Hand-Painted GIFs: Bring Your Illustrations to Life in Procreate

1. Introduction: GIF making is such a simple yet rewarding way to enhance your work. It's a brilliant string to add to your bow and great fun too. Besides that, GIFs can help you reach new audiences, get people excited about your work, and even attract commissions. Hello, I'm Louise Gouet. I'm an illustrator and artist from the UK, living in France. I've been working as an artist and a freelance illustrator for the past three years, working for magazines and publishers and showing my work in galleries across Europe. I started making these GIFs as a bit of fun. I've made a bunch of them over the years and picked up lots of tips along the way, which I'm really looking forward to sharing with you. In this class, I'll guide you through the entire process of turning your illustrations into GIF stickers. For the few straightforward techniques, you'll be able to bring your work to life in exciting ways with no previous animation experience required. This class is perfect for illustrators and artists who want to take their work to the next level. Particularly if you're new to animation, this is a great place to start because instead of painting every frame separately, we will be starting from a still image and manipulating it using the tools in Procreate. This makes the process really quick and very versatile. You can even use it to bring old illustrations in your sketchbook and new lease of life. Hopefully, this class will give you lots of ideas about what's possible and how you can apply it to your own GIFs. You can learn from my trials and errors to make the process as simple and streamlined as possible. I really hope you'll enjoy this class, and I can't wait to see what you come up with. I look forward to seeing you in class. 2. Class Orientation: Welcome to my class on GIF making. I'm so glad you're here. In this class, I will be walking you through my entire process of making animated gift stickers with Procreate. By the end of the class, you'll have everything you need to start making your own animated GIF stickers, either from your existing paintings, or painted from scratch, or using mine, which I will link in the class resources. I'll be going through four different options of how to animate your illustrations using very simple techniques. We'll be using the liquify tool, rotation, erasing, and painting using Procreate. Is a great place to start if you're new to animation, because instead of painting every frame separately, we will be taking one still image and manipulating it using the tools in Procreate and that will be what makes it move. If you're already in Illustrator, you may well have scrapped bits of paper with paintings lying around or little paintings in your sketch book, which you are very welcome to use for this class. If you'll be painting from scratch, you will just need any paper, some paints, and if you're like me and you like to put some texture over your paintings, then maybe some crayons or pencils. You will also need an iPad with Procreate installed on it, plus an Apple Pencil or any stylus. When you're ready, grab your cup of tea, prepare your workspace, and let's get going. 3. Planning your GIFs: [MUSIC] Hello. In this lesson, I'm going to share with you some notes to keep in mind when planning gifts. Whether I'm painting from scratch or using an existing illustration, it's good to keep certain things in mind to help make the process of animating as quick and smooth as possible. One thing to bear in mind is that with gifts, every pixel has to be either 100 percent transparent or 100 percent opaque, so you can't really play around with opacity. I learned this the hard way with this kettle. I wanted to make semi-transparent steam come out of it but upon exporting, I learned that this was not possible. Instead I made the steam opaque and it works just fine. The second thing to bear in mind is because semi-transparent pixels are not supported, the edges of your image need to be clean. By that I mean, not fuzzy and not textured. The reason for that is when you use a textured brush to cut out your image, it actually relies on a lot of semi-transparent pixels to create the effect. A good analogy is, imagine you need to cut your image out with scissors, because that's essentially what you need to do digitally. The third thing to think about is that the size and quality of your image is going to be reduced when shared to social media. Bearing that in mind, it makes sense to favor simpler images and not worry too much about elaborate details because ultimately some of that quality is going to be lost. Finally, you want to avoid having any very thin lines and that's because when the size is reduced, sometimes if they're a very thin areas of a shape, it just doesn't register and then you end up with gaps in your shape which you don't want. If you have an image with some thin parts, for example, branches, flower stems, just be careful to make them a little bit thicker than you might usually. When raiding sketch books for potential gifts, you're looking for really the same things. In general, anything flat, full colored with clean edges and a blank background is going to work well. [MUSIC] That's the thing I'm thinking about when I'm brainstorming ideas. In the next lesson, I'm going to share with you my entire painting process when I'm painting from scratch. [MUSIC] 4. Painting for Animation: In this lesson, I'm going to be walking you through my painting process. specifically, when I'm painting already with the idea of animating. I start by laying out my colors. Here I'm using Winsor and Newton Gouache and Caran d'Ache Eco Gouache for my white. First, I just block in the main shapes. Bearing in mind what I said earlier, I'm looking for clean edges and simple shapes. Within the shapes there you can add as much texture as you like. The handle is about as thin as you would want to go with any part of your shape. But you can see that I've ignored some of the detail on the handle because I know it will be reduced in size and that intricacy will be lost. Here I'm adding some texture with new color crayons and colored pencils. The way I like to work is by laying down base colors in paint and drawing details over the top. It allows me to get a wide variety of texture in my work and also gives me the opportunity to erase parts that I'm not happy with. It makes the whole process more free. Choosing colors can be a bit tricky when you're making gifts, because when they're being used, they can appear on any background color. I'm trying to keep the flame a fairly light color so that whatever background it appears against, it will still look light. Now I'm just adding the finishing touch, the wick. We're done. In the next lesson, I'll show you how to get this painting onto your iPad and onto its own layer on a transparent background, ready to animate. 5. Import & Selection: Now we need to get this physical painting onto the iPad on a transparent background so that we can make it move and make into a transparent sticker. The first thing to do is to scan your painting, save it as a JPEG, and send it to your iPad. I usually make a default square file in Procreate, and import the photo, resizing it to fit as much of the canvas as possible. Before I do anything else, I'm just going to correct the colors, so I go into Adjustments and Curves. This is very similar to levels in Photoshop, so you just have to drag this top one to the left to make the lights lighter and this bottom one to the right to make the darks darker. Now we need to get our image onto a transparent background. What I usually do is go in with the Selection tool, and cut it out by hand. You can, of course, use the Magic Wand tool, but I find this gives me the cleanest lines. Since I'm usually working with simple shapes, it doesn't take me too long either. I really like the Selection tool in Procreate because you can draw curved lines and click on separate points to get straight lines as well. I'm just pinching with two fingers to resize and rotate the canvas as I go along, much like you'd be rotating a piece of paper that you are cutting out with scissors. Once selected, copy and paste onto a new layer. I'll set my background color to something very contrasting so that I can see what I'm doing and if I've made any mistakes or missed any bits. If I need to clean it up or if I have any inside bits that need to be transparent, I can either erase them with a clean edge brush such as the default studio brush or select and erase. Now double-check to make sure you haven't missed any pixels, and then go ahead and choose a background color that doesn't hurt your eyes, remembering that this will be removed at the end, or you can just hide the background. Now we have our painting on a transparent background. It's time for the fun part, the animation. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you all the animation features in Procreate. See you there. 6. Animation Features in Procreate: [MUSIC] Let's have a look at the animation features in Procreate in case you're not already familiar with them. Feel free to skip it if you're already a pro and know these features very well. Or if you just want a recap, I've linked a PDF in the class resources explaining all of the features. If you go to Settings, Canvas and Animation Assist, you'll see a timeline come up at the bottom. The timeline is linked to your layers panel. Whenever you make a new layer, a new frame will appear in your timeline as well, and vice versa. A group of layers counts as one frame of the animation. You can play or pause the animation here. You have some settings here on the right. The loop option starts at frame 1 and goes back to frame 1 when it reaches the end. So 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, Ping-pong goes back and forth between the frames, 1, 2, 3, to 1, 2, 3, to 1. One shot means your animation will play through only once and then stop, which is not what we want. Frames per second controls the speed at which your animation plays. You probably want to be somewhere between one and 10 frames per second. But just have a play and see what feels right. It will vary based on the gifts you're trying to make. If you have onion skins turned on, the frames around your selected frame show up translucent. You can just show one or two frames or you can have them all visible. This can be very useful or not so much depending on the type of animation you're working on. Selecting blend primary frame will make your current layer translucent like an onion skin too. Color secondary frames will make all the frames that come before the selected frame red, and all those after green. I usually keep these options turned off. [MUSIC] That's all you really need to get started. Now we can get our hands dirty. In the remaining lessons, I'll be going through all the different techniques I use to animate. See you there. 7. Technique 1: Liquify: Now it's time to start animating. The first technique I want to show you uses the Liquify tool. This is a really simple and intuitive way of animating and I'm sure you'll come up with lots of different ways of using it. The first thing to do is to bring up the animation features. Go to Settings, Canvas, Animation Assist and then you'll see that timeline has come up from the bottom. If I go to my layers panel, you can see I've got my candle selected and I'm just going to duplicate this. Slide your layer to the left and select Duplicate. Then with that new layer selected, I'm going to go to Adjustments and Liquify. You'll see that some tools pop up on the bottom part of the screen. The Push tool basically lets you use your finger or stylus to mold the shape. A bigger brush will mean more of the image moves. But for this candle, I just want to make the flame flicker slightly so I'm going to pick a small brush, zoom right in and just lightly affect the flame area. Now, if I come up with the Liquify tool and press Play on my timeline, I can see exactly how that looks. I can bring up those settings to the right and play around with the frames per second. I could just leave it here, but I want to try and make that movement a bit more natural. I'm going to carry on. I can duplicate the layer again and going to Liquify and maybe move it the other way and see what that does. I can just repeat this process as much as I want experimenting with the Liquify tool until I'm satisfied with how it's looking. Remember you're not bound to anything you can always delete layers and redo things. I can go into the Settings and switch between the Loop and Ping-Pong options to see which looks better. Basically, just keep playing with it until it looks the way I want it to. I hope you'll enjoy experimenting with this really versatile tool. For the next lesson, we'll be talking about the Rotate tool and how you can use that to give your animations really natural movement. 8. Technique 2: Rotation: A tool I use very often to make things work is the rotation tool. One really simple way of animating using the rotate tool is to just have your object rock back and forth. This works really well for pretty much anything. Just duplicate your layer, using the selection tool, rotate it, just slightly. Then when you play that on the timeline, you'll see that it rocks back and forth. You can leave it like that, or you can duplicate the layer again and make it rock to the other side. Then it will look something like this. You can try out the loop or ping pong and see which works best. You can adjust the frames per second. I think for this shell, I actually preferred how it looked with just two layers. So, I will delete that third layer and just leave it like that. Another really simple thing you can do which works well for anything round, is to duplicate your layer, rotate it 90 degrees, and then repeat this process twice more. Then when you press "Play" you'll have your object moving around in a circle. Sometimes you might want to just rotate part of an image, in which case you want to use layer groups. For example, maybe I just want this blackbird's beak to move, but nothing else. First duplicate your layer and then hide it just so that you have a copy in case anything goes wrong. Next you want to select the part of the image that you want to rotate. In the case of my blackbird, I want to select half the beak. I'm going to zoom right in, use the selection tool and cut out the part that I'm going to be moving. Now copy and paste your selection onto a new layer. Whilst you've got that area selected, go to your previous layer and erase that shape, so that you're left with two parts of your image. Now select both layers by dragging them to the right and create a layer group with them. A layer group counts as just one frame of your animation. Now instead of having two layers and two frames, you've got one layer group and one frame. I'm going to duplicate that. Now I have two layer groups and to frames. In my second layer group, I'm going to select the layer that I want to rotate, in my case, the bottom part of the beak. Using the selection tool, I'm going to rotate that as far as I wanted, being careful to align the edge of the beak. Now if you notice that's created quite a conspicuous line where the two layers meet. What you can do is press and hold with your finger to select the eyedropper tool. Pick a nearby color and use a textured brush such as the 6b pencil, to just blend in the area. You can keep picking neighboring colors with the eyedropper tool to create more nuance. Then just lightly brush over the area where there is that harsh line to make it look more blended. If we play that now, that's looking good, but it's a bit mechanical. I want to show you another really useful tool. If you click on any frame in the timeline, this little menu will come up. Using the hold duration slider, you can make this frame appear for longer, without having to duplicate the layer. This is really useful, because Procreate limits the amount of layers you are allowed on a document. I think it looks much more natural to stagger the movement. It's not just open, close, open, close. It's more like peep every now and then. There are so many possibilities with this technique. It's quite endless, what you can do with it. I'm really looking forward to seeing what you come up with. In the next lesson, I'll be sharing another animation technique, which uses the erasing tool. Hope to see you then. 9. Technique 3: Erasing: This is a really simple one the very effective, and useful for things like food and also handwriting and text being written a case. I've got this cookie here and I want to make it look like it's being eaten. The first thing to do is to duplicate the layer, and then on that new layer, I'm going to select my erase tool, and make sure that I've got a clean edged brush selected, such as the studio pen. I'm just going to go in and take a bite out of my cookie. Once I've done that, I'm going to duplicate that layer, and take another bite, and just keep repeating this process. They can be quite large bites, because otherwise you're going to have lots of friends, so it's better to keep it simple. Maybe in total, you want to do this about four or five times. At the end, if you want, you can leave some crumbs. Let's see how that looks. I think that's too many crumbs, so I'll take some away. Then, you can also add an empty frame at the end just by adding a new blank layer, so that even the crumbs have disappeared. Another thing that's quite nice is to set the whole duration to maybe one, two or three on the first frame, and that way we get to like cut a home piece of food for a second before it gets eaten. Now, I want to show you a really useful way of using the eraser tool to make text look like it's being written. I've got here my drawing of a piece of paper. Then I've made a new layer on top of that, and I've written my text on that layer directly into Procreate. I've got these two layers grouped into a layer group, so they make one frame. I'm going to duplicate this layer group. Because we want the text to look like it's being written rather than being erased, I need to always start from the frame underneath. Selecting the bottom layer group, select the text layer, and just erase a little bit of the end of your text. Duplicate again. Again, select the bottom layer group and erase a little bit more. Just keep duplicating your layer group, always selecting the one underneath and erasing that text layer a little bit at a time until eventually it's left completely empty. If you play that, it should look like the text is being written. Now, in the case of text, it's really important that people are actually able to read it, and it doesn't just disappear really quickly. You need to find that first layer where the whole text is written out, and set it to hold for a few frames so that people have time to actually read the text before it goes away. It might take a bit of trial and error to get the right hold duration, but just play around until it looks like a comfortable amount of time to read your text. In the next lesson, I'll be sharing my final technique, which is a painting directly into Procreate, hope to see you then. 10. Technique 4: Painting with Procreate: Welcome to the final animation technique which is painting directly into Procreate. Changing details on your existing paintings digitally is a really good skill to cultivate and it also has wide applications for animation. Series of blackbird from earlier, but this time instead of making his beak rotate, I want to make him blink. First of all, I'm going to duplicate the layer, and on this new layer, I'm going to cover up the eye. There are a few ways of doing this, but one quite simple way that I like is to take a textured brush such as the 6B pencil, and hold down with your finger to bring up the eyedropper tool. I'm going to select a color around the eye and just paint over it. I'm aiming here to give myself a blank canvas to draw a closed eye on top off . Since I've got a textured painting here with multiple colors, I'm just going to keep using the eyedropper tool and selecting different colors around the eye and painting little patches over the eye until it's completely covered and I'm happy with the way it looks. I'm quite happy with the way that looks and now I can create a new layer on top. I'm going to select both of these layers and group them so that they will just be one frame. On the new layer I've just created, I'm going to draw a closed eye on top. It's a good idea to have onion skins turned on here so that you can see the open eye on the layer underneath and line them up. Now when I play that, he should be blinking. As I shared with you before, the hold duration is going to be very useful here. To give it a more natural look, set the open eye to hold for a few frames, and then you would just be blinking occasionally. Those are the four techniques I use when animating using Procreate. In the next lesson, I'll show you how you can combine these techniques to create really rich combinations of movement. 11. Mix it Up: Now, you've got these different techniques in your tool belt. It's time to try mixing and matching them and seeing what exciting combinations you can come up with to give your animations real depth. First, I wanted to show you this bee, which I found in a sketchbook. What I've done is cut out the body of the bee using the selection tool and put that on a new layer. For the legs and antenna, I've actually just traced them onto a new layer using a clean edge brush. I've also drawn a pair of wings straight onto Procreate on its own layer. I've got three layers in total. I've got the legs, the body, and the wings. I've combined them into one layer group. That's what I'm left with. I'm going to start by duplicating the layer group. Now, I want to make several movements happen here on the same GIF. I want the wings to flap and I want the legs to wriggle. I'm going to start with the wings. I want each of them to rotate outwards. I select just one wing a time, rotate outwards. Because I have onion skins turned on, I can see where it was before. I'm just going to move it into position. I want to line up the base of the wing with where it was before. I'll do the same on the other side, lining up with the base of the wing where it was previously. Let's see how that looks. Now, I'm going to move on to the legs. I'll select the leg's layer. Again, I'm just going to select each individual leg separately. With the legs, I can either rotate them or I can use the liquify tool. The wings are in my way for the back legs. I'm just going to hide that layer for a second. I try to make it quite random, some legs will be going one way, some will be going the other way. For the legs, I find it's good to have a couple of different variations. The wings can just have two positions, but the legs might have three. I'll duplicate my layer group again and just keep moving the legs around and the antennae, they don't have to be big movements. I turn the wing layer back on. Once I'm satisfied, I'll play that, and see how it looks. As you can see by combining movements on the same GIF, you can have a more natural effect. I wanted to show you another example of using multiple techniques in the same GIF. I've got this watering can here and I've already gone ahead and made these droplets come out just using the eraser tool, like I showed you before. That was my original image with the three droplets. I just went through and erased one at a time until I was left with just the watering can. That's the effect I got but it's a little bit static. I was thinking I could maybe make the watering can tilt whilst it was drooping so it looked like it was pouring out the water. I'm going to combine it with the rotate tool. To do that, all I need to do is just go on to each of my layers and use the selection tool to pick just the watering can and just rotate it slightly. I'll turn onion skins on so I can see what I'm doing. Just do that with each one rotating it slightly more each time. That should give us the effect of the water pouring out. One optional extra step would be to move the drip slightly. For example, on the second one, maybe I'll move that first drop down. Then on the third one, maybe I'll move everything down a little bit. Let's see how that looks. That's another way you can combine techniques to create a richer movement. I did the same thing here with this boat. This was my original painting, and I duplicated it several times. Then I used the eraser tool to carve out waves slightly different each time, just a random. Then I also moved each layer slightly to give the effect that the boat was rocking back and forth, slightly up and down, just bobbing on the waves. I really liked the effects that, that made, very simple but very effective, I think. The combinations you can come up with are truly endless. I heard that this is just whetted your appetite. The best thing to do is just to go off and experiment and play and enjoy yourself. I hope this has given you some ideas of what things are possible. Don't forget to share your projects in the project gallery. I would love to have a look at them. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to export your GIFs and which settings to use. See you then. 12. Exporting: Hello. In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to export your GIF and which settings to choose when doing so. You go to settings share animated GIF at the bottom. You'll see this screen come up with a preview of your GIF on the right, and the settings on the left. You can choose either max resolution or web ready. It doesn't matter too much, but I usually choose max so that I can share it on my portfolio or do whatever I want with it. But be aware that whichever option you choose, once it's uploaded to Giphy, it's going to get shrunk down anyway, and will look more like the web ready option. You can double-check your frames per second the way you want them and adjust them here if needed. Most of the time, you're not going to worry about dithering or per frame color palette. You can just ignore them. But you do want to make sure you have it set on a transparent background, that's really important. Most of the time you're going to want the upper threshold set to a 100 percent. There are a couple of exceptions which I've laid out in the PDF, which I've put in the class resources, but 99 percent of the time, you're just going to want that set to a 100 and not worry. Just click ''Export'' in the corner, and you can just save your image to your iPad or AirDrop it wherever you want it to go. Now you can see if I go into my photos app, voila, my GIF is there. If you tap it, you can also see how it will look on a dark background. That is how you export your GIFs. In the class resources, you'll find a PDF with a recap of all of this information. In the next lesson, I'll show you how to make your GIFs searchable on social media so that other people can use them. See you then. 13. Make your GIFs Searchable with GIPHY: One of the most exciting things about GIF making, for me at least, was being able to put them on social media and share them with friends. It's a great way to get people excited about your work and it's also just really fun to see how other people use them in their stories. To make your GIFs searchable, the first thing you need to do is apply for an artist account on Giphy. I know that sounds a bit intimidating but it is very simple and anybody can do it. First of all, you just make a normal account with them and upload a minimum of five GIFs. Then you need to fill in their application form. You'll need a link to your Instagram or another social media platform and your website if you have one. Giphy have a bunch of helpful articles on how to apply which I've linked in the class resources. Once you've done that, you just have to wait for approval. I've heard varying accounts on how long this can take, but for me, it was about a week and you'll get an email once you've been approved. I just wanted to quickly show you the upload process as well. The type of GIF we're making with a transparent background is a sticker so make sure you have that selected and then select your file. You'll see it come up on the left. I just wanted to mention the importance of hashtags if you want your GIFs to be searchable on Instagram stories or elsewhere. Hashtags in this setting are the keywords that people search for your GIF to come up, so you want to use as many as possible whilst keeping it relevant, of course. You can think both broad and specific. Think about a category that your GIF would belong in. You can think about the colors, the season, and as you go, you'll get these tag suggestions as well, which are useful. Last but not least, remember to tag your name and or username so that people can find all of your GIFs in one place easily. That's what you need to do if you want to make your GIFs searchable for other people to use in their Instagram stories, and TikTok, and iMessage, and stuff. In the next video, I'll show you how you can use them in your own Instagram stories straight away. 14. Your Instagram Stories: In the last lesson, I showed you how to make your GIFs searchable for others on social media. But I also have a nice simple way for you to use them in your own Instagram stories straight away without jumping through any hoops. It's very simple. You create a story on Instagram, and then once that's up, you minimize the app and guarantee your photos, Find the GIFs that you wanted to use, and copy it to your clipboard. Now go back into Instagram and it will appear here in the corner. Tap Add sticker. Then you can rotate it, flip it by tapping, and just position it wherever you want it. You can also resize it a lot, which is great. This way you can save them at high resolution and keep the quality even if you make them really big. Another way is to select the text option, tap once and paste, and because it's already on your clipboard, it'll appear in exactly the same way. You can treat it like any other sticker. 15. Conclusion: Well, That's it. That's everything I know about making GIFs stickers. I hope it was useful. I really hope you enjoyed the class and that it gave you lots of ideas and that you are just raring to go and make your gift stickers. I would absolutely love to see your GIFs, so please do share them in the project gallery. You can also tag me on Instagram at Louise Gouet. If you have any questions at all, feel free to pop them in the class discussion. Thank you so much for taking my class and happy GIFing.