Easy Animation for Illustrators with Adobe Fresco on the iPad

1. Intro: [MUSIC] Wouldn't it be cool to bring your illustrations to life with a little bit of motion without having to learn any complicated or confusing animation software? If you think so, this right here is a class for you. Adding movement to your drawings is a lot easier than you think. All you'll need for this class is an iPad and Apple Pencil and the Adobe Fresco app. That's right. You don't even need an actual computer to create dynamic moving illustrations. This class will walk you through all the different ways that you can add movement to your illustrations using the animation features in the Adobe Fresco app. You'll learn how to move objects along a motion path, you'll learn how to do frame-by-frame animation, and you'll learn how to combine frame-by-frame animation with motion path to create something even more dynamic. Although this class is geared towards illustrators, even beginners will be able to follow along and create their own animations. No prior animation knowledge is required, and you don't even really need to have used Adobe Fresco before. If you've used Procreate or other drawing apps, that'll be helpful, but I'll walk through each of the steps and the different tools and how they work. Though we'll be creating an animated scene in this class, the skills that you'll learn can be used in countless other applications, like animating your typo or lettering, spicing up your Instagram posts, creating dynamic moving editorial illustrations. The opportunities are endless. I've created animated illustrations for clients like Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, Adidas. But, I don't consider myself an animator. I say that because I don't want you to feel intimidated by experimenting with animation and adding movement to your illustrations. It doesn't have to be complicated. In fact, Adobe fresco makes it intuitive and fun. It's set up for Illustrators as opposed to other complicated animation software which is geared towards real hardcore animators and programmers. Are you ready to have some fun, make some stuff move? I know I am. Let's get into it. Let's go. [MUSIC] 2. The Project: [MUSIC] The class project is to create an animated scene with three or more animated elements. First, we'll sketch out a composition with a foreground and a background. Then we'll create some sea friends to populate our little scene as a combination of sea and seen. I just put them together into a fun new word. You can also choose to follow along with what I'm doing and copy my process if you don't want to create your own things. I know sometimes that's easier when you're learning a new thing. After we sketch everything, we'll tighten up our elements, keeping them on separate layers. Once we have all our elements drawn, we'll animate each of them one at a time using different techniques. By focusing on individual elements, as opposed to the whole scene, we'll make things a lot less complicated and allow us to really focus on the motion that we're creating and the different ways we can experiment with movement. In the end, you'll have a dynamic animated scene that's ready to be shared with the world in the form of an animated GIF or a movie file. Completing this project will give you the ability to add all motion to your illustrations, which will open the door to tons of new possibilities and opportunities. Learning to add motion to my illustration work has led to countless projects for clients like Cartoon Network and Microsoft. Please share your final projects in the project gallery, and I'll be sure to give feedback for each and everyone. In addition, please feel free to share your process work along the way, showing your scenes, your different characters, even before they're animated. Will be fun to see them in that stage and then see where they go to the end. [MUSIC] 3. Sketching The Scene: [MUSIC] The first step in creating an animated scene, is to sketch out a rough version of that scene. You'll want to have a foreground and a background with a couple of different levels to that background. You also want to leave plenty of room to add in some sea friends to populate our scene. Before we talk about my sketch, I just want to talk a little bit about file size. When you're creating an animation, file sizes can get pretty large. I tend to work a little smaller than I would if I were making something that was going to be printed. That said, I still work a bit larger than our final animation or movie would be exported as. I do this so that I can still have a good drawing experience. If your file is too small, there won't be enough pixels to get smooth details. So it'll be hard to draw everything that you want to draw. For this project, my file size is 2000 pixels by 2,500 pixels. I feel like this is a good compromise size so that the file doesn't get too cumbersome, but also it gives me enough flexibility in terms of drawing. If you find your animation is lagging a lot as we start animating things, you may want to make your file a little bit smaller, which you can always change after the fact. That said, even if it's a little laggy, you can still preview it at full speed and it will still export and give you your final file in the correct speed. Let's hop over to my iPad so we can look at my sketch and I can talk through what I did. Here's my sketch. I drew a sad diver sitting on the floor. I don't know why he's sad. I just think it's silly. I put him in an old-timey diving gear situation because I think it looks cooler. I don't really know exactly what it's supposed to look like, but this is how I picture it in my memory, so that's what I'm going with. He also has some heavy boots to hold them down. I think maybe he's supposed to have some air source. But I'm going to pretend he doesn't because this isn't real. Maybe that's why he's sad. I did give him an octopus friend, though. To make things a bit more interesting, I added a background with two levels to give it some depth. The first level has this rolling hill with some seaweed and of course the octopus. This is behind the diver, but close. Behind that, I have a big whale then some rolly hills that will be far in the distance. The whale is technically one of the see friends I'll be animating, but he's so big that he is also part of the background, so I wanted to incorporate him in this sketch. I'm keeping things nice and open to provide space for the sea friends we'll be adding in. This isn't everything that'll be in the scene. I'm going to have a fish over here, and then another fish over here that's like in the foreground in front of the diver and the seaweed. Now it's your turn. [MUSIC] 4. Sketching The Characters: [MUSIC] Now that I have my composition all sketched out, I'm going to draw some sea friends to hang out in that space. Although I'll be referencing my composition, I'm going to skip some of these separately because I'm going to be moving them around as we animate things. I'll meet you at the iPad. I want to have a whole bunch of little fish swimming to the background. Because they'll be so small and swimming, we only really need to draw one. I'm going to make a new layer and then just sketch a little fish. I'm not going to go too complicated. It's going to be small and it's just going to go through the background swimming. Maybe just an eye, maybe a line for a mouth, maybe some gills, and then maybe just a fin situation like that. I don't like that fish yet. I know I said it's going to be simple and it doesn't really matter, but I feel like I can make it a little better. I think if we make the shape a little bit better like this, then maybe a little bigger eye, it'll give it more character and it will be easier to see because it's going to be small. Then maybe smiley face like that and then a couple of gill lines. Then let's just make this fin back here in a little bit bigger. I think the flippers were mostly fine. Let's make a better mouth. That feels more fish-like. I think these fins pointing down also look a bit like he's not in movement. I feel like they need to be going back because this fish is cruising. We spent too much time on this simple fish. But that's fine. I'm going to turn this off because we don't need to look at it now. The next thing I'm going to do is make a medium-sized fish that'll be one of the main characters in this little sea world. I'm going to have this fish swimming around here in front of the diver, in front of this seaweed. What I'm going to do is turn down the opacity on our sketch so I can still see where it is and then make a new layer to sketch on top of that. I made a new layer. I'm just going to sketch him in this area. I feel like he should be a little bit more character than the generic fish in the background. Maybe he'll be clumped like this. Give him some big eyes, maybe one that comes out around the side. Maybe some big fish lips. This is already more fun than the other fish. We give him a head fin. Is that what they're called? I don't know if these things are called head fins. Fisher silly. Then maybe a weird tail, and then we can give him some funny little flippers and some gills. I think he's looking pretty good. I think we can tune him up a little bit. I'm going to turn down the background so it's easier to see this. Now I'm just going to see if I can make him a little bit better. Let me give the body a little bit more shape, extend it a little bit further back. The eyes are pretty good as they are. Maybe he's looking back. [LAUGHTER] I feel like that expression is pretty good for him. I think this fin is fine. This maybe a little bit smaller than I initially had it. I think I like this thing on his head, but it's a little too big. I think if we just slim it down a little bit, that's pretty good. Then maybe simplify these gills, make them a little bit smaller. I feel pretty good about that fish. We can delete the layer underneath and we can turn that off for now. Turn our sketch layer back on. Definitely need a pufferfish. Or is it a blowfish? Which is it? I don't know the difference between the two, but we're going to need one. The pufferfish will probably go in this area over here. But it's not too dependent on our sketch layer, so I'm just going to turn off the sketch layer again so I can focus on this pufferfish. I'm going to draw it a little bit bigger than it needs to be just because it'll be easier to sketch that way. Since the other fish are going sideways, this one should face us. Maybe I'll start with regular fish pose. Is that what you call it when a blowfish or a pufferfish isn't puffed out? I don't know. I want him to face us, so maybe it's just looking like this, looking pretty cute. Give him a little tail, and then some little fins. Maybe some cheeks they go over his eyes. I feel pretty good about that. Let's say we can tighten this up a little bit. Let's pull those cheeks over the eyes a little bit. Smooth out the eyes. I think the overall shape is pretty good. Maybe we just pull the tail in a little bit shorter so it has more perspective so it looks like it's going back a little bit more than it was. Now we need to draw him in puff mode. I'm going to turn down the opacity on this sketch so that I can draw over it since it's the same thing, transforming. I feel like I need to see this underneath. I guess I'm just going to go with a big round circle. Maybe push the eyes out. [LAUGHTER] Is that what the pufferfish looks like? I think we can do better than that. I'm just going to start from scratch here. I like the idea of starting with just a big circle though. I think that was the right move. Instead of putting the eyes so far apart, maybe we can keep them like this and then maybe like puffy cheeks, maybe pull this one down lower. Maybe his mouth. I don't know. Maybe the fins are just sticking out the side because that's all they can do because he's so puffed out. Maybe we can give him some tone. Let's just try to clean this up a little bit. I think it's pretty good. We've got this eyes bulging out, get the cheek, the mouth sucking in air. Then this other cheek with the eye, maybe his eyes are going out to the sides because he's just blown up so big. Let's make this fin just sticking straight out like he can't do anything else because he's just so inflated. Let's look at the before and after and make sure that we feel good about it. It looks like it could be the same little guy. I think seeing them side-by-side like this makes me think that the puff state needs to be little more dramatic. I'm going to put these two together on one layer to simplify things. I'm going to turn that off. Then the last thing that I want to do is just like a giant whale in the background. I'm going to turn my sketch back on, turn it up a little bit so I can see it, and make a new layer to start drawing this whale. I want it to be huge, like this whole area back here. So we'll just see part of it coming in. Let me just use that as a guide. Then make a new layer and try to make it more whale-shaped. I think whales, I like the big lower jaw mouth thing that maybe comes down like that. Is this what a whale looks like? Like that maybe. Then maybe there's like a bump and it's even bigger. Let's turn off that. Something doesn't look right about this. I'm going to turn off my sketch because I'm getting distracted. I think I want the top to come down a little bit. Like the body is much bigger than the head I think. Then mouth. I think a crucial whale feature is the eye to be really low, like below the mouth area. Maybe he's a little grumpy. Feel like whales are grumpy. He's looking at us. Are those teeth or whatever they are? Then those little bumps. Then I think this underside, it's got some like lines, like that. Then we got a big fin over here. I think that's good for the sketch. I'll probably tighten it up a little bit more later on. Let's turn our sketch back on. That whale is going to be in the back. Then we've got this little fish, let's get him sized appropriately. This is going to be a fish that swims across the background. It's going to be lots of these. I'm going to multiply them. Our pufferfish is going to be right in this area, so about that size. Then the other fish friend is right there. These are our characters. Turn those off. This back on. Now we are ready to get serious with this sea scene and tighten it up. [MUSIC] 5. Tightening Up The Scene: [MUSIC] The next step is to tighten up our scene. When you're drawing something that you plan to animate, it's important to keep all the different elements that you want to move on their own separate layer. To make things a little less confusing, I'm going to group my sea friends together into a little group and then turn them off because we don't need to worry about them yet. This is our background sketch and now we're going to make a new layer. I'm going to choose a brush that I like to use for inking. I'm going to use Kyle's Inkbox-2Smooth 2Be 4Gotten, which is available in Adobe Creative Cloud. Now we're just going to start drawing, tighten this up. As I mentioned, we want to make sure that we keep things that need to be animated on separate layers. I'm not going to be animating this little diver guy or the ground he's sitting on. But I am going to animate these plants. We'll do those separately. I'm going to bring down the opacity a little bit lower. Gone to my new layer, I'm going to select my outline color, which I'm going to use black. Got my brush. I'm going to sure my smoothing is turned up because there's a lot of smooth lines here. I'm going to speed this up a little bit so that you don't have to watch this for a very long time, because it can get pretty boring to just watch me do this line work. I'm going to go into super speed mode and I will talk to you at the end. Or if I think of anything important to say along the way. [MUSIC] Okay, so now that I have my diver and the floor, the sea floor all tightened up, I'm going to go ahead and color this in. When I'm coloring my illustrations, I like to do it on a separate layer to give myself some more flexibility. In Fresco, you can set your linework layer as a reference layer. What that means is you can go into a new layer and use the paint bucket to fill in the shapes and it'll do it on that new layer. Let me pick a sandy color for our sand, if that might be okay. Then for our diver, I think I want to give them like an orange suit. Maybe like a reddish orange. That's not the color I wanted. Let's say if I have an orange, this is close to what I want. Now maybe I can just make it slightly more orange. Let's see. All right, I like that, but I want it brighter, more saturated is what I mean. Maybe we need gray for the helmet in this other stuff. I'm going to pick a lightest gray for the helmet and the bib, whatever that is. Then this part of the boots. Then I'm going to go ahead and get darker gray for that and this other assorted boot image. Now we need skin color, I think because he's sad, I would like to use like a funny bright pink color, that would be fun, I like that, but I think we just need it to be a little bit lighter. Last one. I think a yellow for this other stuff will really bring it all together, maybe like that. Now I just want to add in little bit of shading to bring it to life a little bit, give it some more depth. I'm going to go ahead and turn off the reference layer. I don't forget later, I'm going to make a new layer on top of my color layer, and I'm going to set this layer to multiply. Then I'm going to grab a light purple. I'm going to use this to make shadow. When you use a light purple, it cools down any color, so you can use it on all of your colors and it works great. I'll show you right here. I don't want it to be that dark though, so I usually adjust the opacity so it's a little more subtle. Get a shadow under the belly area. Then I guess this leg because it's behind the other leg and then some down here. I'm not too particular on how perfect or accurate my shadows are because as you can see, my drawings aren't very accurate. They're fun and playful and sometimes perspective is wonky and I'm okay with that. I treat shadows the same way. We try to brace them in reality a little bit, but sometimes things are exaggerated a little bit, or maybe they're a little bit inaccurate. Make this helmet look a little more around by doing a round shape like that. Have it come down a little bit, maybe some shadow on that because it looks like it's inside or something, we're back there. Then some shadow from the helmet on his face. Some shadows under the eyes to enhance how sad he is. A little over here to give the eyeballs some girth. Girth the eyeballs, there's no shadow. No shadow going in. Cheek shadows. Okay, and now we'll just put a little bit on the ground to make it look like he's sitting or more, so like he's sitting. That already looks like he's sitting. All right, this is good. We're in a good place with this, so I'm going to put these together in a group. The line work, then the color layer. Actually, now that I look at this, I think we need one more thing. I'm going to go back into this little group here, add a new layer. No, I'm going to add a new layer. I'm going to turn that mask option off, turn that line back on. I think to make it look like he's got a glass dome over space, we need a little highlight. What I'm going to do is just draw like a half circle. I think that looks pretty good. Maybe you just bring down the opacity a tiny bit. Yeah. Now it looks like he's got glass over his face. We need a new layer so that we can draw this second part of the foreground, the background of the foreground, if you will. I'm actually going to bring down the opacity of our diver and floor so that we can draw through the diver and see what we're doing. This is just a squiggly line, so I'm just going to lose the margin. I'm not going to do the seaweed because we're going to animate that. But I'm not planning on animating this octopus friend, so we can draw him in. To do that, I'm going to bring down the opacity of this new layer, this new line that I made so that I can see the octopus and I'm going to draw a new layer on top of that. Let's just start drawing Mr. octopus, this tentacles. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] I'm just bringing it to that line and then when I merge them together, all will be, well. [MUSIC] This one is going to go up over ground here. That doesn't look right. Sometimes you think everything's fine with your sketch, then it doesn't work. Sometimes you got to troubleshoot. I think that works. I'm going to temporarily turn off the sketch layer and then erase the extra stuff that we don't need from the hill line. Now we can turn the hill line back up. I'm noticing I must have pushed really hard when I did that hill line and I don't like how thick that is, so I'm going to do something risky and I'm going to redraw it. I say risky because I don't want to mess up where we aligned the octopus. That works. We can go ahead and delete the old one. We can merge that down onto one line and then we can turn our sketch back on and do the rest of the octopus details. I'll draw these eyes. We want to make sure he's looking at the sad diver. Lower those a little bit. That will get him some funny bags under his eyes for some reason. Then we just need some tentacle details, suction cup things. Good. Now we just need to color in this layer. I'm going to do the same thing we did before and then make a new layer. I'm going to set my linework layer to reference. Then come back. I'm going to pick colors. I think the octopus should be like a purple, it's somewhat dark purple, like a bluish dark purple. You can see my color picking technique is very willy-nilly. It's a little too saturated for my taste. We're almost there. Tiny bit more towards the blue, tiny bit less saturation and that's it. That's the one. Let's make his eyes yellow. We'll use the same yellow that we used on our diver. Notice then we've got a little problem to fix here. I'm going to go back to our linework layer and erase this little overshot. Now we need to fill in this sandy hill and I want it to look, it's a little bit further back. I think I'm going to start with the sand color that we picked and then maybe make it a little more green or darker so it looks like it's further back. Let's try this. Let's bring back our diver to full opacity so we can see. I think it needs to be a little darker. Maybe it needs to go closer to green. Less saturation. A little darker. Yeah, that's better. I don't like how dark the line is. I want to make that lighter color. I should have not merged that, but I'm just noticing now, so we're going to have to solve that problem. I'm going to turn off the reference layer and select my line work layer. I want to make this line color a darker version of this to just set it back a little bit. I think being in black really doesn't make it look like it's any further back. But I guess I'm going to leave the octopus that color. Sometimes you got to make up your own rules. I'm just going to choose a darker version. What I'm going to do is just draw over this part of it so that it doesn't fill in the line work on the octopus. Now, we can fill this in, but it's going to color everything in. What we need to do to fix that is pull this color margin down until it leaves us with what we want. Cool. That is good to go. Let's just add in a little bit of shadow. I'm going to do a new layer just like we did before. I'm going to set that layer to multiply and then I'm going to grab that same light purple that we used and put in some shadow. I'm also realizing that we forgot to color in that part. Let's go back to our color layer, select this purple. Now back to our shadow layer, back to this purple. Let's put that in shadow, definitely shadows on the stuff that's going behind the sand hill. This tentacles, those can get darkened up. Put some shadow where they overlap. [MUSIC] Then let's do a little shadow on the ground where he's sitting, and just bring down the opacity a little bit so it's a little more subtle. Cool. Let's group this together and merge that down. Now all we have to do is these two background layers. I'm going to do three more layers, actually. One for the far background, and then this hill and then this hill. I'm going to do the farthest background first, and that I just want to do a bright blue for just the general water situation. Maybe that color blue. I think that works. It's also highlighting the fact that we forgot to color in his eyes. Let's go back into our diaper layer. Select our color layer, and then choose white. Fill that in. I think because it's behind a helmet and he's underwater, white looks weird. What I think we should do is make the super light pink instead. I'm wandering down. Now let's drag our sketch layer on top of our blue background layer so that we can see these lines for the hills. I'm going to make a new layer on top of that and I'm going to choose a lighter purple for this first one. Maybe we'll base it off of this purple but make it less saturated. Let's go ahead and draw this for a squiggly line and then fill that in. I think that purple is pretty good. Then maybe we'll just use the same purple as the octopus for our furthest back hill. I'm going to put this behind this one, so let it go, so it goes behind it. Cool. Now that we have our main sea area done, we're going to draw in our seaweed that we're going to animate in the next step. For this stage, we're just going to draw them on their own layers. I'm going to make a new layer. As you can see, I actually dragged my sketch layer above all of our drawing layer so we can see them. For this first seaweed layer, I'm going to do all of these foreground ones together. This one, this one, and this one. Even though they'll be animated separately, I'll do them in the same sequence, which I'll show you later. But to make things less complicated, I'm going to just group them together. [MUSIC] Now we can go ahead and fill these in. I'm not going to do shadows on these, so I'm just going to fill on the same layer. I'm going to try to pick a bluish green. Let's see if I've got something in here, something like this. Maybe we'll make it way more green. Let's see how that looks. That's what I'm talking about. Cool. Now we'll do a new layer and we will do the seaweed behind this hill. Instead of doing black outlines, I think I'm going to use this seaweed color as the line work and then do a lighter one, so it looks like it's further back. We'll see if that works. We're on a new layer here. Then close the bottom below that line because we're not going to see it, so we're going to tuck it behind. Same with this. We just need to end the plant behind that octopus tentacle. Now let's make a lighter version of the green to fill this in. Now we can just set this layer, drag it behind that hill. Now we can turn off our sketch layer and we are ready to move on. [MUSIC] 6. Making Fish Swim: [MUSIC] In this lesson, we're finally going to make something move. Can you believe it? I can. But first, we need to make the final drawing for our little fish. In this lesson, we're going to take that little fish and make him swim across the background. In fact, we're going to multiply that fish and have lots of fish swimming through our scene. I'll see you at the iPad. To make things easier to see, I'm going to go ahead and just make a new temporary layer that I'm going to use as a mask. I'm just going to select white, then fill that in with the paint bucket and then bring down the opacity. The reason I'm doing this, as opposed to just bringing down the opacity on the drawing underneath, was a couple of reasons. One, there's a whole bunch of different layers. Two, with it just being on this layer, I can toggle it on and off in case I want to reference the color. I'm going to bring that up just so I can see my original drawing underneath. Now, let's turn back on our fish sketch. This is going to be a bunch of little fish swimming in the background. I think right now it's a little bit big. Let me go into this folder of my sketches and just size this to the way I want it to be. That way when we draw it, it has the right line weight. If we drew it bigger and then shrunk it down, it'll have a really small line weight and it wouldn't match with the overall aesthetic that we're dealing with here. I'm going to make a new layer for this fish. I don't want to outline it in black because it's in the background and so far away. I think what I'll do is use this shadow color on the purple maybe, or maybe the dark gray would be better. We'll have to experiment and see. This might be the wrong choice. I'm going to go back to my new layer, zoom in on Mr. Fish here, and select "My inking brush." I'm just going to trace over this fish. Yeah, I think this color will be fine. I think I'm going to make the bottom of the mouth stick out a little bit. I'm not too worried about this being too tight because this is going to be constantly in motion and in the background. I'm just going to go pretty quickly. [MUSIC] This eyeball in here. Few little gills, maybe a few scales, but not too many because I don't want it to be too busy. I can turn our sketch layer off. Now I'm going to first make sure that it's level because I'm noticing he's a little crooked. I'm not sure why I'm referring to this fish as a he. There's nothing to tell me that this is a he fish. I'm going to do a layer underneath to color from. Now I'm going to set this as a reference layer so that I can fill on a new color underneath. I'm going to drag a new layer underneath it, and then go ahead and select this lighter gray color, and then use that to fill this in. Then copy this eye color. They can have the same eyes. I'm going to grab this slightly darker gray and then just add a little bit of shadow. I think that might be too dark. I think what we're going to need to do is, let's just make a new layer and then bring down the opacity to a gray that makes more sense. Maybe we'll just do the whole lower side of the fish and this back fin. Maybe a little detail on these fins. Maybe a little bit in the scales around the eye and there we go. That is plenty of fish detail. Our fish is ready to go. We can bring it to life and give it some friends. I hope you are excited because I know I am. Now that we're satisfied with the fish, let me go ahead and merge our different layers together so it's just one layer. I think this is an extra layer here. Let's just delete that to avoid some confusion. Let's move the fish to the background. Because I want the fish to be behind this stuff here. Now we are ready to make this fish swim. To do that, we're going to make sure we have our fish layer selected. I'm going to click on the little animation button down in the bottom right and we're going to choose, "Path." All you do to create a path is you just draw a line and our fish swim along that line, which is pretty neat. If we go into effects, we can change some different things to control how fast our fish is swimming and some other settings. I think he's swimming a little too fast. What I'm going to do is bring the frames up. The more frames, the slower he's going to swim. Because when there are less frames, less time between each frame. I think the speed is pretty good. Now let's use even more magic. Let's add more fish. We can just drag this out and add as many fish as we want. That's pretty cool, but they are a little too perfectly in a line to look very real. What we can do now is hit "Scatter," pull this up, and this will read our fish out so that they're all not in the same place. Now one issue we're having here is that some of the fish are stopping before the end. The reason for that is I didn't draw my path long enough to go all the way through the frame. I'm going to actually just X this out and just redraw the path. I'm going to start further back and then pull it out all the way over there. You see that fish is going super fast so let's add more frames back in. Slow it down a little bit and zoom in so we can see what's happening here. Then we'll go back to add multiples. Let's slow them down a little bit. Let's also bring our frames per second down to, let's say, put it at 10 to keep things simple. Then let's scatter our fish. We add some more. We can also randomize to change it even more. Look at that. These fish are just swimming in the background like it's no big deal. Let's pause this for now. Let's duplicate our fish. Now, let's make a smaller version. We're going to select the fish that we just duplicated and select the Transform tool. You'll see two different options. I'm just going to choose Layer Content because I'm going to redraw the motion path anyway to make it a little different. I'm going to hit "Transform". Then let's just make this fish a bit smaller because this one's going to be further back. Let's just move this one down and let's draw a new path. Let's go X that one out and draw in a new one. I think will make these ones even slower because they're further away. You can add more. You can scatter them, and you see how they're going behind the other stuff, which is pretty cool because we have them behind in the layer. You can randomize these. I think that looks pretty good. Let's pause this. Now we can play all and see the fish together. You can see that the bigger ones are swimming a bit faster than the ones that are in the background. Now that I'm looking at all the fish together, I think we may have too many of the bigger fish. I think it'll look better if we have more of the little fish in the background and then maybe some of these bigger ones. Some of these bigger ones is what I'm getting at. Let's make sure we're selecting the right layer. That's the small fish. That's our bigger fish. I'm actually going to drag that on top so it's less confusing. Let's click on "Path". Now we can bring down the multiples. Maybe scatter this even more since there's less of them. Randomize it a bit more. Now let's see what that looks like altogether. [MUSIC] I think that's definitely better. We got fish. Let's move on to another fish. 7. Wiggling The Seaweed: [MUSIC] Now that we made fish swim all over the place with motion paths, I'm going to show you how to make your seaweed wiggle using some frame-by-frame animation. Before we start animating the seaweed, I'm actually just going to turn off our fish so that it's not distracting when we're focusing on animating the seaweed so let's go ahead and select the top layer of seaweed, so that's that right there. What we're going to do now is click on the animate thing like we did for the fish and then you'll see down here, we have that frame I'm going to hit "Plus". This adds a new frame to our sequence. We're going to do frame by frame animation here, which means we're going to change our animation by drawing it differently in a couple of different frames. In order to do this effectively, we need to turn on something called onion skins, which allows us to see the previous and next frames. Now you can see that our previous frame, or our first frame is there and it's a little bit transparent. I'm actually going to make it a little bit more transparent so it's easier to draw on top of and see what I'm doing. Now I'm actually going to turn back on that white mask layer that we made before and then I'm going to drag that below our seaweed layer. I'm going to re-select the seaweed layer and now we can see that a little bit better without being distracted by our drawing layer. I think we can actually turn that up a little bit more because we really don't need to see that drawing for this part. I'm going to make sure the second layer in our sequence is selected. I'm going to go back to grab the black to do the outline. What I'm going to do here is just trace this, making it change slightly because we just want it to wiggle a little bit and just giving it the feel that it's in water. I'm just loosely tracing it, but letting it just sway a little bit and change its position slightly. [MUSIC] We'll do the same for this one. [MUSIC] Then when I trace the bottom part, I'm trying to stay really close because I don't want that till it's like it's moving and then this third one. [MUSIC] Now I'm going to hit "Plus" to do a new one and now you can see lately is the first frame and then the second one. For this one, I'm going to try to actually go somewhat between the two to make it have a natural flow to it. When you're doing this thing, you want to do a minimum of three frames. Three frames will give you a natural rhythm. If you just did two, it would end up just looking like it's flashing back and forth as opposed to a more natural movement. Again, I'm just going in-between the two drawings, trying to find a middle ground. The reason for that is because it's going to play like a loop, so I'll play the first frame and the second frame and then the third frame, if you end up just basing the third drawing on the second one and not taking to account the first one, you may have a little bit of a jump when it goes back to the beginning. [MUSIC] Now we just need to get that green color so I'm going to go back to the first frame and then hold my finger to select that color, grab the paint bucket and then fill in each of these. Now we can hit "Play" and we've got a little wiggle action. Let's turn off our mask layer and now we're going to do the seaweed behind the diverse. I'm going to select our outline color there and I'm actually going to turn off the diver and the hill so that we can just focus on these two because since that's behind it will be hard to finish that. What I'm going to do now is hit the plus and do just what we did before. I'm going to trace it and change it just a little bit as we go. May even go a little bit less dramatic on this one since it is further back. Generally, you have things that are further away moving slower because I don't know physics, you can think about an airplane in the sky flying, it doesn't look like it's going really fast because it's far away. I think I might go ahead and just turn off that light purple layer so there are a little more contrast so I can see what I'm doing. Now I'll just go back to our first layer, get the fill color, [MUSIC] fill that in and I just want to go back to the second layer because I noticed a messy area. I'm going to turn off the onion skin so I can see this a little bit better and just clean up that head right there. Let's see how these look. It looks good to me. Let's do an encore with all the seaweeds. You turn back, set diver, hit "Play". We got some good seaweed wiggle, good job team. [MUSIC] 8. Combining Techniques: [MUSIC] In the next three lessons we're going to combine frame-by-frame animation with motion paths to create even more dynamic movement. To get started, we're going to make a sequence with our other fish, flapping his little flippers, and then we're going to make a loop out of that and then set that on a motion path so that moves around while he's doing his flippers. That sounds complicated. Don't worry. Adobe Fresco makes this super easy and fun, and you can do it. I believe in you. Let's get over to the iPad. You'll see that it's not complicated at all. I'm going to turn off my seaweed layers. I'm going to turn back on our mask layer. I'm going to go into my group of sketches. We're going to find this little guy. But while we're here, let's delete the sketch for our background fish. You can end up with a lot of layers when you're doing something like this and it can get confusing, so I like to delete things as I'm going. Let's tighten this up. Actually I don't need to see the background at all here. I'm going to turn that all the way up just so I can focus on this silly little fish. I'm going to bring the opacity down and make a new layer for the fish, and select black to do our line work. [MUSIC] I feel pretty good about that, but it's at a weird angle, so I'm going to just put that at a normal straight up and down angle. We can turn off our sketch layer for now. I guess let's just not worry about color yet. Let's just worry about the animation. We already have the timeline up because we were using it before. Instead of making a new layer, what I'm going to do is tap on our first layer and I'm going to duplicate it. We can duplicate it again because it's going to be a three frame loop, just like the other stuff. I'm going to go back to the second one and I'm just going to erase the things that we're going to change. This saves a little bit of time as opposed to redrawing the stuff that we don't need to redraw. I'm going to erase this all the way down so that we can change the angle. Let's save even more time. Let's delete this third one and then duplicate this, so then we don't have to erase the third one. We're back to this one. Let's make our head piece. Maybe just come forward a little bit. [MUSIC] If we just lightly draw this back fin a little different it'll just give it a nice little wiggle. I'm just moving these fins like he's paddling a little bit. I'm not really sure how to do the fishy lip thing. What I think I'm going to do is just push them forward a little bit. We'll see how that looks. I guess it might be okay. I guess for this third frame, I'm just going to do what I did before with the seaweed and do a bit of an in-between the two positions to just have it flow in a somewhat less chaotic way. [MUSIC] Let's see what happens. I think that's pretty good. If you think about it, he's going to be moving and it's going to be small like that. I feel pretty good about that. Let's choose some colors. I'm going to leave the background so I can see how the color looks in case it doesn't work. We'll do that. I'm going to grab this eye color, and let's try this orange. I'm just going to come in, touch up that extra yellow. Now we can move on to our second one. Maybe I'll do this first so that we can get a tighter fill here because then I don't need this to be so low. We'll just have to see if it messes up our orange. Let's fill in the mouth. This top fin, this back fin. Then let's grab our yellow from recents. [MUSIC] Cool. It worked better to do the orange first, and now we'll just do the third layer. [MUSIC] Grab the eye color, and then grab the yellow color. Now let's see. I think it's a tiny bit too big. What I'm going to do is transform and I'm going to select, "All Frames" because if we selected one, it would just change one of the frame in our sequence and then the scale would jump. Let's go ahead and do All Frames. Make it a little bit smaller, and then let's move it, let's say there. I think that's pretty good. Now that we have this looping sequence, we're going to put a path to this whole thing. Now we can have it bob up and down while it's moving its flipper flappers around. Let's draw a path. For this path, I just want them to bounce and hover here a little bit. What I'm going to do is just make a squiggly almost circle like that. Now he's just got that natural floaty fish vibe. I think the movement is good. I just don't like how he overlaps the shoulder because the lips are the same color as the sleeve. Instead of redrawing the path, if we tap on the path like header there, we can go to Transform paths, and then we can just move and zoom in, grab the whole thing, move it over here, and see how that looks. That's pretty good. I just don't love how it just barely touches up there and causes a little bit of a tangent. Let's try once more to dial this in. Transform path, and then let's just shift it down a little bit. Let's hope this is good. I didn't move it enough. Let's be more dramatic. Transform down. Done. Let's go. [MUSIC] Perfect. Look at that. Right in that little space, that good margin at the top. Look at this combination. We've got frame-by-frame animation and the path. Can you believe it? Let's actually turn on our seaweed layer since the seaweed is behind this fish to make sure that these interact together. Let's hit "Play all". I don't see any issues there. I think that's looking pretty great. I feel pretty good about that. Good job team. [MUSIC] 9. Making The Whale Bob + Blink: [MUSIC] I'm going to turn on my mask layer again, bring down the opacity. I'm going to turn on the initial sketch layer again. I wasn't very happy with the whale so I went back in and cleaned it up a little bit. This is my new whale sketch. We're going to animate this guy. Maybe this is a lady whale. I don't know why I keep saying guy. It's a bad habit. I'm going to do a new layer for this whale. But the whale is going to be in the background. Let's grab this dark purple to use as the line weight to set it back from the foreground which has the black outline. Turn on our mask again. We can actually put the mask all the way up. You'll notice the whale is going to go behind this stuff. I'm going to draw the full body. I'm going to have a bottle up and down a little bit. To give us some more flexibility, I'm going to take my sketch and shift it forward a little bit so that we have a little bit more whale to work with. [MUSIC] I think we need some of these lines under here. Let's go ahead and set this as a reference layer and then make a new layer so that we can add some tone. I think on this one because it's so big, we're going to need some shadow variations. Let's turn off our sketch layer, turn off our mask layer. Let's start with this lighter purple and then darken it up a little bit and see how that looks. Let's work with that for now. I think we're going to need a lighter color. I don't think these are actually teeth. Do any of you know what these are? We also need this under area. I think both of these are a little too late, but I'm going to fill them in with this and then I can tweak them. Maybe we'll do the eye of this color too. [MUSIC] You know what? Let's turn off our reference layer and then go back to this layer. I think this needs to be a little. That's better. I think this actually needs to be a little more purple. Let's just fill in these little bumps. I don't really like to introduce too many new colors, but I think we need a darker outline color. I think that's a big part of our problem. I'm going to set our linework layer to lock transparency and I'm [MUSIC] going to grab this purple color and bring the darkness and saturation down because I don't want it to be black. Since I have lock transparency, I can fill in the whole thing quickly. Now let's add in some shadows. I'm going to do a new layer so that I can add shadow on all the different colors. I'm going to set this layer to multiply and then I'm just going to grab this light purple color and now we can draw over everything. The purple will make everything look like a shadow and then we can control how much shadow we want. Put some shadow on the eye itself and some shadow there, and some under body shadow. [MUSIC] Behind the thin shadow, below the thin shadow. Maybe some shadows. I don't want to go too crazy because he has a background. I don't know what the shadow is. Just feel like it's underwater shadow. Let's do one more thing here, I like that, a little bit right there. Let's merge our whale stuff. Ms. Whale is actually going to go behind all this other stuff. I want to make this whale blink. In order to do that, let's duplicate our frame so we have another frame. Let's just erase this area. I'm actually going to bring our mask layer down below all of this so now we can see what we're doing better. Just want this eye area. We don't have to do this process again, I'm going to duplicate that layer. I'm going to grab the main color for the whale. I'm going to pull the eyelid down. It's like almost shut. Let's grab the eye color. Back to the whale color. Now we can fill in this area. Now that we have that all filled in, we can go back to our linework color and then draw this eye shutting a little bit. I'll move these two lines down trace a line below, trace the pupil. Because the under part of the eye is mostly in shadow, we want to keep that in mind because we're going to use these colors to do the drawing on top as opposed to just outlining it because it'll be harder to color. I'm going to grab the normal whale color and use that to bring the eyelid down. It's like almost blinking. Let's actually turn up the opacity on our onion skin so now we can actually see exactly where that shadow is. Now I can trace around for that will be. Then we can fill in that top part. We can come back over here, grab this shadow color, paint that in. Now we can follow that line to make our eye. Let's just turn off onion skins for a second so we can see what's happening. Basically we just did the fill color areas so that we can do the line work on top of it as opposed to trying to fill in the colors and things that aren't closed. Let's turn on onion skins in and grab our linework color. Now we're going to move this eyelid thing down to follow that line. It's actually turn on onion skin back down so it's easier to see what's happening. Can trace the eye shape, that other line underneath and bring this top one down a little bit and then trace over our pupil. I think the only thing we're missing now is there's a little bit of a shadow that's supposed to be under this top like wrinkle thing. We can just pull that in. We have that. Now for this third one, we're just going to do a shut eye. Make this less confusing I'm going to turn down the frames to one and this is just going to show us our previous frame, that way, we don't have to worry about the other one. For this, I'm actually just going to start with the line work layer because the eye is going to be shut so there's not going to be as much variation. I'll do that. Bring that down, maybe close this up. Now let's come back here. Grab our shadow color and then bring that in there. Then we can use this on that area. Let's turn off our onion skins again. Now I'm just going to zoom in and fix these little areas where the paint bucket didn't quite work or didn't get close enough. Again, you don't have to go too crazy because this is only going to be seen for a split second. There's some wiggle room for sure. Let's look at our sequence. [MUSIC] We got this blank. Looks pretty good. For an effective blink sequence, you want to hold the eye shut for more than one frame. What I'm going to do is duplicate this a couple of times. Let's see how it looks like that. That looks pretty good, but we don't want it to be blinking constantly, that would be ridiculous. What we need to do is just duplicate the open eye frame a whole bunch of times. A lot better. I still would like it to be a little bit longer. I think I also want to put this in between blink at the end too. What we're going to do here is duplicate this frame and drag that to the end of the blink sequence. Let's see how that looks. That looks pretty good. I think we still just need a little bit more time or is not blinking. Cool. Now, let's put him on a path to make him bob up and down a little bit. What I want to do here is do what we did for the fish. Just have a subtle a little loop. That's too much because it is a big whale. I just want it to just move a little bit. What? Let's try an even smaller circle. That's subtle movement I want, just barely anything at all, but I don't like the position. To fix that, I'm just going to tap on path, transform our path. I'm going to zoom in so I can actually grab the center. Let's see where that is. Let's just turn on our sea weed to see how that works. Make sure it doesn't interfere with the whale. Cool. I just wanted to make sure that this wasn't in the whale's eye or something like that. I think we're good. [MUSIC] 10. Puffin' The Puffer Fish: [MUSIC] It's time for the final fish. Let's turn off the stuff we don't need. I don't like any of the animated stuff going because it gets distracting. Let's turn back on our mask layer, bring the opacity down a little bit. Turn on our sketch group and we just have our puffer fish. Let's go back to our mask layer. Turn that up a little bit so we can focus on the puffer fish friend. Let's make a new layer. This friend is going to be in the foreground. I'm going to use the black outline here and we'll start with the little mode. Is that the technical term for when it's not all blowed up. Doing some cheeks. Contains, what's to come? Then these eyes that look like they're too big right now, but then they're going to look small when he is in mega mode. That eye not good. That's good. I want to have these flippers [inaudible] Let's just duplicate this frame and then we'll come back to this one and draw the first stage of our flip-flap action. [MUSIC] Let's duplicate this one. We're going to have to do it anyway and let's turn off our sketch layer for now. Not turn on. Let's turn off the sketch layer and turn back on our onion skins so we can see what we're dealing with. Let's move these flippers down a little bit [MUSIC] and now we'll do our third one. Let's change our frames to two so that we can see both of the frames that we did. Then I'm just going to go in between these two for the loop. [MUSIC] Let's see how that looks. I think that looks just fine. Let's color this and what do we want to do? We'll just stick with the gray to this. Then we need our eyeball color. [MUSIC] We have this loop of three frames for this, but we want it to change into a mega fish, but I don't want it to happen constantly. What I want to do is duplicate this sequence a couple of times to slow things down. So that is not just constantly flashing back and forth from little to big. I need to duplicate it in order so I'm going to duplicate one. Then move that to the end, and then duplicate two, then move that to the end so it becomes five and then duplicate three and then move that to the end so it will become six. I think we'll do another one to be safe. Now let's do a new frame. Then let's grab our sketch layer again. Turn that on, spring up the opacity a little bit. Let's move our puffer fish, like the big version of it into position. We'll go back to our fish layer, go into our new frame. Now we're going to morph the little one into the big one. To do this, we're going to use a couple of techniques. One of them is the animation smear. A smear is a technique to show a quick movement and a minimal amount of frames by exaggerating things and it gives the illusion of a motion blur. To do this, what we're going to do is just connect the starting and end points. What I mean by that is the eyes are here, but they're going to be here eventually. What we can do is draw lines connecting the start and the finish point. We can trace that eye and then that eye. For this one, do the same thing. But let's try to end it a little bit before the edge of the eye. That way it'll give it one extra little pop into place. Then for the pupils, can actually just make them into one long shape. Another thing you can try, which we'll do on this one because why not? Is instead of making it one shape, you can just duplicate the pupil a bunch of times. I think the body needs to happen in two movements instead of one. Let's make a halfway point like that and then maybe we can still have a little bit of the flipper show through there. Then we can just extend this flipper out to get it closer. We're just making it closer to where it's going to go. A lot of this is just winging it and making it up. Because you can really get away with animation in this way when you're not trying to have it be super perfect because you're just seeing it for like a split second. [MUSIC] I guess we can just keep them out the way it is for now. We're going to do that and then let's make a new frame. Can get the eyes in position now because we already did that smear. [MUSIC] Maybe with the mouth lines, these cheeks, we can just pull those up like a smear. Same thing. The mouth, just taking the starting point of it and then moving it up to where it's going to go. Then we can do the same thing, bringing the bends almost to where they need to be. Same with this one. Then we can bring the body almost all the way out. [MUSIC] One of the fun things about smears it's just how ridiculous they look. I'm going to do a new frame. I'm going to turn off the onion skin so that I can just see the final state of the fish. Let's turn off our sketch layer and maybe just toggle through. Let's color it in and take it for a test drive. I didn't close on that line up there. I'll just color it in gray and then you can fill it in. Before we do anything else, I just want to make sure this transition actually works, so let's try that. Actually, I think we may have one, two many frames here. I actually want to try it without this frame. I think we don't need it. I think we may just need one frame. Let's duplicate this frame and then choose just the frame to transform. Then maybe just rotate it a little bit. I feel like when it's this big, it should just teeter-totter a little bit. Let's duplicate it again. Just the frame, we don't want to transform the whole thing. Just this one. Let's actually duplicate that halfway point and come back to this one. Let's see how that. I think that rotation is pretty funny. Let's just go in and edit the mouth to move a little bit. Let's turn on our onion skins and bring this down to one, so we just say before and after. Let's move this and then make it a little bit smaller. Then on this one, let's make this even smaller and grab some flack. You can see what that sequence looks like. I feel pretty good about that. I just want to duplicate this class part of the sequence before it goes back. Now let's get our smear frame and bring that to the end so that it'll loop back to little size. I think that is pretty good. Let's take this whole thing. All the frames move it over here. I think it needs to be a little higher, we can draw it up here circle. Now, we can turn it all on seeing everything in action. Now we can play all. [MUSIC] What you can do now is go to the export option and choose, "Publish & Export", then go to motion, and then generate frames and then this will make the full animation and you'll build a preview at full speed. Now we're going to hit "Play" and preview it at full speed and we can see everything happening. Now we can just hit "Export" and we can save the video and now it's saved and ready to share. [MUSIC] 11. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] We did it. Can you believe it? We have fish everywhere. We got a whole ocean. We have a sad diver, we got an octopus, we got a whale, we got a puffer fish, so many fish. Thanks for following along through all of the lessons and I hope you learned a lot. To recap, we created a scene with three levels of depth. Then we made some fun little friends to live in that space. We used simple motion paths to turn one single fish into infinity fish. Then we used frame-by-frame animation to make the seaweed wiggle, with just three frames. If all that wasn't enough, we then combined frame-by-frame animation with motion paths to create even more motion magic. With Adobe Fresco, we were able to break this down into bite-size pieces so it never felt overwhelming, or at least I hope it didn't. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask them in the discussion section, that's the best place for me to find questions. It's also helpful for other students who may have similar questions as well. Please share your work in process. It will inspire others to share theirs as well. It makes me really happy and inspired to see all the things that you'll do with the things you've learned in these lessons. I'll be sure to provide personal feedback for each and every project that is posted. Also, if you share your project or process stuff on Instagram, be sure to use the class hashtag and also tag me as well. I love seeing my students work out in the wilds of Instagram and social media. If you found this class helpful, I'd be super grateful if you could leave me a review. Those go a long way to help others discover my classes. See See in the next class. Good talk. [MUSIC]