Intro to Animation in Procreate

1. Introduction: Hi, and welcome to this introductory course on animation in Procreate on the iPad. My name is Ben Nielsen and I'm a Media Design educator with over six years of experience teaching creative programs both in-person and online. In this course, we're going to be tackling the basics of animation in Procreate on the iPad. For this course, you will need an iPad that can run Procreate, but you don't need any prior experience with animation or with procreate in order to take this course, because we will be starting from the beginning. You don't have to have an Apple pencil to take this course, but I will be using one. And as an Apple pencil does make it easier to draw in Procreate, it is recommended that you use one if you have one available to you. This course will not cover everything that happens in Procreate or everything there is to know about animation. It's just a basic look at it, but we will be going over all of the available animation tools that are in procreate. We will be using a simple animation to do this. We'll be creating a stick figure ninja that we can use the procreate tools to animate. We'll talk more about that in the project section for this course. I hope that you're excited to go ahead and get started and dive in with me and learn about animation in Procreate on the iPad, animation is a complex, multifaceted subject that people spend years and years studying and producing. So of course, we aren't going to be able to touch on everything that has to do with animation. In this course, we'll be focusing in on one of the basic principles. It's called squash and stretch. And we will talk more about that throughout this course. But that will help us to learn about how to give an animated feel to our stick ninja. Remember if you have any questions along the way, feel free to put those in the discussion tab, and I will do my best to get back to you and answer them. In the next video, we're going go ahead and get started by talking about the project for this course. 2. Project: The project for this course is going to be to create a simple animation of a stick Ninja or another stick figure character that you want to create. I will be doing in India in my project. But you can do whatever kind of a character you want to do. But it should be a very simple character because the focus of this course is not unlearning to draw something, just on being able to animate that character. So some kind of stick figure is the best way to go for this. There are a couple of requirements that I have for your animation. The first one is that it needs to be at least two seconds long with at least 24 frames. So you should be doing 12 frames per second, which we'll talk about in the course. But it should be at least 12 frames per second. And so in order to do a 2 second clip, you need at least 24 frames. Now you can go longer than that. You probably don't want to go anywhere beyond a 5 second clip because any more than that and it's going to get really overwhelming to be able to produce that many frames on your first time through. The only other requirement for the project is that it demonstrates the principle of squash and stretch because that is a basic principle of animation and it's the one that we're going to be focusing on this course. You need to make sure that your stick figure demonstrates that principle in your animation. Otherwise, your animation will look very tilted and stiff. Course we'll talk a lot more about this principle as we go through the course. So you don't have to worry about understanding and right now, just know that that's one of the requirements for the projects. So in summary, remember it needs to be at least two seconds at 12 frames per seconds. So at least 24 frames. And it needs to represent the principle of squash and stretch. Please do take the time to complete the project for this course because you will learn a lot better if you actually do it along with me. If you follow along with me in this course, at the end, you will have a completed project that you can then submit. Now because this is a video project, you do need to export it as a video, which we'll talk about at the end of the course, and then upload it to a free video service site like YouTube or Vimeo, and then paste the link to that site or embed that video into your Skillshare project because Skillshare can't upload your videos natively. So once you have it, go ahead and paste that into your Skillshare project so that we can see it. And I'm happy to give feedback to you if you're interested in getting feedback as well. This helps us all to learn and grow together. So please do take the time to be part of the community and go ahead and share your project with us when you're done with the course, I'm really looking forward to seeing your projects. In the next video, we're going to go ahead and dive in and start learning about the Procreate Interface. 3. Procreate Interface: Okay, so now it's time to dive in and learn about the interface in Procreate. If you're already familiar with the interface and procreate, then you might not need to watch this video, but you might learn something new as well. If you've never used Procreate before, make sure that you watch this video so that you're at least familiar with the things that I'm referring to as we go throughout the course. This is the opening screen to procreate. So there's some example projects that they've done and you can see that I have some other projects here as well, including animations that we will be looking at it as we go through this course. But for now, let's go ahead and let's make a new document just so we can go ahead and take a look at the different tools that are here and learn our way around Procreate. So let's go ahead and hit the plus in the top right corner. That's going to let us create a new canvas. So what you can see here is that there are a bunch of different pre-made options for you and screen sizes. What we will probably go with for this just because screen size is a good size to work with on the iPad. If you don't have a specific size that you need to be meaning, since we're just practicing in this course and creating a little project for Skillshare. We don't really need a specific size, but I do want to show you something. If you hit the plus button, underneath the plus button, that's going to give you the option to create a custom canvas. Now, the important thing to note here in the custom canvas is just to see that it tells you how many maximum layers you have. So depending on the size of your canvas and what iPad you are using will determine the number of maximum layers that you can have. The thing about your iPad that determines how many maximum layers you can have is how much RAM it has. So the better your iPad generally, the more layers you'll be able to have. So for example, this is a 2017 iPad Pro. And I can have 250 layers with a screen size of 1122 by 49, 52. For us, we're going to go ahead and make this a 1080 by 720. That's an HD size canvas. And you can see that it remains at 250. So 250 is the maximum number of layers that my iPad can reach depending on iPad you're using, you may see different numbers for that. Why is this important? It's important because the number of layers that you have determines the number of frames that you can have in your animation. So if you're doing a very long animation, you might need a lot of frames. Remember I mentioned before, we will be animating at 12 frames per second. So every 12 frames, basically 1 second, 250 is going to be playing. I'm going to click Cancel here, and I'm just going to hit screen size just to make a canvas that matches my screen size here, I just find that a useful way to get started. Okay, so let's go ahead and let's just take a look around what we see here on the interface. We're not going go over everything in great detail because we don't need every tool and every feature of every tool in this course. But there are lots of courses that people have made on Procreate, on Skillshare that you can go ahead and check out. This will just be a brief overview. Let's start in the top left, there's the gallery button that will take us back to see all of our projects. Then there's the wrench icon. This controls all of your settings. This is how you export. And we'll be taking a look at some of the features inside of here, but not all of them throughout this course. But just know if I say, let's go to the Wrench, that's why I'm talking about next we have a magic one which is going to be your adjustments. We probably won't need to touch these adjustments during this course, but it's useful to know that they're there. Then you have the S, this is your selection tool. And you can see instead of opening up a menu, it actually opens up a toolbar along the bottom there. We'll be using selections a little bit in this course. So we'll be looking at that again in the future. The next is the arrow. This is going to be your move or transform tool, but we need something on our layer to actually use it. So let's go ahead and just use our brush tool, which is the first tool on the right. Let's change our color to something we can use like black. And go ahead and we'll just make a line. Then if we go ahead and hit our arrow, you can see we have our transform tool and this also opens up a toolbar on the bottom and gives us some handles, will be using the transform tool during this course. So you will see a lot more of this as we go along. There's a lot of options in the toolbar. We won't go into all of them. We'll be using quite a few of them throughout this course. Now we already saw the brush tool when we drew that line. The brush tool is how you draw things in Procreate. If you tap on the Brush tool after selecting it, you'll actually open up your brush library. This is where you can select what different types of brush you want to use. We are primarily going to be using inking brushes during this course. But as you can see, there are tons and tons of brushes that come pre-made. And by hitting one of these buttons, you can even add a new brush. You can purchase brushes online or you can make your own, but we won't be going into that in this course. The next tool is the smudge tool. We're not going to need the smudge tool in this course, but it's good to know that it's there. When you tap on it, you see the same brush library. So it draws from the same brush library as the brushes does. But instead of drawing new lines, it's smudges existing lines. The next tool is the Eraser tool. We can use this to erase. We will use this sum during this course as we adjust how our stick figure looks. The eraser tool also uses the same brush library. All right, the next thing that you see are two squares stacked on top of each other. Those are your layers. Now, we won't be looking at the layers panel a lot because we're going to be using the animation tools. But you can see that when you look at the layer, you can actually see what's on it. You can see my black line and that white line that I drew first. So even though we can't see the white line just looking at our Canvas because our background color is white, we can see what's on a layer here in the layers panel. Again, we won't be touching this very often in this course because we'll be primarily using the animation mode, which uses layers as frames, but it's good to know that it's there. Next up you have the color circle. When you tap this, you get all of the different color options. We will primarily just be using black in this course because we're just doing a stick figure of a ninja. But of course you could choose whatever color you wanted it. There are a bunch of different ways to select colors along the bottom. So I'll just tap through these really quick, but I'm not going go into the detail of every single one. We'll just be using black. Okay, Then as we dropped down on the right-hand side, you will actually see that there are a couple of sliders and a button. So the first slider actually changes your brush size. So you can see that adjusting there. And the second slider changes your brush opacity, so it makes it more or less transparent. The button in the middle is your modifier key. So think of that as like holding down Shift or command or something on your keyboard. We're not really going to need it for this course, but there's a lot of useful things that you can do in Procreate with that modifier key. Then down at the bottom of the undo option and the Redo option, I really prefer to just use the gesture controls, which are two finger tap and three-finger tap. That's just a lot quicker to be able to use. Now my slider bar is on the right-hand side. Yours might be on the left-hand side. I prefer to have mine on the right-hand side just because I'm left-handed. So I'm going to be drawing with the pencil with my left hand and I want to control the sliders with my right hand. You need to adjust that option. You can do so in the settings and it's a little confusing, but you go under Preferences and it says right-handed interface is turned on. I'm not sure why it says right-handed interface is turned on when I think that's fair for left-handed people, but if you want to switch it, you turn off the right-handed interface. So choose whatever works best for you there. Okay, and that is just a basic intro to the interface of Procreate. We're going to be going into a lot more detail on the tools that we're going to be using in this course. But I just wanted you to feel familiar with all the different pieces so you kind of know where everything is. In the next video, we're going to go ahead and turn on the animation tools and actually see what tools we have there for creating our animation. 4. Procreate Animation Tools: All right, Now it's time to learn about the animation settings inside of Procreate. First, I'm going to go ahead and clear this layer because we don't need this line here. So let's go ahead to our Layers panel. I'm just going to swipe to the left and then hit Clear, clear out my Layer 1. Okay, Let's go ahead and turn on our animation tools. So if we go to our wrench icon and we go under our canvas options, we're going to find our Animation Assist. Let's go ahead and turn that on. When we do that, you will immediately see that a timeline opens up along the bottom. This is our animation timeline. So let's click out a wrench and go look at what we have down here. First off, you'll see a play button that play buttons not going to do anything right now because we have no frames. So it's technically playing, but nothing's happening. Then we can click, pause to pause it. Okay, let's just take a look at something here. Let's go ahead and add a frame. We now have a new blank frame. Let's draw something on that. It doesn't really matter what we draw this point. Then we'll add another frame and we'll draw something. And you can see my old frame is still there. We'll talk about that in just a second. Then let's add a third frame and another line. Now, let's hit play just to see what is happening. Okay, that's not a great animation, but you can see what is going on there. It's playing through each of those frames in sequence. All right, Let's figure out why we can still see our frames even when we're selected on this middle one. When we hit Settings, we're going to find out all the settings that are available to us in the animation option. So first there's the Playback setting. One is a loop, you just saw that. So it played over and over again. If we do ping-pong and then we hit Play, you'll actually see it bounced back and forth across the screen. All right, Let's keep looking at the settings. There's loop ping pong and one shot. One shot we'll just play through onetime loop will continue to go back to the first frame and play through again. And ping-pong will go back and forth between the first and last frame. I like loop most of the time, so I'm going to set it back to that. Then we have frames per second. This will determine how fast our frames play through. So if you remember, I mentioned this before, We want 12 frames per second. 12 frames per second is pretty standard in a lot of like old-style animation because it's half of 24 frames per second. 24 frames per second is often done in like live action films, cinematic kind of stuff. And so 12-bit half of that fits in well. And animation doesn't need to be as smooth as a cinematic film. So we've gone from 15 to 12, that will just slow it down. It was set to 15 because a lot of things are filmed also in 30 frames per second, and 15 is half of 30. Next we have our onion skin frames. So onion skinning shows us what's happened before or what is happened after. This is very useful to have because as you are drawing your animation, you want to know what's happening in the frame right before. Or if you're adding animation in-between two animation frames, you want to know what's happening both before and after. That will allow you to create a more fluid field to your animation. So I always have my onion skin frames set to max. But you can also adjust how many you want to see if so the max here is got 12. That gives us the last second of frames that we can see. The onion skin opacity just determines how dark or light those are. So if we set it up to 100%, you can see we can't tell any difference between our current frame and our previous frames. If we set it down to 0, we just can't see it at all. So 60s what it sets up and that's a pretty good level for it to be at. If you turn on blend primary frame, it will actually blended the frame that you are on, your primary frame into whatever is behind it. Sometimes you want this because you need to see what's happening behind your current frame as you are drawing it. Otherwise you can't get the proportions just right. But for the most part, I like to have this off. That my primary frame doesn't need to blend into the background. It's important to note that blending your primary frame does not affect the way your animation actually looks on export. It just affects how it looks while you are drawing, okay, then colored the secondary frames. I like this because it will actually turn your secondary frames in the past red and your frames in the future green. Now you can see it didn't do anything here right now. It should change red in the past and green in the future. But there's a little glitch in Procreate. So sometimes you need to leave the document and then come back into making that work back to the gallery. There we go. You can see that it's happened now. Now I have read and if I scroll back, I have green. That just gives you a good idea for what happened before your current frame and what happened after. This is all seeming a little confusing to you. Don't worry, that's fine. Animation takes practice to really understand what's going on. But the important thing to understand here is our first frame. The frame most on the left will play first and then it will cycle through. So you can see that the other frames turn red as it goes away. Now this will not affect how our export happens when it exports, only one frame will show at a time. But the reason we like to have this onion skin feature is so that we can see as we draw, we can kind of determine how we want to move our next frame to make it seem like a fluid animated motion. Okay, So now we kind of know what we have going on here. Let's go ahead and make this little line animation just look a little bit better. So I'll go ahead and I'll delete these frames. We just tap on a frame and then we choose delete. And you can see there's a few other options here. There's a whole duration if we want our frame to stay. So we have a moment of pause in the action. We can increase that whole duration by a number of frames, and it will create those frames worse. There's also duplicate, and we'll talk a lot more about that. Delete which we've just done. And then the last frame will always have a foreground option. And if I go the first frame, it will always have a background option because you can make the last frame or the first frame stationary behind or in front of all of your other frames. This is great if you have like a background. For example, the Walt Disney animators did this all the time in their old films. They would have like a background of the forest. And then you have Sleeping Beauty come out and she dances across it and only Sleeping Beauty is moving, the background is not moving. So let's go ahead and delete these frames. And we'll just do a practice animation here. So we'll just make a line go across, but we'll do a little bit better than we did before. Click Add a frame to zoom out. Just do a two-finger pinch. Just need to be able to see the edge of my frame here. Okay, So now you can see those are all green because I'm back at the start, I'm going click Play. There you go. You have a little dotted line jumping across the screen. And you can see it's on loop. But if we change that to be ping-pong, it will then come back and forth, forward and back. One shot. We'll just play it through one's from whatever frame we're on. And then it will just stop. So those are the basic animation tools that exist in Procreate. You now know all about the different tools that are here. And now it's time to learn one of the principles of animation, which is squash and stretch. We'll talk about that in the next video. 5. Squash and Stretch: All right, Now we're going to talk about one of the principles of animation. And this is the only principle of animation that we are going talk about in this course. But there were 12 principles of animation elaborated by legendary animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson, who worked for the Walt Disney Company. And this is one of those fundamental principles that they talked about and it really helps us to get more realistic animation. Okay, So this is squash and stretch. And I'm just going to play through this animation so that you can see this principle. So there's going to be two animations of a ball here. Okay, Let's play through that again so you can watch it. The first one does not use squash and stretch, and the second one does. So you can see here that in the first one, if we go back, the ball falls at a constant rate and always with the same shape before coming to rest for a period of four frames. That doesn't look very realistic because that's not our experience in the real world. In the next animation, you can see that the ball elongates as it falls. This is the stretch part of the squash and stretch principle. So it stretches as it moves and it builds in speed. So there are less frames here. And then when it impacts the ground, it squashes. So it squashes out and then comes to rest in its normal state. Let me play through all those again, just so you can see them one more time. So this is the principle of squash and stretch. When something is in motion, It's probably stretching out. And when something is coming to rest, it is probably squashing. When something is preparing for motion, it often squashes. So for example, if we make our ninja stick figure jump, it's going to squash down first before it jumps. You want to start thinking about this and the way that motion happens. There are other principles of animation, but this one will go the furthest to helping your animations look real the soonest. And by real, we don't necessarily mean that they look realistic. They aren't like photorealistic films, but that they are believable by the audience. Let's watch this again. The first one's not believable. The second one is a lot more believable. Okay, So you're going hear me refer to squash and stretch more throughout this course. But in the next video, we're actually going to learn how we might make this happen by learning about this select and the transform tools here within procreate. 6. Transform and Select: Now that we know about the principle of squash and stretch, Let's go ahead and see how we would use the transform tools inside of Procreate to make this happen. So let's go ahead here and we will just make a third ball falling so that you can see how I've done this, right? So let's go ahead and let's add a frame. So we've got this blank frame here, and we'll just bring this ball in on the other side. So using our brush tool and I am just selected on inking and mercury here, and my color is black. We will just draw a circle. If we hold down for a second at the end of our circle, it will actually make us a circle or an oval. And if we don't like what we've got, we can always undo with two-finger tap and do twice, and then make another circle. And then what we wanna do is use our transform tools on each frame to change the way that this looks. So always start with the main thing and then we'll duplicate the frame by going down to our frame, tapping on it, and choosing Duplicate. Now we have two frames on top of each other. Okay, so let's go ahead and we'll turn on our onion skinning so that we can see this. So let's take our onion skin frames back up so we can see them all. And now that we have this duplicated frame, we can transform it by hitting our transform arrow. And you can see down in the bottom we now have our Transform panel as opposed to our animation panel. And you can see this lightning bolt says snapping is turned on. Let me show you what that means. When we drag. You can see it snaps to other objects. So there's our onion skin. And you can see that these lines try and keep it snapped in reasonable places with that other frame and also those iframes on the left. So the first thing that the transform error lets you do is actually move your object around. And that's great. Even without squash and stretch, you can move your object around and that can save you a lot of time in the drawing process of the animation. This is one of the great things about digital drawing tools over physical drawing tools is you can save yourself a lot of time and effort. Okay, then within the transform, we want to stretch this ball out as it falls. So let's go ahead and we'll just grab the lower handle and we will drag it down and it's going to stretch. But we want to pretty much maintain the volume size of that object so that it doesn't look weird. It doesn't look like it's actually changing in its total size. Let's just drag in our sights a little bit so that it stretches out right, but the volume is remaining mostly the same. So as it's falling, we will continue to do this. To leave the transform tool, we just tap on the arrow again and we're back to our animation. Then we can duplicate this frame, transform it, and we can drag this down as it continues to fall. We can stretch it in a little bit more and stretch out the bottom. Okay, and there's a few things to note around here. The first one is this is the freeform transform. So I can do any kind of free-flowing, free forming transformation to it. Whereas my uniform transform is going to keep everything the same. So it's going to keep the proportions are the same. When I'm on uniform. I'll just undo that, distort it. Actually going to let you take 1 and kind of just maneuver it. So this is great if you're trying to subtle movements of maybe like hands or feet or on the ninja. You'll see we have like little tie in the back of his mask. This is a great thing for that. I'll undo that and then you have the Warp option. And the warp option will actually give you a mesh and you can turn on or off the advanced mesh. So what the Advanced Mesh on, you can move specific points in the mesh to make different effects. So these are all different ways you can transform. Let's undo that. So those are the four different types of transform. And then you also have like your flip. So you can flip things horizontally or vertically. You can do rotations by 45 degrees. So you have a bunch of different tools downloaded the bottom, but these are the main ones that we will be using, right? So let's go ahead and just practice this. We'll just practice transforming over again as we go down to do the squash. So duplicate, selection tool transform. And after you've stretched out quite a bit, that's probably as far as you're going to need to stretch. And you might just duplicate that frame again and only change its position because it's pretty well stretched out. Next as it encounters the ground. We're going to actually start squashing it. Squash that a little bit. And we might even want to use our warp advanced mesh and we might want to just pull that up a little bit so that it looks like it's really squashing there. Okay, we'll just keep going. Start to bring this down. And we want to push the sides out again as we come down so that the volume appears to remain the same. Okay. And then a great thing when you're trying to cause something to happen in reverse is just to go back, duplicate those other ones. So now we wanted to stand back up, so we duplicate it, move it to the end. And we do that for a couple of these. Duplicate it, move it to the end. You can always scrub through here to see how it's looking. So in my first one, I didn't have it bounce up at all, but we probably do want it to bounce up a little bit. Just to make it a little bit more realistic. We'll just give it a little bit of a balance. Then it bring it back to rest. Let's zoom out. We'll play through the whole thing so that we can watch all three. Give it a little hold here. Maybe four or five frames. Okay, So that is how you use the transform tool. The other tool that I want to talk to you about is the selection tool. Let's go ahead and we'll make a new project. So we'll go to the gallery, hit new screen size. Let's go ahead and turn on our animation tools, gear, Animation Assist. And let's draw a stick figure. There's our stick figure. Duplicate this frame. And we can transform him so we can use the free form to move him over. Let's say we didn't want him to actually move over. What we wanted was for him to kinda wiggled his arms. So that's a great place where we can actually go in and make a selection. So using the S, We have several selections. There's an automatic selection of free hand, a rectangle, and an ellipse. Freehand is most useful when doing animation. So let's go ahead and we'll just draw around his arm. And then we can transform it. We use a warp, will just make his arm move up a little bit. Then we'll go ahead. We'll do another selection around his other arm, Transform, Advanced Mesh. Kind of given this wiggling maneuver. All right, then let's click out of that and we can see what happens with his arms. So this is a great way to maneuver just part of your duplicate objects. So let's make this just by duplicating these two frames over and over again, we can give him a little wiggle. Let's just make that a loop and click play. And he just wiggled his arms. And that is how you can use the selection tool to just transform part of an object. And this is really helpful in avoiding drawing the same thing over and over and over again from scratch. You can just make small tweaks through selection and transform in order to make your animation look the way that you want it to. Now we've talked about the principles and the tools that we need, and it's time for us to go ahead and make our first animation. So the first animation that we're going do is just going to be a rolling ball animation. And this is where I want you to really start following along and doing what I do so that you get practice in on using these tools. And then when it comes to the last video to make our stick figure animation, you'll already be familiar with the tools and that won't be quite so intimidating. So in the next video, we'll go ahead and we'll make the rolling ball animation. 7. Rolling Ball Animation: All right, So here we are. We're going to go ahead and make our rolling ball animation. And this is a really great way to get started practicing animation because the rolling ball is very simple. Now, a stick figure might seem like a simple animation to you, but the truth is there is a lot more going on in that than just having a ball roll across the screen. So let's go ahead and let's make a ball just like I showed you before, only this time it's going to roll instead of balance because bouncing can be a little bit challenging to do on your first try. Let's start with just rolling. All right, so I just have a brush here and it's mercury in the inking section. It doesn't really matter which brush you use, but there needs to be some variability to it because if the ball that you make, it's actually perfectly round, it won't really appear to roll. You need some variability in order to see it roll. So let's go ahead and let's just draw the circle out. And again, I just hold for a second to get it to snap into a circle form. And by now you should be pretty familiar with how we go about making a duplicate frame. We just tap on the frame we want to duplicate, and then we duplicate it. And I do want to check my settings here to make sure I'm on 12 frames per second because it defaults to 15. So I'm going to be on 12 loop, make sure my onion skins are on and turn on my color secondary frames. So now we can just transform this next frame. Make sure we're on free form because we don't want to warp right now. And we're just going to move it over. Keeping it in line, will move it over a little bit. And then we're going to use the green handle to rotate it. And we just do that a number of times. Duplicate, move, rotate by about 15 degrees. Duplicate, Transform, Move, Rotate. We're just going do this across the screen. So I'll go ahead and speed this up so you don't have to watch me do all of these pieces over and over again. Okay, so now we're at an important point here because we've reached the edge of the screen. And when we get to the edge, part of our ball is going start disappearing. Now when we do that, if we duplicate this and then we transform it, we push it over to the side and rotate it. The next time that we transform it, we're not going to have the piece of it that is off the screen. And that's why we didn't start on the far left edge of the screen. We started more in the middle so that we could have our whole ball to work with. Let me show you what I mean when I duplicate this now. Then I transform. You can see I only have part of the circle. So this is important to think about as you are doing it, because you might need to duplicate another frame to get the right proportions. Let me zoom out here. So we basically just wanted to roll out of the frame. But now I only have about a third of the circle left. So when I do this, I have to push it all the way to the edge so that you don't have a weird gap because that will look really funny. And then at the end, I'll just click Add a frame to make a blank frame. Now let's play through and see what we have. Okay, so we have this rolling ball. And it looks a little awkward at the beginning. So let's go back to the beginning and let's actually transform the other way. So we'll do a duplicate. When you do this, it's important to make sure it always goes to the duplicate which comes to the right. But you want to move your frame back to the left, Transform, and then you want to go backwards and rotate the other direction. So duplicate it, but then make sure you're on the leftmost frame. And this will just help us to move it out of screen. And the snapping can get a little funky here because part of the object is disappearing so it doesn't match up exactly anymore. Let's just see what that looks like. Okay, so we have this simple ball rolling animation, but you'll notice we haven't applied any squash or stretch to it. So you can always go back and fix things later. So let's look as we see this rule across. We'd really probably want it to squash a little bit on the bottom as it's rolling across the ground. So we can go back. And as it comes out here, we can just squash that a little bit. So let's go here and warp and use our meshwork to just squash that guy a little bit. Go to the next one. As we get to the middle, it might be speeding up a little bit, so we might want to actually stretch it just slightly, as well as giving it a little warp there. And it's always good to kind of just scrub through your animation and just see how it's looking. You can try different things like here, I'll try stretching it a little bit on the top as it warps up to become a little bit flat. And you're probably thinking, this seems a little tedious. This seems like it could really take a lot of time and you are correct. The animation is not a quick or easy process. Even with these digital tools, which of course make it much easier than the hand-drawn days of old. It takes a lot of time and a lot of work to make an animation work. So don't expect it to be a really quick and easy fix. So I'll speed this up while I do it and you go ahead and work on yours as well. So there's my ball rolling animation, it's not perfect. I could do a lot more tweaking to it, but this helps you get the idea for how you use the transform tool to make an object move across the screen. And how you can go in either while you're doing that or come back in later and add in some squash and stretch in order to give the animation more of a fluid feel. So go ahead and do an animation like this. If you haven't been following along, go ahead, go back. You can re-watch this video and make your animation so that you have a really simple animation of this ball just rolling across the screen and that will get you familiar with the tools. And in the next video, we'll actually go ahead and we'll make this stick ninja animation. 8. Stick Ninja Animation: All right, So here we are with that stick ninja animation that you would have seen before when we were looking at the document gallery. And I want to walk you through frame-by-frame here, what I did so that you can see how this works. But I don't want you to have to watch me draw everything in real time. So I'll go ahead and show you frame by frame what's going on here. And then I will go ahead and I will also post the time-lapse of creating this for you so that you can see it as a time-lapse as well. Let's start here. So we have the very edge of the ninja appear, and this is not a transformation of any other version of the ninja. So I didn't start out in the middle with this and then work my way backwards because this is not that simple. The thing we just want to show the very edge of his face coming in. So as we go out here, I was actually drawing each of these frames separately because they're quite different. So we can see that he starts to enlarge as he comes out. And then we actually start to put in his arms. So there's a little bit different here. And then as he comes out, we're going to see him stretch. And then he's going to squash back in because he's preparing to leap. He stretches to come out. And then he squashes back in to prepare to leap. And each of these frames, I was just drawing frame by frame because there's a lot of variation in them. Then as he jumps we see a stretch. So we've got a squash stretch. Then on this frame I start duplicating. So I've got this frame and this is basically going to be his basic structural pose while he is flipping through the air. So you can see, all I'm doing here is duplicating and rotating. Duplicating, rotating, changing the position here. And then I'm actually using the eraser tool to erase part of his arms and then the brush tool to bring in another part of his arms. But it's the same basic pose throughout. So his arms are reaching back as he's twisting. His arms are still reaching back. So I'm just drawing those in separately and then we're bringing them back out. We're still in the same basic pose. And then he starts to pull out his sorts. Here his swords are out completely, so we've got a stretch. His arms have stretched out, but his basic poses remain the same. And then as he comes down, as he falls, we're going to squash. So his legs start to bend. So we're making some adjustments through erasing and transforming so that he's bending, squashing. You can see we've done a warp here on the TI of his mask so that it actually goes up a little bit so that it looks a little bit more realistic. And as he squashes, then he stretches, as he leaps. So we have him leaping, his legs are still kind of bent and then he's lakes drain out. So at this point we're just transforming the legs a little bit again and doing a little bit of transform on the TI of the mask. And then he leaps forward, falls, and then here's where we have to start transforming how the legs work so that he appears to run. So here we're going to transform his legs so they appears to crouch. We erase part of the arms and draw those back in so that he's crouching. And then we just do a small transform on his head here. So we just select his head and flip it and rotate it a little. And then we adjust with the brush the way the mask looks so they appears to tilt his head and look, you hold that for three frames. So he appears to be looking. Then we go back to the same frame that we had before. So he's back to the same frame and then he's going to run forward. So we're going to need him to strike a different pose here. So we actually draw a new frame. So this is a whole new drawing to have him leaning forward. There's the stretch principle and then we're just going to duplicate this frame. But we're going to transform just his legs. So using the selection tool, we transform just his legs. Let me zoom out here so you can see this. So it's legs appear to be running. And using the selection, we also transform the tie on his mask so that it appears to bounce up and down. Let's play it through so you can see so you can see the balance there with the squash and stretch. And then he runs, this is a very simple animation. By animating like this can take quite a bit of work and quite a bit of time because you are doing frame-by-frame, even though I'm not drawing out every single frame individually, a lot of them are transformations. It can still take quite a bit of time. That is how you would go about putting in your stick figure animation. And I just wanted to also show you how to add in a background or foreground. So let me go to my Layers panel here, scroll all the way down and I have a hidden layer. And that one, we have set over here at the very beginning, and we tap it and we turn that on as a background. Then when we play this through, that frame never moves. That frame just stays there. And he just appears to jump into this grass and run out. So that's how you go about setting up a background with that as well. So go ahead and work on your stick figure animation minds, a stick ninja, you're welcome to do a stick ninja as well or whatever kind of a stick figure you want to do. But just remember it will take some time, but it's worth it to get this practice. And so you start to really understand the way the animation tools in Procreate work. I will also go ahead and post the full time-lapse. So if you're not aware, procreate will actually keep a time-lapse of what you do. So you'd find that by going up to your settings, your video, and then you have your time-lapse replay. So I'll go ahead and I will post that time-lapse replay for you so that you can see me actually drying and making this in faster than real time. And that's a really useful way to even go back and just watch kinda of your artistic process as you are drying and developing something. Right? So that is the stick ninja. So go ahead and work on making that. And in the next video we'll talk about exporting the animation. 9. Exporting: Alright, now that we've completed our animation, we're ready to export it so that we can go ahead, upload it to YouTube or Vimeo or whatever and share it. So let's go to our wrench up in the top-left. And we don't want to be on the video anymore now we want to be on the share. And there's lot of different ways that you can share Procreate projects. But when you've created an animation, you really want to go down to the bottom and you want to choose one of these animated options. I'm just gonna choose Animated MP4, but you could do it as a gift or something else. But for the purposes of this project, we want to as an mp4. So it's going to be very short. You can again choose your frames per second and we can go with web ready, which will make it a little bit smaller because that's all we need right now, you can see the max resolution is a lot larger. If you look under the estimated file size in the middle, it says 378 kilobytes, whereas Web Ready is just going to be 18 kilobytes. That's pretty much all we need to do there. And we can see the preview going across. So for this we just want to see the animation. So just web ready is fine. And then export, it's going to export it as an MP4. It's gonna go ahead and give us the option of where to save it. There's a bunch of different things you can do here, but I'm just going go ahead and choose Save video. That will just save it to my camera roll and then I can upload it to YouTube or Vimeo or whatever. And then I can share that link or embedded in my class project for this course. So go ahead and click Save Video. And then if we go to our actual photos app, we can see it. So here we go. And there's our video. So that's it. That's how you go ahead and export. There are different file types that you can choose, but I think MP4 is probably going work best for this project, and that's all you need to do. Then go ahead and upload it and share that link or embedded on the class project section for this course. And congratulations, you are now a Procreate animator. Well then in the next video, we'll go ahead and wrap up the course. 10. Course Wrap Up: Thank you so much for taking this course on an introduction to animation in Procreate, I hope that you've learned something and that you've enjoyed this course. Please do go ahead and share your project with us in the project section for this course, remember that you can upload your video to a free service like YouTube or Vimeo and then share the link or embed that video in the project section for the course. I'm so looking forward to seeing what you create if you're interested in more creative applications, especially ones on the iPad, I have lots of courses covering things like Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo, and luma fusion and assembly on the iPad. Go ahead and check those out on my profile page. Also feel free to check out my Ben designs YouTube channel where I post weekly videos about design topics and also at my Ben designs media Instagram account where you can get weekly lessons on design principles. If you have any questions at all, please go ahead and ask those in the discussion tab for this course. I am happy to do my best to answer them again. I'm so excited to see what you're able to produce from this course. Thanks so much for watching, and I will see you in the next course.