Creating Hand-Drawn Animated Stickers for GIPHY

1. Quick Intro: Have you ever illustrated something and been interested in making it move? Or have you been curious about what it takes to make those animated stickers that you enjoy sharing on Social? My name is Monique Ray, I'm an animator and illustrator originally from Miami, currently based in San Francisco. I've been working in industry for about 13 years now, producing a wide variety of projects across mediums, including brand and editorial animations and illustrations, as well as animated short films. I love hand drawn animation, but for the longest time it intimidated me. I broke the ice for myself by creating my own series of animated stickers. This sort of creation of these really short form animations allowed me to realize that it wasn't as scary as I originally thought. And at the end of making this project, I also had this product that I could share with the world but also share with potential client. It actually won me more projects. In a similar vein, I just wrapped up a commission with Giffe and I've done a few other sticker commissions. Hand drawn animation has become one of my favorite ways to move imagery. It's now an invaluable part of my practice in artistic expression. In this class, I want to take you through the process of making your own series of animated gifts, or animated stickers as they're really called for Giffey. I'm going to take you through the process using my favorite animation application, Clip studio paint. So feel free to join me if you're using an act that isn't clip, there's still valuable content that you could get. From this class, I'll be sharing best practices for gifts on gifty platform. And show you how to export and upload them to the site. Also take you through the process of creating your own artists accounts. So your gifts will be searchable and sharable on social. Maybe this sounds interesting to you if I'm looking forward to seeing you in the class and I'm excited to see you inmates. 2. GIFs VS Stickers: Before we jump into the class, I wanted to explain the distinction between gifts and stickers. On Gifte, you'll hear me using these terms interchangeably in this class, and that's my bad. They are two different things. A gift is an animation that has a background, a sticker has a transparent background stickers. You see more often in media apps like Instagram and Tiktok, where you put stickers on top of photos and videos, gifts. You see a lot in messaging contexts like DMs or Facebook comments. For example, you'll need an artist's account in order for your stickers to be, it would be shared on social wherever gift is integrated in this class, we'll be focusing on the creation of stickers. But you could take what you learn here and make regular gifts too. 3. Sticker Ideation Through Sketches: Okay, so in this class I'm going to walk you through the ideation process of creating a sticker pack. When making a sticker pack, there are some best practices to consider. I'll link to the full page so you can check it out. But the highlights are The background should be completely transparent with no edges or borders. The animation should loop and be around six to 15 seconds long. At least 20% of it has to be transparent in order for it to work as a sticker. And in order for your artists account to be approved, you need to have at least five stickers. That feels like a good amount also for us to create for a sticker pack to make sort of this holistic piece of work. We're going to aim for that when we're designing my stickers will live within the world of a personal project that I've been developing for a little while that's based off of my childhood growing up in Miami. This is a great avenue to promote any sort of creative projects that you're working on yourself or any characters that you've been designing. And if you're at a loss for what to draw, just pull up the emojis on your phone. Emojis were a big part of the inspiration for the sticker pack that I did called Brown Skin ladies. Okay, since already know this based on, so I'm going to start out drawing my main character. The main character of Serah C is based off of childhood version of me. You're going to call her little, she's pretty active rambunctious girl. I'm seeing her running, I'm just following that bread and drawing that out all. Don't worry about these being really sexy drawings. These are about getting your ideas out. We'll refine them later. Either here, um, analog or I'm going to bring them back to clip studio paint and refine the sketches there. So think of this as just sort of idea dumps. All right, so we got a little mo run in, kind of drawn to that sort of imagery of her. I'd love to draw one eye. Don't ask me why she's happy she's running. And I feel like adding another character from the story, her dog Abby, which is based off of my present day dog, Abby. In this story, we're playing like Abby and I knew each other when we were younger. She was in my life when I was a kid and we're running together and she's feeling good about the day too. So I'm going to draw that I, that I love. All right. So I'm loving that idea. Okay. And lomo is a chatterbox. She loves drawing our own stories and sharing them with her friends and her family. So I'm seeing her like doing a little like blah, blah, blah. You know, like with her hands really enthusiastically sharing a story. She's like, and then this happened and then that happened. You know what I'm saying? Text works really well in these stickers. Try to stick text in wherever you can. You know if it works for the drawing. And I love me, a chat bubble, I think we're going to have blah blah coming from her mouth. Blah, blah, blah. That feels good. I'm digging it. Okay, so we have two ideas already that I'm feeling. Speaking of chatter box, I see another one with little Mo and Abby having a convo, why not? This is cartoon and they got things to talk about. Let me tell you they got things to talk about. All right, so. Abby and chatting up a storm. Yeah, I can already see this animation, Right? I can see it. I know y'all can see it too. These mouths opening a heads, moving these little lines. I love the expressive comic lines adding those to my animations to con, illustrate, talking or action. I could see those sparking out the, moving their mouths. I'm digging that. Let's see. Sometimes when I'm at a loss for what I'm going to draw, I like to just jot down of a few ideas. Words, words help me ideate. I'm going to do that right now. Miami is the most obvious word that I can think of. This is where the whole story takes place. Thinking about childhood, what we got up to, fish market, mine, fish market, fish market, my family, my parents, and I used to go down to the beach on the weekends, on Sunday especially, and we'd go to local fish market. You could think of it like a farmer's market but like Island style. You know, there was a vendor there who would sell coconuts, chop off the top and give you a scoop and a straw so you can enjoy the contents. I'm enjoying what I'm saying, so I'm going to put coconut thinking about what else little gets up to. She loves to draw. Drawing is like one of the oldest hobbies. Thinking of the things that I've done throughout my life and drawing is one of them. So we're going to put down draw. What else does Lim get up to? She skateboards. She's a skateboarder. And true story I did skateboard when I was a kid. I was not very good. I maybe was able to do kick flip and that's it. Lim is a better skateboarder than I was. We're going to put that down because I think that could be really fun drawing. Let's see, Family. Serious is all about family, man, so let's write that down to. All right, cool. So I'm feeling inspired by these words. Let's see what sort of imagery I can pull from that fish. Something about that drive to the fish market which was super scenic. Miami's a beautiful place, it's never been. I'm seeing, I'm seeing little mo in the car head out the window. Enjoying the weather. Though in real life it is super hot and humid in Miami, depending on the day. Right? So we'd actually have the AC popping in this car. We'd have the AC going in real life. But you know, this is cartoon. So we can embulge a little bit, head out the window, let's see, maybe a hint of mom and Dad, We can just draw some heads here. Mom and Dad always had on shades. Draw some glasses. We'll figure that all out later. I'm actually thinking, maybe this is already feeling too long as a sticker. If I'm going to do this, I may want to do maybe just a half of them or think about how I can size this up. This is given Sunday drive and energy, maybe I'll put Sunday somewhere here. It could like I'm kind of enjoying the idea of being in the car, right? So maybe actually grab another color so that I can kind of see what I'm doing. Maybe there's some palm trees was by quintessential Miami, you know, and that could be fun. That also helps sort of simulate motion. You know, movement even though nothing's moving in this, right, this will be static, that image. But we can have some elements in the background going by. I think that could be fun. All right, cool. What else we got? Coconut, coconut, Enjoying a coconut. I think that's the best thing to do with that. Maybe go ahead with the straw, you know, coming straight out the coconut. Okay, cool. So I skipped ahead a little bit because I think you guys get the idea of sort of how I work through the ideation process when thumbnailing. I'll walk you through the ideas. I ended up coming up based off of these words that I jotted down here. Here we have the skateboard. Beyond a skateboard, here's how the coconut drawing ended up turning out. I'm loving it. We have me drawing, enjoying laying down. Then this one right here was going to be a family portrait, but I'm actually feeling like I don't need it. The rest of the sketches are feeling really good and we're already at five. I think I'm just going to stick with these skateboard coconut draw and then the other ones that we walk through, Sunday driving sketch that I'm enjoy blah, blah. Maybe one of my favorites. And then me and Abby chatting up a storm. And then she and I running as well. Feel like it's more than enough for us to start expanding on these ideas. Now that we've got some ideas down, some sketches that we're enjoying, we're going to go ahead and scan or take a photo of this and bring this over to our computer. We're going to begin a digital process of this clip studio paint, which would be refining the sketch and then pushing it into final illustration. 4. Getting to Know Clip Studio Paint: Now that I have my drawing scan, we're going to go into CSP. And I'm actually going to familiarize you guys with the workspace before we dive into actually producing any illustrations in that. Okay, we're going to jump into CSP. Your apple like can look very different than mine. One of the great things about CSP is how modular it's workspace is. You can yank out, pull them wherever you need them to be. If there's any panels that I'm referring to that you can't find in your workspace, you can really easily find them up here in the window. Drop down for example. Say I come in here and I don't see the animation timeline. Just come up here. To start, I'm just going to walk you through some of these panels. The panels that you're very likely to use the most, all of your tools here, high level. Some of the most important ones for me are going to be the brush tools. I encourage you to play with these clip studio paint, comes stocked with so many incredible brushes that you can use. What I love about it, they really simulate real world textures in traditional mediums. Check these out. Pencils are some of the ones that I'm gravitating towards a lot lately. You can also import brushes. In here you can see some of these I've manipulated from the stock versions and also imported in some of my own. This is actually appropriate pencil that I love. I think it's the six pencil that I have brought in to clip studio paint. This one is one of my favorites right now. Sketch pencil. We got our pen, our pencil, our eraser, our brush. We've got our field tool, which you're going to be using a lot. I'll walk through all these settings while we're in the illustration phase because we'll be using this tool quite a bit. We've got the object tool which allows you to manipulate vectors to better illustrate that. Let's create a project. Let's actually bring in our sketch so I can better show utilization of some of these tools. We're going to go over to the folder. I'm bring CSP back up, drag drop that on the icon, and that brings that in. Okay, to show these layers. All right. Csp is a few layers that you can use. It has a rasterized layer which is really great. There's a vector layer which is amazing. The object tool is going to allow you to manipulate that, which is really awesome. The pinch tool also gives you another way to manipulate these vectors. We have some amazing that can allow you to push this how you need to, didn't feel that. Then we have our timeline. Csp is a little different than some other apps when it comes to how animation works. First of all, in order to do any animation, you're going to need to create a timeline. You can do this one of two ways. You can either create an animation project when you go to a new project, and that'll be this last one right here. Manipulate these settings however you want to hit, okay? And that's going to automatically give you a timeline. Or you can just make a time line by tapping this button right here for the playback time. I'm going to shorten that. These are short animations. I'm going to make this 1 second. For now, I'm going to be working at a frame rate of 24, which means 24 drawings per second and likely animating on two. These are gifts and they had to be small sizes. I think this is a good start. I'm going to link that playback time, 24, 1 second. There's our timeline. You ever create this and you're like, oh, I want it to be longer, I want it to be shorter. You can just really easily drag this if you want to make it something really long and you don't want to drag that out like crazy. You can go over here, you go to timeline, change settings, and you can change that to 100, and it's going to bring that out. Be wary of this because your drawings, whatever you've created before, you've done that, they'll end still at the last frame of your timeline before you extended it. You need to stretch these out. You can do that, really. Shift. Click those and drag them out to where you need them. I'm good with 24, so I'm going to go back a little bit. Okay, a moment in animation in CSP is called the cell. And the cells need to be connected to the timeline in order to register. If you want to create any animations, you're going to create this guy which is a new animation folder. And then your drawings are going to be nested within that. Each of these drawings is going to be a second of your animation, but these need to be connected to the timeline in order for it to be seen. All what we're going to do is connect those. In order to connect them, you can just go over here, hit that button, hit one, go over here, hit that button to, this is a roundabout way to do it. You can also disconnect these, which is really powerful. I still have that two drawing. Maybe I drew something and I'm not so sure about it, But I don't want to delete it. I can just disconnect it from the time line and that drawing will still be there. But another way to do this and how it's typically done, another way to do this, and maybe easier way to do it, depending on what you're going for, is to just do that. And that'll create a new drawing for you on the area of the timeline that your indicator is on. You can see the pop over here, okay? And this button right here is going to cut on onion skinning. Let's put some of this to work. Let's create a new animation. You can use this guy that I created previously. We already have an animation folder here. And let's draw something easy. How about a blank? Let's go blank. That's these brushes. I like that draw. I like a la, a las. Okay, here we go. All right, awesome. And then we're going to go over a little bit and I want to create a new drawing on six. So I'm going to hit that and I want to see my previous drawing, so I'm going to hit this, which is onion skinning. Drawing another pieces looking Now say I want to utilize drawing two for my third drawing. I want to build off of that drawing. For my next drawing, I'm going to share an auto action that automates the process for you. But I do want to show you all what the process is, what this auto action is, Sally, essentially doing is duplicating that layer, renaming that three and connecting that to the timeline. You can see that was a whole lot, that was the whole thing. Delete that. Disconnect this so you guys can really see what's going on. This is something good to know. Two, you're going to see me utilizing this in a later lesson. When you delete a layer from your layer stack, it doesn't erase it. It's indicator from the timeline. The timeline is still looking. For drawing number three, you need to disconnect that, but this can work in your favor. I like to do this and just create another drawing. And you can see CSP is smart. It knows the next order is 3.3. Is already here, so it's going to automatically connect that drawing for me. This is something you'll see me utilizing when I'm doing my line work and my field work for my animations. All right, so this and I'll show you guys the beauty of this auto action. Select two on your timeline. Bring your layer stack, excuse me. And then move over to where you want this third drawing to be, this duplicated version of two. Then you're going to go to this auto action that I'm going to provide to you guys and hit play. You can see it did it all for me. Now we have a duplicate of drawing two that we're utilizing for drawing three. Which handy? All right. I'm going to leap back, put on my onion skin because I actually don't need it. That will just to illustrate the idea, I'm going to do another frame. I'm doing this, I like a walkie line, but if you want to draw straight lines, shift allows me to get there. All right, closing it on up. Let's see what this is looking like. My time line is too long. I'm going to go over here. Go to time line, change settings long. I'm going to make that 24. We can bring it in closer. Okay, now I want to open it. Eye back up. Instead of drawing those frames again, I'm going to utilize the drawings that I already have in this case. I want an instance of two here. I'm going to hold all grab two and drag it over. And you can see now I'm using that two drawing, You can see it two over on the layer stack. It's when I go to two, it's bouncing back to that two drawing. This is really great because if I make any changes here, I'm going to raise something. See it? I go over to two, it's the same drawing. Those changes are going to carry across. Undo that, grab one, hold, all, drag that over. See how this is looking? We're going to hit play. Play is right here for all. Okay, cool. Maybe I want to hold this open a little bit and I can hold it on the end. Maybe I want to hold this close a little bit. Can drag that out, you can play will give a different result for your animation. Now do we have a better idea of the clip studio paint interface and tools and animation timeline? We're going to move on to the next lesson where we're going to refine those sketches that we did previously. Next lesson, be ready to bring your scans or your photo of your sketches into clip studio paint or whatever apple you're choosing. And we're going to start working on those sketches and pushing them and finalizing those for animation. I'll see you in the next lesson. 5. Refine Our Original Sketch: Now we're in clip studio paint. I have my sketches that I've brought in. I'm going to start refining one of these and taking this over to the final illustration phase. I'm feeling blah, blah, blah. I think I'm going to refine this sketch right here. So what I'm going to do first is create a new layer. Mean that sketch like that. Zoom in. All right, so this is really me just taking this sketch to the next level, right? So that when I'm doing my final line work, I have a pretty good guide. I don't have to think about it. So much stabilization is on, I'm going to cut it off. I like to leave that for you when I'm refining my sketches or doing my final line work, I should say. Okay, you see me racing pretty quickly without clicking buttons. That's because I have my eraser attached to this button on my Waco. Let's, you know these characters. I, it's been interesting to see how they develop. You know, the more that I draw them, I kind of with the characters not having ears sometimes and then drawing ears other times. You know, I don't, who knows where that will land eventually. But digging there being an ear because these heads are so simple, right? And ears. Nice additional data to know like what direction she's looking in and what she's doing to be a little more oblong. Okay. The proportions don't feel right to me. Little is little, so let's make her smaller. See about this, blah, blah. I'm actually going to dim this light a little bit. You can see we start to see those transparency cubes back here. So what I'm going to do is just create a new layer, make it white, Fill it completely in so that I can have something that this can be transparent against some, a lightness a little bit. Go back to that layer, go back to my pencil, select my red again, blah, blah. I like the idea of this sort of forming around her. Okay, I draw her. Mm hmm. Let's start to write this out. See how this is feeling? I know the power of threes. I feel like there needs to be another block. So let's do that. Let's squeeze another blow in here. Blaw, let's see if we can cram it in. I think we can blow, and it could be cool that it's like trailing off a little bit. Give these a little more space. I'm going to my lasslol, I'm going to manipulate this a little bit. All right? So that there's a little more separation between these words. I'm gonna bring this in a little tighter. I kind of like breaking arms and doing like weird and wacky proportions, you know. Okay, awesome. So we see sort of how that developed from this sort of rough situation, this rough idea to now this drawing. 6. Complete Linework: So we're just going to jump into line work. To this, I'm actually going to hide my timeline. I don't need it yet. Drag this down to give me more drawing space. And then I'm going to create another layer. I'm actually going to go into my line work. What I created right here was my vector layer. Let's start naming these. Name this line work. This is already named sketch. Okay, cool. I have my line work and I'm going to go over, I'm digging this pencil. Yeah, that looks good. I like that a lot. So this is what I'm going to use. So now we're going to go in, start to illustrate this. Okay? I like to turn on a little stabilization. When I'm doing like these big shapes, I don't like to do too much but two each is on. Draw this ear. All right. One what you just saw me do right there. Sometimes I get some weirdness if I have to cut on, on certain brushes, so I occasionally cut it off. Sometimes I work with it, kind of depends on the brush. So if you're experiencing any sort of like weird, you could probably see that happening here. Line withs. Check your tilt. Maybe cut that off. That, right. I always make sure to zoom out. You know, these stickers are going to be really small on a cell phone, you know, you want to make sure your ideas are reading at the size folks will likely see it at. Right back in, so I can finish up these arms. This. So here, select this with my objects selector. Move it around a little bit around, all right. Give her a pony blend. Okay, So I'm going to go to correct lines. Sometimes what I like to do a correct line is connect these lines here. You see this sort of when I came around with that shade, clicking this on, it'll connect it. You can also use this. Select that from the subtool section and draw on it like that. And that'll connect the lines too. But I need to move this around anyway, so that looks so weird to it. I like to use the vector layers to just like finest my drawing a little bit. I don't want to change the way I drew it too much. I wanted to still have that unique fingerprint. You know what I mean? But it's nice to have to move some things around. Something that's also really cool about vector layers is the ability to a line that's gone across. This is really great if you want to draw big shapes because it's easier to control your line work when you draw that way. And then you can delete those extra bits in order to make sure you have that selected. You're going to go to your eraser tool and you're going to check on Vector eraser. You're going to want this, something that I always keep on is really useful to. Okay, cool. I'm going to turn off the to see how this is feeling. I'm actually liking it a lot. So now let's go and create a color here. Let's put this on folder, okay, so in our radio, do our colors. 7. Add In Color: All right, I'm ready to do my fills. I'm going over into the colors that I like to use for these characters and I'm going to pull them. But feel free to select whatever colors you need for your artwork. A lot of times I'm pulling from this color wheel, seeing what looks good but feels good first. Before I do that, I want to make this earring. I'm going to select it with the object layer, go to the color I want, and click All right. I'm going to color, I'm going to go back to fill and refer other layers. You want to make sure that refer multiples on because we're going to want to reference our linework layer. In this case, all of our art is in one folder. This would actually work for us. We can now reference any layer that's within this folder and cut on go to my color layer and it knows that it wants to respect this linework layer. Alternatively, say this is outside of that layer, that's all good, we can just hit this lighthouse. What this means now is it's going to respect any layer that's a reference layer. Then you just make whatever layer you want and you can make multiple layers or reference layer at one time. Click that on, go to your color, and it's going to do the same thing. We're going to go back a little bit because I want to keep those in the folder. Go back to this, start to color this character. Now you can see because my line is broken here, it doesn't know, it fills everything. This is actually her shirt. I don't know if this is going to work here, because this is such a massive break. But let's give it a shot. If you close gap, I'm going to up it to like 50, something really big. And look at that, it actually did work. That's pretty cool. If I don't need it anymore, I'm going to cut it off or bring it back down to 20. Because if you have it too high and you don't need it to be that high, it starts to do some greatness. Going to go back to black, fill these layers, and then want orange for her shirt out. And then don't forget to color anything that needs to be white because these stickers are going to be transparent, right? I mean this being having no background is actually a cool look to me. Maybe I'll leave this but say you want this to be white. A lot of times our background layers are white and we forget to color in those white things, fill that. I actually think that would work better using the sticker on a busy background. This text could get lost. Zoom out, see how it's reading. I think we can do a little something here to make this more legible. So let's pull this out. I love this a little bit. Let's just use a brush to fill this in. I'm going to start to manipulate this text a little bit to make sure it's reading that little thing. Let's see out. I'm like law. And as I'm doing the action too, I'm realizing that I probably don't want this hand to be like this. I want to be this way. So I'm going to augment that. All right? Let's fix that. I don't want her thumb to be out here. I don't want her, her whole palm broke. See sometimes for me, it's nice to just do another layer and start to work. See what's good, draw my fixes over it and then come back and be precious about it later. So let's do that. I think it needs a little more lane to it so that it reads. Yeah. Okay. I'm just going to hide my color real quick so I can make these. I'm actually going to duplicate this layer, and I want to keep that around so I can see the difference. And I'm going to this hand, I kind of like the looser nature of this hand. I might take that across to the other hand too. This is No. Yeah, I like that. I like the energy of that can. Right. So let's bring this layer back. And it feels more like the action that I'm trying to illustrate. Anyway, law. Law, law. All right, so let's go ahead and erase these and find that. So it's feeling, it's giving what it needs to give. Okay. Hello, Bett. Boom. Wonderful. A little palm line, P, B. Okay. Let me bring this up. I want to bring this back down a little bit. Can you see more of a hand on the other arm? Perfect. So cut my color back on. I'm probably gonna just I can keep I can salvage it. I'm gonna get rid of this stuff. I'll be under wrong, er. Okay, go back to those colors again. Go back to my film. Do that back here. I'm just going to erase this. Know I'm gonna just pencil this and I'd like to come over 'cause these, these brushes have really awesome texture in it, right? I like to sometimes come behind those lines and add my fill. I think I'm going to extend this down. So I'm going to grab my correct line tool and just drag that over a little bit. It doesn't need to be fully connected for me connected a little more, select my color line, color, fill that over. I think I do want to bring this over. I bring my correct line just a little bit, blah, blah, blah. You know, sometimes you got to act it out right when you're doing his work. It's best to not take yourself too serious, you know. Okay, cool. So it's feeling good to me. Could maybe just for the sake of perspective, make this hand bigger. Because technically it would be causes closer in space to us. But this is cartoon and I'm like the whacky nature of the Strong, so I'm going to leave it as it is. All right, cool. Zooming out. That feels good to me. Don't forget to save all. If you drag your image in here, you're going to need to save as if you just do a regular save, it's going to save it as whatever that image was for me. If it's a PNG, it's just going to save it as a PNG. You don't want to do that. You want something that you can open up and CSP and see all of your layers. So make sure you save As or you can save, duplicate, save As, name it, whatever you'd like. Make sure it's Clip studio paint format and then save it. I've already saved so we don't need to fix that. All right, cool. So now that we have an illustration that we love, we're going to take this over to the next lesson and animate it. Think about, this is a moment in your animation that we're going to build on in the next lesson. I'll see you in the next class. 8. Rough Out Our Animation: In this lesson, we're going to animate one of our stickers. I'm going to stick with blah blah, blah. We're going to go ahead and create a new scene. I'm going to make these, the scene 1,000 by 1,000 pixels. And make sure you toggle on your animation projects. And I'm going to bring this down to 24 frames. I might want something more, maybe 48. Okay, I'm going to go over here and grab my line work and my color command, C command V. You see that? Put it in this animation folder and that's why we can't see it. I'm just going to pull it out and you can see a little bit of her pony over here and drag it over, center it up, and get my time line back in. Okay, a good way to think about frame by frame animation is to break it down to sort of the key poses, the key moments in the animation. Lucky for us, we already have one key moment. This illustration that we did. I'm going to name this original name, this rough on my animation folder. Put this on top. Dim this a little bit. What I like to do when I'm animating, even if I'm working from an illustration that I've already done, I like to draw a mock of that illustration. It's easier for me to digest it if all of the frames have constant visual quality to it. I'm going to do that right now for the phrase frame digging this real pencil. This doesn't have to be sexy drawings. Again, you know, we're back into really keeping it rough. The idea is the gesture, the idea of what we're trying to convey. Clean it up in the next pass. Okay, just draw everything in. All right, cool. So we got our first frame of animation and I'm going to create another empty layer. I'm going to cut on on. I'm thinking about what is the other extreme moment in this animation, right? If we got this, then this feels like the other most extreme moment, right? I like to act these out. It just helps me think about the animation. I'm even seeing how my shoulders move as I do that movement. I lean back, I lean into it. The head is probably going to come up a little bit with this, considering all of that, I'm going to redraw this head. I'm definitely going to animate this mouth. That's too good to not do that, right? In this case, I actually want to keep the head and the body separate. It's just going to make it easier for me to plan this out. What I'm going to do is take two, drag it onto the folder, and you can see that it put it in a folder called two. That's why you can still see it because all the timeline cares about is what layer is Mam, whether it's a folder rasterized layer, whether it's a vector layer, it just wants to know which layer is named to. Once it finds it, it connects it for you. This is great, because now I'm going to move this head up a little bit. A good thing to think about when you're animating is art. What I'm going to change this color so I can illustrate what I'm saying better. Making sure these movements happen on some arts help the animation cell. So let's undo that. I'm going to draw the hands coming in, clasping up, cut off my skin real quick. It's good to sort of flick between your drawings to see what's going on. Definitely want to cut off your skin every now and then and just go between these drawings. If you see me making noises that aren't keyboard noises, it's because I have this hot key remote that I'm utilizing. All of my hot keys are binded to this, but I'm also sharing all of my hot keys with you. You don't need one of these in order to use hot keys forever. I was using a good old keyboard. Whether you have one of these or not, all you need is your hot keys appended. In order to do that, it's good for me to show you all how to do that as well, so you can create your own hot keys if you'd like. You're going to go up to Clip Studio Paint. You're going to go to Shortcut Settings. Click here. Within this menu, you're going to be able to change any hot keys you want, add any keys that you would like. For example, you need to get from the previous frame or to the next frame or something that I'm using a lot. From a previous cell to cell is option option, and option X is option Z and option X is F. Quite a bit for that then for me to go from one frame to the next, which would be not one drawn to the next, but from frame one to frame two to frame three, I have that set to option shift. And option shift, back to animating this that I'm going to hit back on my onion skin, and I know my shoulder wants to come up. I animate that up a little bit more. I also want to animate this up a little. She's closing up her fist so I can see, do you put my blah blah in another there? I created a new layer. And I'm going to put this on a separate layer instead of merging it because I'm not sure what I I don't know if I'm going to she's talking it's cut off skin to see what that looks like. I'm going to love that. Maybe it'll be behind the stay in place, but behind she, I think that might be, she wants to let that see how that's reading. Maybe even bred girls, it's behind her head but then comes in front of her pony. All right, so let's keep developing these drawings since her head is coming up. I'm using all to grab this red again, all essentially brings up your eye dropper tool, it's a hot key for that. And the cool thing about learning frame by frame animation through a process of making gift gift. Inherently, we need to be a low frame rate so that you can make something that a lot of people can use on different devices regarding themself. I have a zip that taking advantage of that and minimizing your drawings. You're really focused on the acting as opposed to. So this animation is, you know, we like smooth animation. You can also aim for that. There's nothing wrong with, there's nothing wrong with that at all. But definitely wanting to sell the motion more than anything else, with as little drawings as possible. It's a good idea. Okay, so I'm just going to drag this so I can get a quick idea of what this feels like. It's actually feel bad. Bring this in. I can get an idea of timing. I kind of want another sort of motion to bring alive a little bit more. So what I'm thinking about is some sort of follow through, a little bounce back when she goes like this. So she kind of doesn't just land flatly at that motion. I'm going to build on this one drawing. So what I'm going to do is go ahead and use our duplicate raster cell and make this, you can leave that out soon. Bring one over, I'll click bring that over. Fix that spacing so it's not happening so quickly. Okay, so now see how we can push this drawing a little bit that effect that I'm looking for. So I'm gonna put this in a folder and I'm going to separate these. Elle, Okay, cool. So once I sort of have a rough animation that is looking good to me, I'm ready to kind of move on to adding my lines back in. 9. Add Linework To Our Animation: Okay, now that I have a rough animation that I'm enjoying, I'm going to go ahead and do my line work. Go ahead and create another animation layer. We're going to call this line. I'm going to use vectors here. I'm going to name this or create a vector layer by ticking that and connect them. The great thing is, is that if I want to create another blank layer here, another animation cell, and I hit that clip studio paint, knows that I've already been using vector layers, so it's going to make that a vector layer too. All right, so I'm going to start doing our line work. So for starters, I'm just going to go ahead and grab my lines from my original drawing, my original art. I'm going to go ahead and copy that, Taste it. Here's our first frame. I'm going to go over here. I'm created. Let's hide that for now. Again, bring this back on. I'm going to go to one. There's some things that I want to utilize from this. What I'm going to do is go ahead and hit my object tool and start grabbing the elements that I need to no paste them. And I'm going to do something similar work in the same non destructive way that I was working on my rough layer so it's easier for me. I'm going to drag that and pull that into a folder so that I have separation between these elements. Go ahead and grab the head separately in the earring as well. Copy that, create a new vector layer, and paste that in. Now I can move that up really easily. Let's hide this for now. Go back in with my black, go back to the pencil that I was using. I'm going to check my line with to make sure I'm using the right line with for this art. Looks good. Make sure it's 12 so that I match it and draw that. We're going to change this, so. All right, cool. So I'm also going to pull the body, so I want that to stay relatively the same. And then I'm going to paste that into that folder. I want this to move up a little bit. I don't want to be too stiff. Okay, cool. So I did pretty poor drawing for these hands for myself, so I'm going to have to figure out what I was trying to do or I could, you know, refine it in a sketch, but I don't think that's necessary. Let's see if this is make sense a little bit. Let's pull that over and you can see I'm using, I have my Select Layer tool appended to this button on my Waken pen. So it allows me to really just select layers really easy, really quickly, so I don't have to go up here and toggle it, so that's what you see me doing. Okay, that's fine. I'm feeling that this round carry, I'm gonna hide my roof and just make sure these frames are working together like they feel right. No feeling good to me. So I'm gonna keep developing this one. It's fine in the head, up top so that that hearing doesn't get clipped by the hand. I'm actually going to move this chest line into a little bit. Alright, cool. So I'm loving those two frames. Move on to two, which remember was an extension of one. I duplicated one to make that I'm going to do the same thing here. Now remember we can't use this to do that. It's going to rasterize our layers and we don't want that. I'm going to undo all that. I'm going to do it. I'm going to go ahead and create an empty cell. It's going to create a folder for me because that's what I did before. I'm cool with that. I'm just going to delete everything. Actually delete everything, but one thing, I do need one layer. I'm going to go back here and I'm going to go to my object layer. And I'm going to go ahead and copy this and paste it here. I'm going to separate these guys again. She grab everything, cut it, and paste it into a new layer. All right, cool. And we're going to do some more separation than we did before. I do want the head separate from the body cut. All right, cool. So now I have these elements so that I can independently move around. And I'm going to go back to that body layer for ahead and erase this hand. Actually know I'm going to keep it. I do want to maintain. Bring it down. Let's see how this reads. Sometimes it doesn't look good. We just kind of squash and manipulate things like this. I think it could work. Let's see. I don't hate it, so it's the starting point. At least I feel like I'm losing a little bit of an arc there. Let's bring the one over. Okay, it's feeling good to me. Can let's go ahead and get this arm in order. I can go ahead and use this to kind of move things where I want it to be. This is great because if I cut this up to something like 90, it's going to really move a lot of elements. And if this size live about can move this around and create this. Let's bring it down a little bit. Again, bring it up a little bit, lock that, turn the sides down again. I don't love what's happening, man, just to make sure that's making sense. Let's cut on onion skin. Should be aid. They're out. I kind of want this to bend more, so I'm just going to go ahead and use that correct line tool to kind of push this a little bit then I want this to, so I'm actually going to do that since this is a straight line. Just all right, let's see how this is reading without onion skin in the rough on. So fun, I want something more happening with this mouth. I think what I did here was I widened it. Let's follow that. I'm going to use my correct line tool again. I'm going to hit on Connect lines, so that this can become one shape. Turn this down a little bit. 10. Add Color to Our Animations: Okay, so this is feeling good to me, so I'm going to hide my rough layer and I'm going to zoom out so I can see this in its real state. I kind of love the idea of this popping up, this bubble, so I think I'm going to leave it like that. You're digging it. It's fun. Okay, so now that I'm ready for my color layer, instead of just creating a new animation layer, naming it color, and then going to each frame, what I'm actually going to do is delete that and duplicate my line layer, name that color and go in and delete everything that's inside that color layer. What that does is it leaves these markers for me. This is awesome, because now I have these points that I can go to really quickly using those hot keys, as opposed to going here, making a new frame. Naming it like doing all of this, this creates a nice little template for me that is based off of my line layer. Now I'm going to go ahead and create a new raster layer because it understands that one was here. It's going to connect it for me. I'm going to cut on my original up, the opacity and I'm going to move it out of the way. Move it up here. I'm just going to use that as a color. Go ahead and pull those colors from here. It looks like I already have them in here. But if you don't, this is the way you would do it. I'm going to have that then I'm going to start filling refer other layers is what you want to have checked on for your subtools instead of the folder like last time. What we're going to hit is this lighthouse. Then I'm going to go to the entire animation folder for lines and I'm going to hit lighthouse for that. I'm going to start with filling the blocks. I'm going to cut this on for reference. I'm going to cut this on for reference. I think I'm going to up the scale just a tiny bit and make sure guys you can see if fill up to Vector isn't on it creates these weird lines going on. You definitely want that to be checked on that and inside the mouth is black. I'm going to go to my next key. I'm going to add another key frame. Do the same thing, go to my next one for three, add another, and repeat. And I'm just going to do this for all my colors and we're going to zip through this. So you guys going to have to watch me do this. All right, there we go, blah, blah, blah. For the next chorus, we're going to export this out as I'm going to upload me animating all of these if you want to check them out, it'll be just a sort of fast time lapse if you're curious about how those stickers develop. I'll see you in the next class. 11. Export Your Stickers: Hey y'all, It's a new day. I had to take some time to animate the rest of the stickers. I hope you enjoyed yourself animating yours as much as I enjoyed myself animating mine. Now we're going to jump into exporting these files as gifts in preparation to upload them onto Giffy in the next lesson. Okay, so let's get into it. I am going to start with blah blah, that first gift that I animated. Okay, And starters, what you want to do is hide your paper layer. This is going to give you a transparent background to your gift. And that's what those blocks in the back indicate indicates transparent space. Cut that off. Then we're going to go over to file. Actually, before that, I like to check my animations with the transparency. Sometimes you can see like little errors and things you didn't fill in when the background is transparent, that you may not see when the background is white. This looks good to me. I'm going to go to file an export animation, excuse me. Then I'm going to go to animated gift. I'm kicking my folder that I want to save it into save. And then you're going to get this prompt from CSP that gives you loads of options for your gift. For starters, it's likely going to re size yours like it did me sometimes. That's good, right? You want your gift to be as small as possible in most use cases. But in this case, gift actually resizes your gift based on the context. Theoretically, it doesn't matter how big it is resolution wise, as long as the gift file is under 100 megabytes. So if you're within that file size, then you can make it pretty large. I'm going to stick with the original size that I develop these at, which is 1,000 by 1,000 Then export range. This is pulling data from your timeline. If your timeline is exactly the length that you want it to be, this is going to be right framer. I'm going to leave it the same tip. If you want to size your gift down, you could make your frame rate 12 frames per second. I'm good at 24 FPS. I'm going to leave that as is. And you want to make sure that your count is unlimited. Then also make sure this is ticked on, even if you hide your background layer, your paper layer. If this isn't ticked, you're still going to have a white background. Make sure that is good to go. Then we have this setting for dithering. I don't need it because I'm using really flat colors. And that's just my stylistic approach, typically anyway. But if you're using more gradients, you have more detail in your stuff, in your animation, then you might want to click this on, see what it does for your file size, you'll see you make more. There's a lot of trial and error in the export process to make sure that your sizes are good, to make sure that your file size is good, to make sure that you're not losing detail. To make sure that your colors are as accurate as they can be, that you're comfortable with the color accuracy. Sometimes gifts can shift colors a little bit. There's settings that you may need to play with, but depending on the outcome of your export. The great thing is when I hit, okay, Clip studio paint is going to tell me how large the gift is, and that'll give me instant indicator of whether I need to lower some settings, lower my resolution, see what I need to do to size it down. I'm going to hit okay. It's not even, it's 862 kilobytes, which is way under 100 megabytes. I'm good to go. I'm going to hit okay for that, This one straight. Now I'm going to go to the next one, which is chat. I'm just going to follow the same process and hide the paper and then go through the export process and check them first. Before I do that, something I highly recommend looking good. This is a perfect example of why you should check your gifts with your background transparent. What I noticed is that I forgot to color in my straw. You can see those transparent blocks going through there. Lucky for me, these are only a few frames, and it's going to be real fast to take care of this. Go in and fill in this real quick. So you can see on some of the fills are a little more rough because I didn't use the paint bucket tool to fill some of these gifts. I actually went in frame by frame and scribbled in the fill. Just inspired by some of the traditional work that I've been doing. Traditional medium work, I should say, with color pencils and these. I didn't do it to all of the gifts, but you have fun with it. Keep it loose, see what works, see what doesn't. I thought it was cute, so I added it to a few of these. Now you can see that this is filled. All right, so I'm going to go in with the white now and take care of that. And then export this gift as well. Cool, so now that's looking good. Go ahead and exploit it. We could see you there. I'm noticing another little air. I'm in a fixed thought. A little loose is good. That's kind of what I'm going for. Cool, I gonna go to the next sort. All right, here's another instance where I'm noticing my cartridge isn't colored. So it's color in my game girl. All right, let's look at it again. Out, cool. All right, let's export this animation. Animated Gifs Game Girl man. I would have killed for a game girl when I was young, Huh? Why we didn't have one of those? You know, I read somewhere, supposedly they made one. They were testing it, you know, anyway. All right, so game girl. Now we're going to go into skateboard. I had my background check us out, fun Export animation. I need a gift. Kind of raise something there by mistake. I need a gift skateboard and we run it. So I'm going to check my gifts out, make sure they're good to go. All right, so start with blah blah. And you can see when you preview it, that it's transparent, which is good. That's what we want. Good chat, looks good. You may notice this fluctuations in some of the colors. I'm not mad at it. You know, if color accuracy is something you could play with forever, I'm okay with it. I can tell she's still melinated, right? It's still giving the effect that I want some good with it, I believe it is. There may be some way to fix that within clip studio paint. I know there's ways to export gifts from other apps that allow you to control your colors more accurately or more easily. I should say, like Photoshop is really great for that. But man, I pressed about it. I think it's all right. I think if you had some radically weird stuff going on, then it might be something to look into. But you know, she's still brown skin, so I'm good with it. All right. So I'm loving them. I think they look great. We're ready now. We're ready to upload these to Giftey. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to create a Giftey account, if you don't already have one, and upload your gifts that you created and then apply for an artist's account. 12. Upload to GIPHY and Apply For an Artist Account: We're just going to go over to, let's just type in artists account, Gif. This top link is going to take us where we need to go apply for an artist's account on Giffee. This is actually going to give us some really good information too, if you haven't already checked this page out. Gives you an idea of what the process will be. Just because you apply doesn't mean you'll get in. This is something to keep in mind. Make sure that you do all the things. Making sure you set up an avatar, making sure you have at least five gifts. Just every, all your ducks are in a row so that your account gets approved. As you can see, I click that, It's giving you more information on all of this. I'm going to click this right here. What it wants you to do first is either sign in or log in. I'm going to actually use the dummy account that I created. I can give you a better idea of what your screen will look like if you don't have an artist account already set up. I got that going. I'm going to log in. What it's telling me is that in order to be considered for a brand artists account, you must have at least five gifts on your channel. I'm going to upload that I created. We're going to want to go sticker and I'm going to select the files. I'm going to start re running, looking good. Add another one. I'm going to add skateboard. And I'm just going to go through all of these. I wonder if you can add them all at once. It looks like you can. Perfect. Okay, so these are uploaded. Awesome. What you can do too is instead of going one by one and adding the tags that you need for these individually, you can do it in bulk. Something to consider when you're adding these tags is also easy for you to search for these gifts. For example, this is from my world that I'm developing. I'm going to put seras, which is the name of this universe, and also the name of herbal tea. It's named after that. I'm also going to put in Monique, this is really for me. Nobody is going to be searching for these, I don't think they will. If you need to find them, you need some distinctive titles to help you access those. I'm also going to do Let's See, Fun Stew cartoon. And the cool thing too, is that you can also add some individual texts. So this is giving me best friends energy. So I'm going to put those friends best friends. Any, so you guys get the idea, find some tags that are relevant to your animations. But also find a few that are obscure enough that when you search it, really only your animations are going to pop up and that just makes it easy for you to search them. All right, so once these are feeling good and you've added all your tags in, you've either done them all bulk or gone into each of your gifts and done them individually or done sort of a mixture of each. Then you're going to go down and upload these. Upload it to Giffy. All right, upload is complete and I'm going to go to my channel. And you can see all my gifts are here. Don't fret about if you have any of this weird anti aliasing outline action going on. Once you zoom in, your animation is good to go. I'm going to go back to my profile and something to consider. Also, I highly recommend that you customize your profile as much as you can already have my actual account where you can see my avatar and all of my information outlined. This is going to help your account get approved by Giffe. Be sure to go ahead and open these settings, change your avatar, fill in as much of this as you can. Having a link to your portfolio or your Instagram, your art, Instagram specifically, all this stuff is going to help you get approved. Once you do all that, let's go back to my profile. Once you do all that, we can then go ahead and go back to our artists account. This is how I always find it. And then we're going to click this here again. It's going to bring us back to that application. And I'm already signed in. If I wasn't signed in, it would ask you to. What we want is a creator profile. Brand profiles are for orgs, musicians, public figures. Think about this as I've done a sticker pack for a company before, they would create a brand account that they would then upload all the stickers that I created into that brand account. What we want is creator, we're going to select that. Then you're going to fill all of this jazz out. If you haven't already. I imagine if I had already filled this out of my profile, it would autopopulate. But if there's no information here, make sure to fill it out. Make sure again, you have your avatar, good to go. Once you things, you're going to submit your application and then you're going to wait. You can take anything from a few days. I can't recall how long it took mine to become approved. I think it was a day or two. Give it a little beep and they're going to get back to you and they're going to let you know if things were approved or not. If that's all set, you are ready to test your gifts. We start sharing. I'm going to find a device and share it on a story. All right. So I found a device and I'm in Instagram and creating a story using a photo of kid Seems fitting right. Given what s gifts are inspired by. Then I'm going to search for them. So I'm going to use one of these keywords. You can see my animations and only my animation. You can see the power of having distinct tags to help you find your gifts. They could easily get lost in the sauce. I'm picking one, I'm using chat kid me will get a kick out of this, I'm sure. Shoot a dope me is getting a kick out of this. I'm gonna get another one. Actually, let me see. Let's go with blah blah. This is one of my favors. And there we go. 14. Conclusion: All right, congrats on animating your own gifts. Send one to someone you love or a friend or share on social to celebrate completing this class. To recap, we illustrated our gifts. We animated them and then exported them and uploaded those to gift and created an artist's account. Jump back into any of these lessons if you had trouble with anything. Repetition is an awesome way to these concepts that you learned here. Yeah man. Upload your projects and share your progress and tag me. I want to see what y'all made and thank you for taking this course.