iPad Slideshow GIF in Canva: Share Digital Art on Social Media

1. Class Trailer: Hello and welcome. I'm Joe, and in this class, we're going to use Canva to create this iPad slideshow gift complete with shadows. IPad gifts are a great way to share slideshows of your illustrations, photography, lettering projects, and more on your website or social media. This class is for anyone with a Canva account, both free and P. It's beginner friendly, but assumes a basic understanding of Canva. I'll be providing you with the iPad frame and Apple pencil. Let's get started. 2. Accessing the Canva iPad Frames: As a thank you for taking this class, I'm providing a Cava template containing an iPad frame in both portrait and landscape orientation, as well as an Apple Pencil element. To access this Cava template, go to the Class Projects and Resources section and download the class guide PDF that I provided. Go to the page with the big blue button. Click on that button, and another link will pop up. Click on that, and this page will open. Simply click on use Template for new design. And then you can begin using the template. In the next chapter, I'll begin the design. 3. Building the Background for the GIF: I am going to create an Instagram story to share a few of my illustrations. They are vertical, so I will select the vertical iPad frame and copy. Next, I need to start a new design by going up to the plus and choosing Instagram story. This is thumbnail view. When working with gifts, you want to be in Scroll view. At the bottom right of your workspace, you can toggle between thumbnail view and Scroll view. I will create the background for the first slide of my gift, then duplicate it for the other slides. Each slide will have the same background and feature a different illustration. I want this to feel warm and comfortable, so I will build my background on a wood tabletop. I can upload my own, or I can pull one in from Canva by going up to the elements and typing in wood. Then go to photos, Select All, and choose a tabletop. You can make this the background by dragging it in and hovering until it expands. Then release, and it will snap to the background. You can double click it and show a different part of the background. Now paste the iPad. You can size it and place it. Now I want to add a shadow. However, the frame and iPad element are grouped. Now, you can't add a shadow to a group, so you have to ungroup them. Click on the group, then click Ungroup. I'll add a shadow to the iPad frame. But first, I'm going to enlarge it a little bit because when you add shadows to elements in Canva, they shrink a little. To add a shadow to an element, click on the layer. Go to Edit. Then shadows, and I'm using a drop shadow. The first adjustment is the angle. I like my shadow to fall to the lower right. That looks good. Distance gives an object height. This is already at 50, which gives the iPad a realistic height. If I were to shorten it, for example, the iPad flattens out. And if I bring it back up, now that iPad frame has some height. And finally, I like to give it a little blur to soften it. Once the shadows in place, you need to resize the frame, center it over the ipad and scale it down. Now, you don't want to go too far because the table will show through. You want it just over the black. If you need to, you can drop the frame behind the ipad temporarily. It'll be easier to see. Go up to position and click layers. Then you can drop the frame behind the iPad, and that purple line shows you the edge of the frame. You can also click on the frame and move it around. Now you don't want to leave the frame beneath the iPad because that shadow shows through. Go back up to your layers and move the iPad below the frame. And finally, you want to group them again so they work as a unit. Simply select the frame and the iPad and click Group. And you might need to size it up. I could use some more elements to make this feel more like a scene. There's a iPad pencil. A cup of coffee and a plant. You can find cups and plants in the elements in Canva. I found mine on raw pixel and uploaded them to Canva. Now some shadows. If you're adding shadows to multiple elements, you want all those shadows to fall in the same direction. And if an object you pull in has a light and dark side like my coffee cup, make sure they agree with your lighting. Now, you don't want to add too much because the artwork is the focus. Also, remember to leave space for text if you're going to add it later. And finally, a nice finishing touch is a vignette. Click on the table. Go up to Edit. And this time, click on the adjustment menu up at the top. All the way down at the bottom is vignette. You can lighten and you can darken. I like to darken it just a little bit. A vignette brings focus to the artwork. And now the background is complete. In the next chapter, we'll duplicate the slides and add the artwork. Let's go. Oh 4. Duplicating the Slides and Adding the Artwork: I'm making duplicates of this so that I have a slide for each piece of art in my gift. This is when you want to make any final adjustments to your background because once you make your duplicates, all of your slides have to match. You don't want to have to adjust each one individually. That's a lot of work. To duplicate, go down to the thumbnail and click the ellipse. Then select Duplicate page. My gift will have three illustrations, so I want three slides. To add the illustrations, you'll upload them. I've already uploaded mine, and you'll drag them in in the order you want to share them. And if you change your mind about the order later, you can always sort them later. I'll first click on number one, and I'll pull in my first image. Simply drag it in, hover, and it'll automatically size. You can double click to adjust. The ratio of this one is slightly different than the frame, so I have some room to move. And if they're the same aspect ratio as the iPad, there's nothing to move. However, you can use the sizing to crop. And if they happen to come in sideways or upside down, you can rotate. And now I'll select number two, pull in my next one, and number three. You can put your artwork on most any canva frame. Imagine this was a TV with your artwork on it or maybe even a piece of toast. Let's move on to the next chapter. I'll create the gift and adjust the timing of the gift. See you there. And 5. Generating the GIF and Adjusting the Timing: The Now that all of my images are in their frames, I'm ready to save this as a gift. Canva is automatically going to save these at five second intervals when downloading as a gift. Once it's saved, I can go back and change it, and I'll show you how to do that. But for now, let's go ahead and download. Go up to share, click Download. Under File Type, change it to a GIF. You can leave all of these settings and click Download. You can rename it and choose where to download it. Before adjusting the timing, I'm going to play my gift. The five second interval is a bit long for social media. These should be set to about two to 3 seconds. I'll close this out. Here's how you adjust the timing. When the initial download is complete, close out the screen, go to home. Locate it in the home screen, reopen it to adjust the timing. Click duration at the bottom of the screen and click on the first frame. Then go to the top. The clock is where you adjust the timing. I'm setting mine at 2.5 seconds. Then you want to toggle this on so that it applies to all three slides. And once you've adjusted the timing, you want to redownload this. So head back up to share and download using the same process as before. And once again, you can name it and choose a place to download. And that's it. Once you've done that, you're ready to load this into your stories on Instagram. All open mind to take a look. It's a much livelier pace. Before closing this out, save this to our project so that you can use it with other artwork in the future. Make sure to name it up here at the top. Then go to file at the upper left and click Move to a folder. You can either create a new folder or use an existing one. I already have an Instagram Stories folder, and I'll move it to that folder. We are done. Thank you so much for creating with me. If you have any questions or comments, leave those in the class discussion. I do respond. And share those gifts to the class projects. We're building a gift gallery. Thank you also for leaving a review. See you in the next class.