use them a lot: from social media to my newsletter and website, but also in slides presentations. Animated stickers are great because they are a loop in the background, they don't distract, but they keep your slide, Instagram story, e-mail, or web page alive and engaging. I use stickers, for instance, on Google Decks to pitch ideas to clients or share a work in progress on newsletter to break down a paragraph and add some color and a fan element, on social media for encouraging interactions in the stories. During this class, you'll create your own pack of animated stickers. A pack of animated stickers is a collection of animated graphics that share a consistent style, theme, or visual language. Each sticker within the pack is designed and animated in a way that aligns with the overall aesthetic and purpose of the collection. This cohesiveness ensures that all the stickers work harmoniously together and create a unified visual experience. Today for my own class project, I will create a pack of animated stickers for a presentation. Other ideas for you could be to develop a series of stickers for Social Media, for an event to promote engagement, or for your website. When creating a cohesive pack of animated stickers, you'll want to ask yourself the following questions. What do you need them for? What emotion should they convey? Do you want them to be fun, serious, or maybe cute? Do you already have a personal brand with a style and colors? Or do you have complete freedom in terms of style and tone of voice? As usual, our creative journey begins with brainstorming and mood boarding. Let's create a list of sticker ideas, and gather visual inspiration through a Moodboard on a platform like Pinterest. In the resources, you'll find a link to a secret Pinterest board I created over the years. There you find some pints there are animated and some there are not. You can notice here, for instance, that animation is quite minimal. The color palette and the style are consistent. A spot illustration is an illustration that doesn't have a background or too many floating elements. It's quite compact. Those work well as stickers. Some stickers include a piece of text, some don't. You can decide if you want to add some text to an image, or maybe have one animated stickers being a word or a small sentence on its own. We also notice that there is a limited, but not fixed number of images in a pack. It could be three, but also ten usually. They are simple spot illustrations showcasing different moods. A quick note about transparency. Notice that your sticker and GIF should have the alpha channel, which means the background will be transparent. Now that we gather some inspiration, let's think about what we need for our pack of stickers. For example, in my presentation I might need a welcome sticker. Maybe a character waving something for the slide in which I share my contact information. Because these slides are always a little empty and sad I'm thinking about something with an envelope symbolizing the E-mail. Some categories useful for me are celebratory sticker, new sticker, pointing or showing sticker. This early brainstorming phase serves to write down ideas. Let's not worry too much, you can already doodle, but you could also write down a list of notes, if that's your brainstorming style. For my new pack of stickers, I decided to use this little wolf character I designed some time ago. You don't need a main character, as we just saw on the mood board. Your stickers can also be objects, words, or a bunch of different characters. Maybe you need an animated arrow or a new post sign for your Instagram stories. We can write down and sketch multiple ideas, more than we actually need, Later, we will select our favorite ones. Here I am sketching some waving wolves. Here there is one holding an envelope. This could be a good sticker for the contact info or for the newsletter as well. This one says "hi". It's another potential candidate and a good idea for the welcome sticker. If you choose to design and animate characters, try to have dynamic poses and interesting silhouettes. I made a whole class about this topic. Go check it out. I could also have some arrows to point at things which are always useful stickers. Or it could be the character pointing at something. Here I try to organize a little my sketches, dividing them into groups. I start thinking about which doodle I like the most. Remember, we want our stickers to have some movement, so keep that in mind. As we brainstorm and sketch. For instance, this wolf could wave his hand. And in this sticker. The balloon could be animated as the wolf speaks up. This sticker could show the wolf happily jumping up and down. Let your imagination run wild. As you doodle and explore different concepts, it's good to start thinking about potential animations and especially be sure that they can be short loops. In the next lesson, we will dive into illustration. 3. Illustration: Now it's time to bring our stickers ideas to life, finalizing the spot illustrations. First, we need to pick our favorite ideas and decide which ones go into our sticker collection. There is no fixed number of stickers to create a pack. It could be three, but it could also be 12. I would suggest to start small, especially if that's your first time. There is always time to add some later in my case and looking at my drafts, I think I will go for this one. Choose your favorite ideas and start refining them. This is the time to decide what the style will be. Do your illustration of an outline or not. Do you already have a color palette in mind? Think about color palettes that will make your stickers visually appealing and cohesive choosing and using a color palette creates a sense of unity within your animated stickers pack. A well curated color palette doesn't just facilitate consistency, it also enhances the impact of your animated stickers. Maybe you already have your own brand colors or you have a palette in mind. If not, no worries. I provide you with some colors idea. In the resources of this class. For my pack of wolves, I chose this color palette. The colors complement each other. The palette is minimal and bold. Let's finalize those illustrations. I will focus on clean and simple lines, because let's not forget we have to animate this later. Complex details will require a longer time and a lot of drawing across numerous frames. Keep dynamic poses and silhouettes in mind. In this stage, you can refine the sketches, polish the shapes, and even add small details or change something that doesn't work. For instance, here I'm trying different graphic options for his mouth. Another example. In the case of this line Wolf, I really needed to redesign the arms. Cute. Here I'm using procreate and I'm falling in love with this texture. It's definitely an extra step that's going to complicate my animation process later. Feel free to leave it out. Keep in mind transparency, your stickers have to work without the background. You might try to turn off the background layer every now and then to check out the illustration is looking. In the end, I decided to add one text to my pack and it says wild. I think this is a very versatile sticker that I can use on many occasions. This is how it looks with a transparent background and that's how I say a PNG from procreate. Here they are our cut stickers illustrations. Now it's your turn. Pick a color palette and finalize your spot illustrations. Remember, focus on clean lines, clear shapes, and appealing colors to make your stickers visually striking. In the next lesson, we will start animating. 4. Simple Animation: Now it's time to bring those puppies to life. In this lesson, I'll guide you through the process of animating your stickers, using Adobe Animate, Procreate, or your preferred animation software. There are multiple ways to animate. In this class, I'm presenting you three ways with different levels of difficulty. All hand-drawn. GIF is a very light file format. Let's keep in mind that the animation of our sticker should not be too long. A couple of seconds is ideal. Boiling effect. This super easy technique gives movement to a still illustration. It's very common on Instagram stickers. It does not describe an action, but gives a little life to a still illustration. If we draw the same illustration three or four times, let's say on twos or threes, the illustration will be "boiling". To do this, simply copy your illustration three times. Tip one. Your boiling effect can be subtle and minimal, or very crazy. This depends on how precise your copy is, and how fast your animation goes. Tip two: when you copy your illustration, always copy from the first master illustration to avoid a "shifting effect". Simple minimal animation. Adding small animations to some part of the illustration also helps achieve a sense of livingness and engagement. For instance, making your character blink instantly brings it to life. Another option could be to move only one element, such as its arm or tail, in my case. This type of animation is very simple to make, and effective. It does not require crazy animation skills, but does its job especially for short loopy GIFs. Tip one, blink. Blink in three steps. The blink animation can be broken down into three steps. Open-eye, half-closed eye, and closed eye. I usually keep the half-eye drawing for two frames before moving to the closed-eyes drawing, which can be two or three frames long. To reopen the eyes, you can go directly back to the first drawing, or paste another two frames of half open eyes for a softer blink. That's how you bring to life a character with only a couple of drawings. Tip two: waving. The rest of the body stays still while we animate only the arm or the tail, I would suggest redrawing the entire body, though. Otherwise, we would notice that one part does not move at all. That's what I'm going to do here with the sticker of the wolf holding the envelope. For the waving we should first of all draw the arc of the movement. This will be the anchor point, that's how the tail will move. I think my movement could last 1 second back and forth. I want the animation to be soft and the tail to be faster in the middle and slower at the extremes. This means I will draw more frames close to the extreme positions. The closer the drawings are, the slower the movement looks. This is me animating in time-lapse, the wolf wagging its tail. For the rest of the body, I will have a boiling effect. Another minimal animation is the one for the "Hi" sticker. I make the balloon appear and disappear, so it is a loop. And I animate the head of the wolf with a blink and the mouth opening. To give it a little more life. I also animate a little bit of rotation as he opens his mouth to speak. 5. Timelapse Boiling Animation "WILD": Here in Procreate, I'm animating this GIF for an animated sticker. And I'm going to turn on the animation assist on Procreate and go on copying my illustration, that says "wild". I'm basically going to copy the illustration first. On one layer here is the orange and on another layer is the black. For the typography, I like to find a thick brush and just try to copy my image, then simply cut with the eraser here. The edges to create this typography. I'm not too precious or too precise. I like the look to be a little rough. Also, later when I'm going to copy this typography multiple times. Of course, I'm trying to be precise and copied but not too much in the sense that the most precise your copy will be the least amount of boiling effect we will have, of course. Interesting on Procreate. is that if you keep separate layers, as I do now with the orange and the black, the software considers them separate frames of the animation. If you want to have backgrounds or multiple layers of elements, you can then group them. - And I'm going to do it right now - to be considered as one single frame. Now I'm moving to the second frame and I copy it all over again. You want to repeat this at least three times in order to have an interesting boiling effect. Maybe even more, four or five times. It's also fine. Usually, if you're animating on a timeline, you can decide to animate on two or on trees. Meaning each illustration, each drawing stays on the screen for two or three frames. In this case. At the end you're going to see, I'm going to set the animation at eight frames per second, which means basically on 3s, if it was 24 frames per second. Here we go. Almost done with the second "wild" as you can see, it's a very long process and it's sped up the video you're watching right now. Overall, I think it took me 25 minutes to animate this very simple loop. I think it's worth saying this. Yes, sure it's repetitive. You can listen to podcasts or do other stuff while you do this. For sure it takes some time. That's because it's a very manual labor. And I specifically want to get the imperfection. That's why I cannot copy and paste. And that's what I like about this type of animation. The boiling effect is really getting the imperfections and let them boil. Here we go. This is the third and last copy of the typography. Next, I'm going to move to, uh, the orange part. The orange part, I'm not going to copy exactly as it is. Or maybe, yes, we could say that, but like in a very much less precise way, in the sense that the next orange shape for the second and third layers and frames are going to be more random. I pay attention to have the same number of spikes, Of course, you're going to see it now, but for sure I'm not following... - You can see it now - I'm not following exactly the same size, let's say, of those spikes. That's because I want this shape to flicker a little bit, to be crazy, and grow small and big. I can't explain it in a better way. Also, I want to say that this process might take some testing, some experimenting, and then going back and forth. In this particular case, I don't need to because I do this kind of animations quite often. I know what I'm going for, but I'm just saying this because maybe we would take you a couple of tries and that's totally fine. This is the third here. I'm coloring all the shapes. Then in the end, in order to see it's a loop, eight frames per second as I said before, here it goes. This is how it looks. And then you export it as a GIF, and there you have it. 6. Full Animation: Full animation. Lastly, a GIF can be fully animated. This technique is more time-consuming and requires more animation skills. It can describe an action that requires different key poses. It can also be a morphing. Morphings do work pretty well as animated stickers, and you can check my previous class about morphing loops to learn all about them. For my class project, I want to animate this wolf jumping and celebrating. I set up the project at 24 frames per second, which is standard. I start with importing the illustration we prepared before into my animation software. I want to make some loose sketches to think about the actions movements. In this case, it is better to make a rough animation first, before cleaning each frame up. Sometimes I make those sketches on a piece of paper. Sometimes I start directly in the timeline. You could also act the movement and use yourself as a reference to better analyze the action you want to describe. Here I'm trying to imagine how to make him jump. The illustration I made, is clearly the extreme key pose of the wolf in the air. I need the other extreme, the wolf on the ground. To emphasize the movement. Note how the arc of the back is the opposite in the jump and in the preparation. This position is quite closed and compressed. But I pay attention to making the silhouette easy to read. From there, I gradually make my character jump. I would like the wolf to open his arms and legs as he jumps up. At the top of the jump, the drawings are closer to each other. You can see that in this rough stage of animation, I do not care about small details like the claws, the inside of the ears, etc. When the walf falls back down, I added one smear frame where the face is all stretched and funny, this helps with a fast movement. Once I'm happy with the rough animation, I move on to Clean Up. Here on animate, I created a symbol of the face which helps me to maintain the proportions between all the elements. The last step is coloring. Remember to check your alpha channel. As usual. You need your GIF to have a clean background and silhouette. You can find the full time-lapse of this animation in the resources. So here you have three ways to bring your stickers to life. Choose the one you prefer. You can even combine some of them: For instance, have a character blinking, but also redraw the whole piece to make it boil. In the next lesson, let's find out how to use our stickers online. 7. Export: To export from Animate. Go to file > Export > Export Movie Which will give you a .swf file, or Export Gif. In animate, remember that all the layers are exported, even if they are switched off. If you don't want a layer to be exported, like for instance my rough animation, you have to set it as a Guide layer. Because as I mentioned earlier, I wanted to complicate my life with a texture. I had to export the black and the other colors separately, and add the texture later in After Effects. For the texture I created on Procreate four textures with the brush I liked, and imported them into After Effects as footage. My animation lasts only 1 second. I duplicated it four times to have 4 second loop. I applied a time remapping effect on the texture pre-comp and made it loop forever with an expression. Here I use the black animation as a mask to see the texture. You can export GIFs from After Effects and Encoder like so. Selecting animated GIFs, I did the same procedure, also with the other stickers, to add the black texture. Congratulations on creating your animated stickers! Look at them, so cute!! In order to use them, we need to export them as GIFs. A couple of notes about exporting a GIF, and some things to keep in mind, it's important to set our loop to be infinite, to have a transparent background and good image quality. Let's see how we can use them. Maybe you want to incorporate your stickers into presentation newsletters and websites to add that extra touch of fun and quirkiness. That's what I'm doing now with my wolves. Here is a template presentation in which I use my freshly animated stickers. I can simply drop them into Google slides or import them. I pick the same colors for the headlines, and spread the stickers across the presentation. I think it looks pretty nice! These waves will also look very cute in my newsletter. I can't wait to use them for the next issue. If we want to use them on Instagram stories or chats, we need to upload them. For instance, on Giphy, Simply go on Giphy - and you will need an artist's account - Upload your stickers. Alpha channel, transparent background, and most importantly, add hashtahgs for easy discoverability. Choose hashtahgs wisely and pick at least one that's only yours. I use, for instance, my own name to be able to see and find all my stickers. In the GIF research, the hashtags are not only useful for you to find and use your own animated stickers, but also to let your audience know how to find and use them. and that's it: your GIFs are up and running! In the next and final lesson, I'll give you a little bonus and some ideas to push your stickers forward and outside of the screen. 8. Bonus!: You did it. You've learned how to create a cohesive pack of animated stickers that will make your digital presence or brand shine. Now here's a little extra. You have this super cool series of spot illustrations. Do you know what you can do with it outside of the digital world? You can print them as regular stickers or you can even make them into temporary tattoos. I love re-using and repurposing my designs to optimize time and energy. I think these wolves are too cute to stay only in the digital world. You can order stickers online or you can print them at home. I recently found out, that they sell temporary tattoo paper that you can print with your inject printer. How cool is that? I hope this class has inspired you to explore the endless possibilities of animated stickers and unleash your creativity. Remember, practice makes you improve. So keep refining your skills and sharing your creations with the world. I can't wait to see your fantastic sticker packs in action! Please share your progress at any stage. I'd love to see your sketches or color palettes as well. Please also consider leaving a review as this helps greatly me and the class. Thank you for joining me in this exciting class on creating animated stickers. You can find me and my work on Social Media. I always appreciate it when you get in touch, if you have any questions or need further guidance, feel free to reach out. Now go forth and have fun bringing your illustrations to life with animated stickers Happy Creating! bye!