Creating an Animated Portrait in Photoshop

1. Introduction: Hi, welcome to my Skillshare class. My name is Ursula and I'm an illustrator. I basically do portraits, but in this class I'm going to show you how to do portrait and animation. You're going to need some Photoshop skills and some basic drawing skills. You can use these basic animation techniques, to create new portraits or to make older portraits even more interesting. This assignment will ask you to start from sketching all the way to creating a complete portrait. I'm going to teach you a composition basics, mapping your animation, and then how to save your animation. If you want to see what your animations going to look like, you can look for me in Instagram as Ursunous. Let's get to it. 2. Sketching - Part 1: I'm going to show you guys what my basic composition will be like and how I sketch it. I'm using this image of Dolores del Rio , which is a Mexican actress as a basis for my composition. But I'm also going to add lines in order for me to know where my balance and my symmetry is going to be. Because I like a lot how the hands are placed, I know I'm going to do a very symmetric type of illustration with it. I'm going to make a very rough line, horizontal, vertical in order for it to be semi symmetric and then I'm going to start seeing where I want to place things. This is why sketching is so important because I do have an idea, it started from something, but now I want to see how it looks in people. That's one of the reasons why I always encourage people to do sketches, it's the only way the idea to come from a picture or from something that inspires you to a very good actual work of art. Now, let's do another one, let's change it and use this as a reference. I'm doing it in the incorrect one, well then. We're going to do again very rough sketches like we know the face is here, we know where the hands are going to be. This is very, very rough, just so that I am aware of where I want things to go, let's do our very famous mitten hands and now that we have sort of like where things are, this is the shoulders, our eyes, where our mouth is going to be, the nose very, very roughly, we're going to place it where we want to place it and then because I want it to be symmetric, I want the eyes and the mouth and the hands to be a main focus and place it in there. But also the hair is going to be a very important aspect. I love the hair in there and the mouth, this very in the middle and of course the eyes, because the eyes are very important focal point in this picture and I want it to be a very important focus point in my composition and in my portrait. As you can see, everything is very, very rough. I'm just looking at how things are. I'm looking at how the hands are going to be placed. I know I want to do something with the hands, I have a certain idea. I'm not quite sure why, the animation may end up being around the hands but the idea is, I'm actually very obsessed with butterflies, now that I think about it we should do butterflies, but I have some ideas. I just need to place them on the paper and that's an important thing about sketching. Maybe you start with something and you end up with something completely different. For example, I am not very happy about how small this is, so I'm going to make it bigger. Again, I'm going to place it where I know I want it just so that I have still a sort of symmetric composition and then afterwards, we're going to see. 3. Sketching - Part 2: Now that I have what I wanted to as a portrait, I'm going to start sketching and mapping my animation. I know I want the hands so let's put some stuff in the hands. But I want it to have movement, a certain type of movement. This is what I'm sketching what a movement I want for the eyes to take. Because of that, I know that I have to place an important thing on both of the hands or up closer to the hands in the top. I think we are going to do butterflies now that I've said it out aloud, I want to do butterflies. We're going to do, I think three butterflies? Yeah. Let's start with this one. Let's just make a very rough butterfly. Remember this is just a sketch. Do not judge me by my very like a small butterfly. We have this one and then of course we are going to have another one here. But now that I think about it is pretty empty in the lower side. I think I want to add another one there. Just so that we know that the movement of the eyes, it is going to go in the lower part of the canvas. It's good that I'm adding this. It becomes instead of a triangle, more of a square, but let's make it a little bit bigger. That's not really going to fit. I'm going to have to change the head. It's just real quick, doesn't matter. We're just sketching still. Then I'm going to show you guys how to do the animation mapping because I'm still not quite sure what I want to do in the back. But afterwards I'll show you what I want to have as an animation and how I end up having an animation from this, the beginning of this. 4. Animation Mapping: We have this sketch of how our animation is going to be. I'm going to do another one, another layer with another color, there's the green. It's easier for me to see, of what I want the butterflies to do. I'm just going to look this up. I don't want a very complicated animation, I want something that can be in loop. In order to do that, I need to think, that's one of the reasons why I started as a butterfly, you can also start with butterflies they just fly around. What we could do is just water. I want to see what the final drawing would be like and for that, then I can just map out afterwards what I wanted it to be. For example, I have this and I want the final one to be semi-closed it means to say that this one either just becomes a little bit tighter from the butterfly and let's just say that this one will become close, and this one just think about it. I mean, all of them are going to flutter, so let's just put it us a fluttering as well. Maybe not as mush as this one, but still a flutter. Now that I have the final one, it's easier for me to do step-by-step what I wanted to do. I recommend doing it in five steps. For example, if this is one and this is the fifth one, we need the second one. It's going to be sort of like this and this one if it's the first one, so that we know what we're doing. In this case, it just moves a little bit it seems I'm going to do two more. It will look more uniform. Two more, let's just do different colors in order for us to see it. Of course, this is just sketching our animation, this isn't what our final animation is going to look like, but it's a good way to make us realize what we are animating, what we want out of it. In this ones where it's more, you can tell where it's going to move if you can. It's easier for me to show it to you guys. I may just refine it before the next one we have so I recommend you guys refining it as well. Maybe make one, take another one, it will become easier for you to know which one you can add, which one you can take, so since we're going to do the last one. If we see it without all of them, then this one first and this one. Yeah, this is how we map the animation. 5. Color Palettes & Brushes: I'm going to show you guys how I end up doing my illustrations from the very beginning. We have this one as a reference, as I said before. I've also taken this from Pinterest as my color palette, and I'm just going to add the dropper and have them here in my swatches. Now, for the brushes, this is a very important thing. I love Kyle T. Webster brushes and there are now available for CSX. But I think if not, you can still get them in the internet. I usually use the Kyle Animator drawing box, animator pencil and that one you can get by clicking here and get more brushes or looking for them in the internet. This is what it looks like. That's one of the reasons why I really, really enjoy them. They have so much ability to just do so much. You can do thick or thin and the bigger you go the better. Brushes are very important for me because there are the tools that you use in order to create beautiful things. I do recommend having a lot of other things for your illustrations. 6. Setting Up Photoshop: This is what it's going to look like now that we have the portrait, and now that we know what the animation's going to look like. Let me start from the beginning. This is our reference. This is the outline I create, just, so that I have the proportions well established. So it's no longer a sketch; this is more of a proportional wise. I have some color blocks with the brushes that I showed you guys. Now we're going to see what the animation is going to look like. I decided to make it three instead of five. Just so that it's easier and it's more fluttering. We're going to add something else afterwards from the animation; so that it looks better. But I decided to change one of them animations. Now this one's still going to be more flutter. But this one is going to change into more of an opening of wings. This is it, this is our setup. 7. Coloring Your Animation: Hi guys. In this class, I'm going to show you how I color the butterflies. We're going to recolor all of the butterflies at some point, but we're going to first do it in the layers. I have some colors that I already know that I wanted, some of them are like contrasting in the composition. But I'm still using some of the colors that I already used for the layer. First we're just going to lower the opacity for the first layer and then I'm just going to recolor this one. I'm still using the Animator's Pencil for Kyle. As I told you before, you can find that in your Photoshop in the Creative Cloud. Usually what I try to do is I try to find the same colors. I try to use like four or five colors that are similar in order to maintain the composition more complete. As I said before, I'm just going to color them. Usually this will be the first step and then I will color the other layers of our animation. It's pretty easy to just go one in a time, just coloring it. I'm going to use a little bit darker pink, just a lot, there's a little bit of that. Here we go. I try to have some idea of what I want the butterfly to look like and this is a very important part for the reference. It's always important to have your reference, and you can see it here, but I have it in my other screen, some reference materials I found in Pinterest about what those butterflies look like. I'm going to keep them pretty simple since those are the ones that are going to be there in the animation and because I have to repeat them, I don't want them to be very complicated. I'm just going to add this little things just to make them pretty. They look butterflies. This is one of the reasons why I wanted to do this animation. Also it's pretty easy to see that flutter and it's pretty good to acknowledge that. We have the colors that we already have, but I want to try this other bright pink just so that we have a little bit of contrast with the eyes and we're going to add them on the butterflies wings. Because we have a lot of pink, I'm thinking about this one, and it needs to be more contrasting just so our eye goes down. I'm just going to add a little bit of the hair color that I use and we are going to add that one so that we can still, even if we're moving our eye around for the composition, this is like a main focus as well. You know what I mean focus, maybe more of a complimentary focus. Remember, the simplest we to do it the best since we're going to repeat it. So for the first time, if you're doing this class, just try to keep it simple. Try to be very calm about it. That's it, guys. 8. Adding the Animation: In this video, I'm going to show you how to set up your Photoshop in order to use it as a animation tool. We're going to go to Window, Timeline, and we're going to create a frame animation. Sometimes when you open it, it's going to show create video timeline. This is very common because Photoshop can't do animations in a time like After Effects, but that's another story. Each frame is going to be a layer. For example, this is now our first frame. It only lasts zero seconds. We're going to add another frame with a different layer, and then a third frame with a different layer.. Now, it's going to look like this. This is too fast. What we can do is we can change the amount of time it needs to change from one to another one. It's here, has no delays, so that's zero seconds, one second. Let's see how it looks, much better. For example, this is in loop. If I want it to last more than three seconds, basically, we can just do one thing and repeat it until we have several frames. I recommend doing 30, or at least 40 frames. Because Instagram only allows videos for five or six minutes. This is 30, a good time frame to do it. That's basically it. That's how you animate, guys. 9. Rendering: Now that we have all of our frames setup, I added a little bit of a contour outside because I felt like she was very lonely in the background, and since I'm not going to add any background I think this is a good way to just frame her. Now that we have that we are going to export it, so this is what we're going to do. We're going to go "File export" and we're going to "Render video". This is very important because if you're planning on doing this for Instagram, you can't do it as a GIF, it needs to be a video. Let's just add Dolores, our folder, Adobe media encoder it's going to do it on its own. The format is perfect and the sizes of regular Instagram size, document frame rate 30 frames per second which is good, and everything is set up this way, so if you want to do your setup this is a perfect way to set it up we just add render and it's going to start doing the video, and that's it, you have now saved your video, as your illustration as a video. Now, if you want to do a GIF, we do "File", "Export", "Save" for web, now this is where you can save it as a GIF. This is the optimized phone format, on name we can just name it something else. Now I do want to let you know that if you want to save it as a GIF, I recommend doing the least amount of color. In a percentage, you can lower it because now it's 256, it's too much, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to 92 which is a good number because it maintains the things and the image size pretty well, and it lowers the amount of colors that we have because we did have a lot of colors. With that done and we're going to have it saved, and that's it guys. 10. Final Thoughts: Thank you for taking this class. I hope you liked it. In this class, you have learned how to do basic animation mapping, basic animation in Photoshop, and composition basics. I hope you like it and I hope you are willing to show me what you have done. You can find me on Instagram at ursunous, and I would love to see what you have created for this class. Remember, you can use all of the skills that I have taught you in other portraits that you have created or in any other illustration you have. Thank you.