Learning Procreate Animation : Intermediate Techniques that will Bring Your Artwork to Life!

1. Introduction: Hello, lovely. Welcome to an exciting journey into the world of animation on procreate. My name is Jada Jackson and I'm thrilled to be your guide on this Skillshare course. If you've ever wanted to bring your animation to life, add a touch of magic to your artwork, or just simply explore the dynamic of procreate animation. You're in the right place. Be prepared to take in loads of information and also have your ipad, your Apple pencil, and also procreate installed So that you can follow along with me throughout this course. Because at the end of this course you're going to be able to submit that animation for your class project down below. And for those of you who aren't as familiarized with the program, Procreate has become a powerhouse for all kinds of artists. In this course, we are taking it up a notch by diving deep into the animation features that make procreate so amazing whether you're a seasoned procreate user or just getting started. By the end of this course, you'll have the skills to create captivating animations that will wow your audience. This course, design for artists, illustrators, and just anyone who's passionate about visual storytelling. And don't worry because no prior animation experience is required to follow along with this course. We'll start with the basics and gradually work our way up to the more advanced techniques. We'll cover everything from the fundamentals of animation principles and just mastering the procreate animation tools that they have to offer. We'll also explore how to maximize your workflow troubleshoot, common issues throughout digital art, as well as unleashing your creativity throughout this very powerful digital medium. Expect hands on demonstrations, practical exercises, as well as insider tips that I've gathered throughout my ten plus years of digital art and animation experience. By the end of this course, you will have a completed animation project that showcases the skills that you've learned in this video that you can later submit into the class project section like I said before. Plus you'll join a community of fellow creatives where we will continue to share inspiration and support long after this course is complete. So make sure to follow. So are you ready to embark on this animation journey together? Grab your ipad, Apple pencil or Stylus, and open Procreate. And let's dive into these animation clips. 2. Learning Drawing Guides and Animation Layout: Are a wide variety of different procreate features that you need to know about before you even think about diving into creating your animation. One of those features is called your guidelines and or your drawing guides. You can find these guides if you hit the wrench button, then canvas and turn on your drawing guide. Now notice how underneath that there is an option to Edit Drawing Guide. If you click on this button, you have a whole bunch of different settings. I'm not just talking about two D grids when I talk about drawing guides. The first guide that we're going to talk about is a tricky one. It's your two D guides. Maybe you've seen these two dimensional grids literally everywhere, especially growing up. But this grid can be used when you want to perfect straight lines in your artwork. If you're using the two D grid to make straighter lines, make sure to turn on assisted drawing, because what that'll do is make it to where you can't draw anything other than straight lines everywhere. You can also change the color guidelines up here. Your next option when using guides are called your isommetric guides, which is what we're going to be using today. These guides make it easier to bring your art into the third dimension. This is especially useful to those who create landscaping or building art. Next, you have your perspective guides, which allows you to create vanishing points to assist in creating perspective art. The last type of guidelines are your symmetry lines, which allows you to essentially mirror what you're drawing on one side of your canvas to the other side of your canvas. This guide makes it easier to draw things such as butterflies, leaves, flowers, and other symmetrical things. If you press options down on the right, you will see guide options that read vertical, horizontal quadrant, and radial. The vertical and horizontal symmetry options are pretty self explanatory. The quadrant lets you draw within four quarters of your canvas, symmetrically like so. Whereas radial, which is simply symmetry in several directions arranged around a central point, like the spokes on a bicycle wheel. Now that we know how to use all the different types of guidelines that procreate has the offer. Let's now talk about the part that actually allows you to animate and procreate. If you go in and click this French bar again, go to your Canvas, then turn on Animation Assist. There is now a new little pop up at the bottom of your screen. This is where you can manage your frames, otherwise known as your layers or layer groups. Each different frame adds a new movement to your animations. You can change how fast your animation moves when you hit on settings and frames per second. You can also change how it loops, if at all, by selecting loop ping pong or one shot. Next you'll want to look where it says onion skin frames and onion skin opacity. Onion skin frames are a way in which you could see previous or future frames you have already created at a lower opacity. Of course, with this being said, knowing that you have the option to change the number of onion skin frames you have visible on each layer. The opacity of it, as well as the color. For the sake of this video, I'm only going to briefly explain how to apply your background and your foreground onto your animation. To apply a standstill background to your animation, all you have to do is click on the layer or frame that you want to be your background and toggle on background layer. Keep in mind to bring your background frame to the very front of your project before doing so. Because if it's in the front, it will otherwise be known as your foreground layer. This allows your selected frame to remain in the foreground of your project, the entirety of your animation. Another feature to know about is when you go back and click on a layer. Again, you will see that you are able to hold the duration of the frame as well as delete and duplicate. Now that we have all the need to know details about the layout and how to use everything, we can now move on to drawing the subject, which is going to be drawing a flower that is slightly moving in the breeze and it's going to be losing a petal to grab your ipad and your pencils and let's hop on over to procreate. 3. Adding A Reference Image and Drawing the Subject: Section, of course, we're going to be starting the fun part and that is drawing the subject. I want to start off by showing you one hidden feature for whenever you have to add a reference photo, but you don't want it showing up on your time lapse. For this you'll want to go into the wrench bar. Click Add and hover over. Insert a photo and slide that to the left. Like so. This allows you to enter a private photo that won't show up on your time laps. Now let's start by drawing the subject of our project. A simple flower swaying in the wind disclaimer. This course is not made to make the most elaborate animation out there. This is just a course so you can get hands on knowledge on how to animate, on brocreate. The first thing you'll want to do is obviously create your canvas. For this project, you can use any of the canvas dimensions you want, -2,000 pixels by 2000 pixels with a DPI of 300. Next is where we will start sketching out the flour. And to help us draw this, we're going to use the isometric guidelines to give our flower a sort of three D shape. After we have used our guidelines to create the sketch of our flower, we can now refine the line work. For this, I will be using the brush HB pencil found in the sketching folder in your brush library. Note that I drew the top of the flower on a separate layer from the stem. This will be important for later. After our line work is all done, we will want to add our base colors underneath the line layers. For this project, we will use a light purple, yellow, and green. You can find that these three are considered split complementary, Which is defined as a color scheme utilizing the base color purple and two secondary colors, yellow and green. Now go to your purple flower layer and click Add Layer. And we want to add a layer above this one because we are going to be creating a clipping mask. You'll notice that we are going a bit outside of the lines with the yellow on the middle of the flower. That's okay, because we are going to click on our layer and add what is called a clipping mask. What this does is it simply clips the layer that you were on to the layer underneath it like. So you'll also want another clipping mask above the coloring for your leaf so you can add a glowy effect to it. Remember how we drew the line work of the flower and the stem on separate layers. Let's say if we don't like the color of our lines, we can change them by sliding with two fingers to the right on the layer. And that will turn your alpha lock feature. Now with Alpha lock on both layers, we are going to grab our various airbrush and go to the stem layer. Pick a dark green and color the stem. Same with the other linework layer, but for this one you'll want a darker purple to make the light purple stand out more. And there you've had it, you've created a beautiful flower. Now let's bring our flower to life with some wonderful animation tips. 4. Bring your Illustration to Life with Animation: If you've made it this far in the course, take a moment to pat yourself on the back. And don't forget to take a step back and view your work. You're doing amazing, keep it up. Now let's move on to the animation part. So the first step to starting your animation bit is to go into your layers and make sure all the layers you used to create your first drawing are in a layer group. What that does is it makes it to where you don't have to flatten the whole image and lose all your different layers every time you create a new frame, because that would be kind of silly. After you make sure to group everything that needs it, go down to your frames and duplicate your first flower layer. Notice that when you go into your layers tab, group of layers there that are representing your new frame and all the layers in it. From the second frame on, I usually just merge the whole illustration frame by frame because I already have the separate layers on one frame so I can have more layers to use for my project. Now, with this new frame, you'll want to select whatever brush you used for your line work. In my case, it is the HB pencil. And by using the onion skin layer to help draw out the petal again, but slightly thinner than the original one, like. So. Next you're going to want to go to your layers tab. Create a new layer under the second frame and combine down on that layer. After that, make your flower layer your reference layer. And then fill in that second layer you created with the same purple you used for the flower. When you combine down on another layer, you're essentially adding it to the group at the top layer was originally in, Whereas if you reference a layer with line art that allows you to create a layer underneath in which you can use the fill tool and keep your color and line art separated. So you can use alpha lock if needed. In our case, we are alpha locking the petal and using our watercolor brush to add the yellow. Now that the petal is done, let's use the lasso tool to select our petal. Then let's click the move tool and move it to the left slightly. As I'm animating, I noticed the flower was too still. I selected the flower layer and used the warp tool to make it have a swaying look. Now, repeat those steps, creating new frames for every movement. Now that we're all finished with our animation, let's press play and see what we've created. Let's also take a look at what settings I have everything on. Taking a look at the settings of our video loop, we have ping pong selected, which allows the image to play through regularly once and then plays again in reverse right after our frames per second is set at eight, because it is more natural for a flower to move slower in just a slight wind. This next has a lot of information on how to export your animation properly and in high quality sustained times. 5. Learn how to Export your Animation: Now that we have our beautiful animations all done, we can now export them into your device. And here's everything you need to know about exporting. There are four different file types to choose from to export your animation As, and that is an animated gift, animated PNG, an animated MP four, or an animated HEVC. Exporting as an animated gift means that you are exporting a small animation. And it's meant to be a lower resolution. Which leads me onto the animated PNG's, which have a larger color palette than gifts do. And PNGs also provide a higher quality animation while also having the option to export with a background. And if you're a twitch streamer like me and you want to learn how to make those animated twitch emodes, this is the option you will want to export it as. Moving right along to animated MP fours, which have very similar qualities to pangs, except you can't export it with a transparent background. Mp fours are more compressed so they don't take up a lot of space on your device. The last, but definitely not least, you have your HEVC files, which is what I use for my animations. Hevc has a lot of similar qualities to MP four, but this option allows you to export it with a transparent background and is an even smaller file size than a gift, and much better quality too, if that didn't make any sense to you. Here is a simple breakdown of everything that I just said, because I'm not even going to lie. I got confused watching that. Now, knowing all the different file types you can export your animations as and what they're used for. We will be selecting to export our animation today as an animated HEB. We don't lose any of the quality and it doesn't take up a whole bunch of space on my device. When you select that, you'll be taken to this page where you can view or edit your animation loop and frames per second before exporting. You can also choose whether you want a transparent background or not. Now click Export, and you are all finished. Now go to wherever you exported it, whether it was your files or your gallery, and sit back and view it. If you followed along with this course on your ipad, then stay tuned for the next video so you know where to upload your class project. 6. Class Project / Outro: That we're all finished with our animation and know how to export it. Let's take that file and put it in as our class project. What I'm looking for for the class project is that you upload your animation file as well as your time laps to that animation file. If you use a reference, make sure that it's not showing up on your time laps. With all that being said, if you learn something today, make sure to drop a follow and share with your friends because there's a lot more that came from. Don't forget to drop a follow to all my socials up here and feel free to screenshot those for future use. As I do post a lot of educational art content as well as Animal Crossing skits and streaming content, I have an addiction. I hope everybody has a wonderful day and I cannot wait to see everybody's interpretation of our class project. And I will see you in the next course that way.