Make Digital Animated Stickers for Instagram Stories and iPhones

1. Intro: Everybody uses digital stickers some way or the other online, but not that many people actually know how to make them.This lesson is great for learning how to create your own set of stickers. Whether you're a content creator, business owner or you just want to make something fun to share with your friends. I'll walk you through how you can create the perfect sets of stickers that you and other people can use time and time again. I'm Poly, also known as Polygon illustration online. I'm a freelance illustrator, animator, and content creator. I regularly share, well, I'm not too online and I post weekly to my YouTube channel Polygon illustration, where I shall what I've been up to. I find myself my work through my online brand. I have a degree in Illustration and Animation and I have just finished my Master's in Illustration and Animation. In this class, you will learn how to design and create your own digital set of stickers. I will take you through all the different stages, from designing to animating, to uploading them. Throughout my lessons, I will be covering three different softwares that you can use to create your stickers. But I will be teaching you how to create your stickers it in procreate the iPad, zoom in harmony, and Adobe Photoshop. So whatever software you've available, you will be able to create something you love. I will also show you how you can apply just stickers, be it on Instagram, on your Instagram stories. I will also show you how to create your very own sticker App, which can be sold in the Apple App Store and you can actually make money from this. For this course, you will need a basic understanding of computers and software to understand some of the things I will be talking about. Don't worry though, you won't need to know how to animate as I will be teaching you the basic steps of animation as well. The lessons are easy to follow and very detailed with all the necessary steps included, and I will be giving you tips along the way. By the end of this class, you will know how to create your very own digital set of automated stickers and you'll know how to apply them and get them out into the world. So if you're looking to make it digital sets of stickers for whatever the reason, this is the course for you. 2. How to Design your Digital Stickers: This lesson we'll be sketching out and designing our stickers. For this part of the project, you can use whatever materials you would like. You could use pen and paper or a tablet. You can pick either. It doesn't really make a difference. I personally I'm going to be sketching out my ideas on my iPad, but it is up to you to use whatever you feel more comfortable with. When designing your stickers, you need to consider what puppets your stickers will have. Where we'll use them? Why do you want to make stickers? How will you or even other people want to use them? Why do you want to make this stickers? Is it because you're a content creator or business owner and you want to create your brand? Or do you want to create an app and sell your stickers to make money? Or are you just making stickers you're going to send just to your friends? You really need to think about the different options you have when creating your stickers. Online and offline, I have my brand Pollygone Illustration, and I'm going to be creating my stickers to match my brand so I can use them to promote my stories and my Instagram content. Because of this, I am going to make sure that the stickers match within my style and within my brand. When you're coming up with ideas to make your stickers, why not write a list of 10-20 sticker ideas that you can use. Let's go and get started. When I was designing my stickers, I decided to start with doing the simple stickers, like the swipe up and those things because I think these are really important to have and include in the sticker pack, especially if you're going to have them on Instagram. Obviously, I wouldn't use this for an Apple Store App part. They have something I definitely would want for my Instagram stories. When you design your stickers you need to think how you can animate it. You don't want to do something really complicated that you won't be able to animate. You want to make sure it's simple enough for you to do with your skill level, but also really fun and exciting. For some of these stickers, I was going to have quite simple animations like stars would twinkle, that kind of thing. But then some of them would be a little bit more complicated like later on I end up drawing a butterfly with flapping wings, so that's going to be a little bit harder to do than just flushing stars. But I really enjoy animating and I wanted to have a few stickers that are a little bit more out there and flashy, but you could tell us a little cute thing to decorate your stories with or you could use them to decorate your eye messages with, if you decide to go down and create an Apple App. As I am creating my stickers for my Pollygone brand, I wanted there to be some art stickers that are included, so I do a sketch book flipping out. I do some inks and paint brushes, different like art suppliers that I usually use. I also decided to do my logo as well. I have actually already made that into a animated GIF, but I am actually going to convert it into a sticker so I can use it for Instagram. This one is for me personally because I think it'd be really nice to be at a brand of my stories, so people be able to go, yes, that's Pollygone and instantly recognize my Instagram stories without even having to think about it. You also need to consider the colors you want to use. Do you want to use pastels, bright, bold colors? Do you have a house style you use for your brand or your content? I personally tend to stick to yellows, pinks, and peaches, and then occasionally there might be some more little pastel colors in there. Just because that is a kind of color I want for my logo, for my banner on YouTube and for my profile pictures on all of my social media accounts. If you'd assign the character, you're going to make a sticker pack based around, you also want to think about who your target audience is, who will use the sticker app, and you need to make sure you pick your colors based around that too. Personally, I don't really want to be very serious with my stickers. I still want them to be fun, exciting, and just add a little bit something to my stories that I can use and other people can use as well. If other people choose to use them that is a way to get my brand out there as well, as people will see my stickers and hopefully go and check out more of my work. If you're creating an Apple app, why didn't you think about how people could use this app? Maybe you could think of something individual and different that may work to make people's messages look really fun and exciting. I've seen some Apple apps with stickers having games with built into them. I saw one Apple Store app that had a game of knots and crosses which I think that's a really funny idea. You can send a message to your friend and they can add that go on every message. Just have a think about what would work best for you and what you're trying to create this stickers for. Once you've finished designing your stickers, we are now ready to start going to the next stage. If you used paper and pencil, you may want to scan in your images or take a photo of it for reference. You have now completed your finish sketches. Now it's time to move on to the next steps. I'll be teaching you some very basic animation skills and techniques that you can use to help create your stickers. I will then be teaching you how you can create your stickers in Procreate, Photoshop and Toon Boom [inaudible]. I'll see you in the next lesson. 3. Animation Basics you NEED to know: In this lesson, we'll be covering the very basic animation skills and techniques you will need to know to create your animated stickers. I am going to be explaining a selection of different techniques that you will find useful to create your stickers. There are many different animation styles out there. However, we are just going to be focusing on two today. The traditional smooth animation with a nice lines that just flow from one frame to the other and the boiling line technique, which is when the lines move every single frame. I'm just starting out drawing a heart, I'm going to be doing a nice smooth animation and then on the next frame, I am just reducing the size of it. I'm using the exact same heart. I'm just shrinking it with every frame. The red underlines are the onion skin and that is where my previous frames are. You can see where I had previously positioned the heart. I then copy and paste all my frames. I paste them in backwards. This is just so it gives it a pumping effect. When played backwards, you can see that it's really nice and smooth. However, I do need to reduce the frame rate a little bit as it is moving a bit faster than I want it to. I'm going to reduce it from 24 frames to 12 frames per second, and you've got a really nice smooth animation. Now I'm going to be doing the boiling line effect. I'm going to create any layer and draw next to it so you can see what I'm going to do. I am going to be drawing the heart again so you get the same idea as what I did previously. There's my little heart. I'm going to go on to the next frame and then I'm going to use the onion skin to draw a new heart within the previous heart. Then I will go onto the next frame and the next frame and the next frame, and just repeat it until I have finished filling out all the frames. Like I did before, I also copied and paste the frames and pasted them back in reverse to get that pumping heart effect. Here you can see that the heart on the right has much straighter lines and there is no variation there. Then with the one on the left, it definitely looks like there is more movement to it and it's just a little bit more fun. Personally, I think both are really good for animation, it just depends what you're going for and what you're using them for. I have done both of these techniques for many different things. But personally, I am going to be using the boiling line effects for my stickers just because I think it works really well when it's small and it looks really cute. That's what I want to go for, for my brand. Here is an example where I have used the boiling line effect. This animation is my YouTube intro, the little girl. You can see that she's got the movement in her body in every single frame. To compare, watch my peacock animation and you can see here that the lines are a lot smoother and they only move when there is movement in the peacock. For another animation idea, you can also see how I moved the girl here. This is my old YouTube intro. As you can see here, there isn't actually that much movement going on a tool and for this, I only actually selected the bits that moved, so her arms and her little buppers. I only moved that. There are 12 principles in animation, but we are just going to focus on one. Squash and Squeeze as we don't have to do anything too complicated for these stickers. I'm going to show you how squash and squeeze works by animating a ball. Here I've just drawn a simple ball. The ball is going to bounce downwards and then it will hit the floor and it will bounce off the floor. We need to show this in our animation. This is where squash and squeeze takes place. I've gone on to the next frame and I have drawn the ball again. This time I have made it slightly thinner and a little bit longer. Then you want to go into the next frame again and make it even thinner and longer. Here I just put up a little bit too high. So I lowered it down and adjusted the width a little bit, just because I wanted to be a 100 percent happy with it. When you get onto the next layer, again, you want to make it really thin and skinny. This time I actually put it a lot lower than the previous ball. This is because when you want to show speed and animation, you put more frames at the beginning and then less towards the end. Now we're going to have the ball hitting the floor. I'm going to be drawing an oval, but this time is going to be the other way round to the previous oval. Then I'm going to draw the ball again. It doesn't have to be a 100 percent shaped like a ball, but I just want it to be a bit more ball-shaped than the other ones we have been drawing. That is it bouncing upwards and now we want it to bounce back down again onto the floor, but we don't want it to be quite a squashed. You want it in between the last two frames. Now the ball should be back to its original size. I copied and pasted the ball from the original frame and put it into the right place. Now this is what the animation looks like when you play it back. As you can see, the ball bounces down, hits the floor, bounces up ever so slightly, and then goes back down, making it look like a really bouncy ball. This is a great way to show movement in anything from characters to objects. Using the squeeze and squash can really help you exaggerate different features on movements. I'm just adding in some frames towards the end because I want to make it look like the ball is rolling away. To quickly recap, you want your ball to go down, and then as it is falling, you want it to stretch and get further and further down and closer to the floor with every single frame. You can see here that this frame is a lot more exaggerated than the previous frame. Once the ball hits the floor, you want it to bounce back upwards like an actual bouncy ball would, because it's being pushed down and then the floor pushes it back upwards, which then makes it go back more to its normal size, but it's not fully round yet. When using squash and squeeze, you need to really think about how objects move through the air and how they bounce and interact with other surfaces around them. Here's an example of squash and squeeze from my animation dinosaur and me. It's very obvious in this animation, but there always to make it more subtle, and much like I did with this mushroom, you can see that it does squashed down a little bit to show movement. But it's not too much and it's not over exaggerated and it just gives it a nice flowing movement to it. For my stickers I've personally chosen to do the boiling line effect just because I really liked the hand-drawn effect and I think it looks really cute when made into a sticker. Now you understand some basic animation techniques. We can get animating. In the next few lessons, I'll be explaining different software you can use to animate to it. 4. Using Toon Boom: This is Toon Boom. There are many different versions of Toon Boom that you can get, but I am using Toon Boom Harmony. Toon Boom is a software that is used by professional animators. We want to start off by creating a new file. What you want to do is go up to the top and click on "File" "New." Now you want to give your sticker a name.There are three different Canvas sizes that you can have for stickers. You can make them 300 pixels by 300 pixels, 408 pixels by 408 pixels, or 618 pixels by 618 pixels. This is just a suggestion if you're going to make them for Instagram, but you want to make sure they are square-shaped. I am personally going to go with the larger size of 618 pixels. To change the size of your Canvas scene, you need to press this little button here which looks like a plus. You can press that and then here, you need to rename it. I'm just going to call it sticker and here, you put in the width. You need to make sure that you've changed the resolution name otherwise, you wouldn't be able to press "Create." Then you want to click on create. Here we are, this is what it looks like when your scene has loaded. I'm going to zoom out a little bit by pressing "Zoom" and then "Zoom out." At the side here, you can see all your brushes and you have a selection of different ones which are textured, some are like normal smooth brushes, and down here, you have your color choices. To the side here, you have all your tools and then up here you have your save and new file document. Don't worry, most of these tools we will not be needing and are only for very fans animations. Down here you can see our frames and our layers. I've decided that I'm going to make my first sticker be a flower opening up so I'm going to animate that. Personally, I prefer making a little sketch and then drawing over the sketch beforehand, but you can do this however you want. You can see here, you've got your Canvas scene there. This is where the camera is. This is where the outline of the camera is. You want to select your paint brush tool, which is on the side over here, and select a brush you want to use. I am going to stick with using this brush just because it is a sketch and I will use a different one to outline it later. I'm just going to minimize the size a bit and I'm going to start drawing. That's what the sticker will look like. I'm actually going to resize that because you want it to fill as much as your Canvas as possible. You can resize by selecting the select tool over here and drawing a circle around what you want to select. As you can see, these little components here can all be separated and are individual as Toon Boom is a vector software. Then I'm going to go and change my frame. You can see there I have my onion skin. If you want to activate your onion skin, you need to go to "View" "Onion skin" and then "Show onion skin." Down here you can adjust by how many frames you see the onion skin from, so there you can see it, I can see it from this many frames away. Now I am going to draw over that and I think the leaves will probably go a little bit lower down as the flower starts opening up. I'm going to have that there a little bit and it's just going to unravel. I think I'm actually going to put a frame in between them, so there you can see there. The green is for the next frame and the red is for the previous frame. I can use the onion skin to fill in the frames. I really like exaggerating the movements so you can see there that it really just flops open. If you want to play back your animation, you want to put it on 12 frames, just because you don't need it to be quite as fast as 24 frames. I'm going to copy this frame. By right-clicking on it, I'm pressing copy and then pressing "Paste cells in the timeline" so the cells have now been duplicated. Now I am just going to continue this with drawing over these frames over and over again to get the boiling line effect. But now as I've drawn the sketch, I am going to go and do the outline for it. I'm going to click on this little plus here and click on drawing. That will create a new drawing layer for us. You want to press "Add and close." I'm going to lower the opacity of the sketch layer to make it easier for me to draw over. I'm going to go down here, click on this little picture here, and click on opacity, and just drag it down a little bit. Now I'm going to go into the next layer. If you want to make sure you don't draw on the sketch layer, you want to press the lock layer button there. Now I'm going to change my color. As you can see here, you have a range of different colors and you only have primary color available but so obviously, you're going to want to use more colors than that. I'm just going to show you a really cool trick that Toon Boom has. You can see here that I've got my black lines there. I'm going to double-click over here on the palette for the black and I'm going to adjust the color here and you can see that the color changes right away. This means if you decide to switch out a color, it will change for all of your layers so you don't have to recolor anything. If you want to create a new color, you press this little plus button here. It comes out with a little color there, which you can rename if you would like, and then you can double-click on it and change the color. Once you've got your outline color picked, you can go up and select a brush. I really like using the pipe cleaner brush so that is the one I am going to use. Now you can start doing the outline on your animation. You can see here that this is where the actual, so there's the flower opening. These two frames here are fully opened. I like to do things in three, so I'm actually going to do an extra frame and then after that we will copy and paste these last three a couple of times to repeat them. That was because when you're doing the boiling line effect, I prefer to have three or four frames. This is because when you only have two frames, it will look like it's just flicking between the two frames, and it won't really look as nice and as smooth as when you have three or more. You don't need to do too many though. Otherwise, you'll be getting yourself a lot of work, so I do tend to only do three or four. You can do more if you want, but really there's not much point because your eye won't be able to notice it when it's playing. To copy and paste these three frames together, we are going to need to press on the Shift Tool, click on the first frame and the last frame, and it will select all three frames. Then you want to click on it, click on Copy Cells in the Timeline, and then you want to click on Paste Cells in the Timeline in the frame next to them. There you will have it, it will be duplicated. One thing you will notice about copying and pasting frames is that the frames will copy and paste exactly as they were previously, so as you can see here, that this frame is missing the leaves at the bottom. If I go over here, you could also see the leaves are missing from this frame, and you can see I'm going to draw scribble there, and you can see that the scribble has been copied across without me putting it there, which is really useful, but it's just something to keep in mind if you are copy and pasting layers. Then if you want to repeat your animation, you can click on this little box in here, but you're going to have to move the timeline down a little bit so you grab this little red thing here and you pull that down. This will shorten the timeline, and you want to make sure you put it on your last frame, so this is what it looks like. I'm going to stop there and we now don't need the Sketch Layout, so I'm going to hide that. Now we are going to color. This depends on the paint brushes you have used. If you use the standard paint brush, you can use this brush here, brush one. You can draw that there, and then you can get Fill tool, select the color and fill it, and it will be perfectly filled. However, when you do this with a brush like the pipe cleaner brush I used, this won't work and you can see that you'll end up with it not really being filled up properly and you'll end up with all this white space there, so we're actually going to have to color all by hand. We're going to create a new layer, again, a new drawing layer out in close. I wanted to use a nice pink for this because Polygon has a lot of pink in the brand, so I want to stick to that. I think that color would be nice. Then I'm going to select my brush and I'm just going to color it all in. Now, you just want to go and color each individual frame in. Now, you've finished a sticker. I just played it back and have a look and see if there's anything that you might want to tweak or add in. I pass anything. I'm going to add in a little bit of shading. You can see here that the animation gets a bit close to the top of the frame there and I don't really like that. What I'm going to do is I'm actually going to move the camera. I'm going to go over here and click on a side, and this gives you a side view. This is where your animation and the Canvas is, and this here is the camera. What you need to do is you need to go down here and create a new layer. Except this time you want to select camera instead of drawing. You scroll down and click on a frame there, and now you can see you can move the camera around, so I'm just going to adjust it and move it a little bit away and there you go, you can see where the animation runs. I'm going to move that closer because it doesn't quite hit the top. Now you can see it's not hitting the top and then when you go back into your camera, you can see that the flower is there. Except now I think I need to move it a little bit more to the left to center. To do that, we're going to go back over to this little X and we're going to click on the Top tool and this will show you the top of the frames. You can see that I wanted to adjust the camera a little bit more over to this side. When you use the Select tool, and I'm going to drag it over there to put it in the center. Then we'll go back to the camera and you can see the flower in the center. Now we have finished our sticker, we are ready to export it as as GIF. I need to do is go to File, Export, Animated GIF, so now this will pop up and you will want to change the name to what you want to call the sticker. I'm going to call it the same. I'm just going to call it sticker one. I'm going to select Loop as I want the animation to continue looping. It is already selected, but if you don't want it to loop, you will want to unselect that, and then you just want to press okay, and wait for it to export. We can see here that the GIF is actually running at way too quickly. This is running on the full 24 frames rather than the 12 frames we want it to run with. We're going to have to actually change the settings in it when we export it. If you wanted to slow your animation down, like I do, what you need to do is go to Scene Settings, and then, over here you will see that it says 24. You want to change that down to 12 and it will change it there as well, and now we're just going to press okay, and then we're going to export it again. Press okay. Overwrite it as we don't want the previous file. Now we're going to open it and see if it works this time. To play your animation on max, what you want to do is press over your file and then you want to hold down the spacebar for as long as you want to see the animation in preview full. Here we go, here is the finished sticker animation. Now, on to the next lesson where I will show you how to use another piece of software to make another GIF. 5. Using Photoshop: In this lesson, I'm going to be teaching you how to make an animated digital sticker using Photoshop. We're going to get started with making these stickers. We want to create a new file, so what we're going to do is come over to this button here and press create new. You can see here, that you have already have some templates available to you, but we don't actually want to do that. We don't want to use one of that to custom templates already available, we want to make one up for ourselves. We're actually going to want to change this to be pixels. This is because we want the sticker to be square. We want it to be 300 pixels square, 408 pixels square, or 618 pixels square. I am choosing to go for the 618 pixels square. We want to type that in to the books, so we have now got our Photoshop Canvas loaded up. You can see here, this is the Canvas here. You've got your tools down here at the side, and over here you have your colors and layers. As you can see currently there is actually a background layer. We don't actually want this, as we want our stickers to have a transparent background, so what we need to do is you need to come over to this little icon here, unlock it, and then we want to create a new layer and delete the original layer. This will now give you this great background, which means that there isn't actually a background to your work. To animate, we actually have to get another bar up here at the bottom. What we need to do is go over to the top bar, and press on window, and then you'll scroll down and eventually you'll see timeline. You want to press on that, and then you'll see here at the bottom, you will get to this bar here. This is the timeline which you can use to create an animation. You want to have a frame animation selected. I'm actually going to start by creating some text. My sticker is going to say new post. However, if you are making a sticker up, you probably want it to say something else. I'm going to go over here and I'm going to select this text tool, and over here you can see that I've already got my pollygone branded font selected. But if you press the drop-down arrow, you'll be able to get a whole selection of fonts that you can use. Then you can change the size of your text here, and over here you can also change the color, so I am going to write my text out. I want it to say new Post. I'm actually going to go over and add a stroke to it, so you do that by pressing layer style, and then you want to select stroke. Here it's adding on a brown stroke and I'm actually going to change that. I'm going to put it as yellow, and here you can adjust the size as well so you can make a little bigger or a little smaller. Once you're happy with that, you can press okay. What I'm planning on doing for this sticker is I want to have some planets which are going to go round in a circle, round the text. I'm going to create a new layer, and I'm going to create each into individual star and planet. I want to draw my planets by using the paintbrush tool, which is over here in the corner. I'm going to select that, and up here you can actually select what you want your brushes to be. I'm actually putting each planet on a different layout. This is really important if you want to move them individually. Now I finished what I want it to basically look like, and I'm going to press this button down here create frame animation. Here you can see it says, no delay. We actually want to give a bit of delay, but we'll give it as 0.2 delay. I'm going to create a new layer by coming down to this button here and clicking, create new layer. I'm actually going to go back to the first layer, and what I want to do for this, is I actually want that to be a little bolder around the new post which will expand and grow as the animation changes. I'm actually going to draw round on a new layer. I'm just tracing round the edge of what we've already got for the fonts, there you go. Then we go back to this layer. Then we want to actually hide that layer. If you go back to the first layer, you can see that it's actually still there but it isn't on the new layer. I'm going to create another new layer. I'm going to draw around it again, except this time, I'm actually going to make it a little bit bigger. You want to go back to the first layer and then hide that new layer. You can see there that the layers are changing. I'm going to create another new layer and do exactly the same thing again. I'm going to hide the other layers, create a new layer, hide those layers from the previous layers, and draw another outline of it. Now what we want to do is make all the planets move around. On the first frame, you don't actually have to do anything because the planets are already where we want them to be, so then we go to the next frame, and you just select each individual planet and star, and move them around. Then you go and do that again for the next frame, and you just keep doing that until all the planets are moving and it looks like they're moving round in a circle. Now you can see it is moving in a circle, but obviously it is going back and restarting again. This is actually going to be quite difficult, so what you need to do is, you want to press on these three layers and you want to hold down shift to select all of them. As you can see, we don't want number 4 selected, because that is the one that's in the middle of the animation. Then you press this button here, which will make them again, and it duplicates them except we're going to want to move them for that other layer. Except now they're actually the wrong way round, so we need to switch them. Then the middle frame, I'm going to duplicate that, and we want to put that at the end. Now, it will be spinning in a circle and then going back. Now there you go, you've got your finished sticker. To export this, first of all you're going to need to save it if you haven't already. I'm going to go scroll down here and press save. I'm going to call it sticker 2. Make sure to save it with your other sticker, and then I'm going to press save. Then you want to go to file, export, save for web, and then you will be greeted with this window here. To make sure you get saved as a Gif, you want to make sure you've selected as a Gif from this drop down list here. When you make a Gif then you are only allowed 256 colors, so you want to make sure you haven't used too many colors in your illustration, which we obviously haven't done. You want to make sure your looping options is selected for what you want it to be. We want it to be forever, so it will keep looping. We don't want it to play once, and then we just press save, and then save again an you've got your finished sticker. This is what the final sticker will look like. In your next lesson, I will be teaching you how to make more stickers using another piece of software. 6. Using Procreate: In this lesson, I will be showing you how you can make a digital sticker using Procreate. So you want to start by making a new file. So you want to press the little plus in the corner, and then that will come up with the new Canvas drop-down list. So we actually want to create a custom size because the size we want isn't available. As I mentioned in previous lessons, we want to create a Canvas which is square and is either 300 pixels square, 408 pixels squared, or 618 pixel squares. I have been going by 618 pixel squared, it is up to you to choose how big you want your stickers to be. I'm also going to give it a name. As I've called the other ones Stickers 1 and 2, I'm going to call this Sticker 3. Then I'm going to press "Enter" and it will create the file for you. So here you go, this is your Canvas. You have all your tools up here at the top. You've got your Paintbrush, Smudge, Eraser, Layers, and then Colors. Then over here you have other options to share your files, adjust your colors, and then these are select tools. So the way animation works in Procreate is that your layers are actually each individual frame. So this would be one frame, this would be another, and that would be another. So I'll give you a little example here. So I'm just going to draw a quick little scribble. Then I'm going to share it as a gift, and then you can see how it would work. So this is what we want to do, but we want to create a more detailed sticker. You can even give it a transparent background there and reduce how many frames per second. I want to create an animation with a paint brush, with some dripping paint. So I'm going to start out by sketching out what I want to do. As Procreate isn't advanced as Tumblr or even Photoshop, you can't really have onion skins, so that is going to be at a disadvantage to us. However, there are ways around it. So I want my paint to drip off my brush downwards and I think I'm going to have this brush wiggle a little bit around just to add a little bit more movement into it. Of course I'm going to be doing the boiling effect too, which will actually make this a little bit easier for me to do. So I'm actually going to change the opacity of that and lower it quite a bit. Then I'm going to create a new layer, and I'm going to select the color I want to do my outline in. Then I am going to draw the brush. As I said before, I like doing my animation frames in at least three or four when I'm having an object moving or a boiling line. So I'm going to animate the paintbrush three times, and then I'm going to have six drips coming down. So I will actually duplicate the paintbrush, which is a very tricky process when you have to make sure all the layers are flattened. So I'm going to create another new layer, and I'm going to draw the paintbrush again. This time, I'll be slightly changing the shape of the end of the brush to show a movement. I'm going to hide the previous layer and then I'm going to reduce the capacity of this layer and then draw over it again. Now I'm just going to test how that looks by exporting it just to see if I like how it looks well, so far not because there isn't actually any way for you to replay the animation without exporting again. Okay. So you can see the movement there. I think I'm going to go and change the brush handle and one of these frames just to really show off my squeeze and squash skills. The thing with using Procreate that a lot of it is just experimenting and seeing what works, well, it's really not that easy to see what it looks like until you've actually exported it, which is frustrating that you're going to have to do this every single time. But that is just one of those annoying things about animating on a Procreate, but it is a lot handier than some software as you have it available with you all the time. Whereas if you have Photoshop or Tumblr you cant really carry a laptop and a huge drawing tablet with you around all the time, when an iPad is a lot easier. Okay. So I'm going to duplicate some of these layers later to repeat them. But first, I need to color it, which I will need to flatten the layers. So I will actually need to color each layer individually underneath the layers and then flatten them afterwards. Sounds confusing right now, but I will explain it as I go along. So I'm going to start with my first frame and I'm going to create a new layer, which I am going to put underneath it. This is the layer I am going to color on. Now I have finished coloring each layer. I'm going to merge the layers together. So I'm going to click on here. You click on the icon for that layer, and then you press "Merge Down" and it will become one. You need to do that for every single paintbrush. Okay. Let's see what this looks like. Okay. So now we're going to be duplicating the layers, and then we will add on the paint drips. You see here, we have this frame here at the top and then this frame. What we want to do is we want to put that frame on the top. So at top of the next frame. So what we're going to do is going to slide the layer across and press on "Duplicate" and then move it on top of Layer 9. There you can see that those two layers are repeated. So then we want to duplicate Layer 7. I move that on top of Layer 8. Then we want to duplicate 6. I move that on top of 7. Then for Layer 6, we don't duplicate that because that is the first frame, so it would just stop the whole process again from that. So this is what it will look like when you export it. So now we want to do the pink splatters. So I'm going to start with this one, which won't have anything dripping from it. Then we'll go into the second one, which has a tiny little bit of paint flying off it. Then we're going to lower the opacity to use that as our onion skin for the next layer. For that, we want the paint to flick upwards as the brush is pointed more upwards, though obviously, the paint drips that have already fallen will still be falling. So they need to be a little bit lower down. Then we can do some around here. Then we can change the opacity for the onion skin layer and make our current layer the onion skin layer. Then there will be some paint coming off here and here. Then to show the animation again, we want to make sure that the opacity is turned up on all the layers. So now that's fixed. This is what the animated GIF looks like. So obviously, we don't actually want a background. So we need to go over to this box and we want to slide that across to turn the ground off. Then you want to export it to full resolution. That will save it to your files once you have pressed "Save image". In the next few lessons, I'll be showing you how you can upload your animated stickers on to Instagram, and how we can create an app for the Apple Store. 7. Uploading to Instagram: When you want to get your GIFs on Instagram, you have to actually apply them to GIPHY first, and then GIPHY will upload it through that server and it will go on Instagram, where you'll be able to search it in the sticker section on Instagram stories. First of all, you need to log in or make an account. You can press this button up at the top corner here, and to log in or create the account. If you've already got an account, you can just login here, or you can join down there and you'll just have to fill in the details. I've already got an account. I'm just going to login now. It loads you up to this page. It's actually important that you fill in this page as the more filled in your profile is the more likely you will be accepted to have your stickers on the GIPHY website. You can see down here that I put it on public, and I filled in the About section and added in my social media accounts. This is important as you want to give each to see that you have a brand and that you are an artist. If you scroll down a little bit, you've got to see here it says how to GIPHY. I'm actually going to press that and this will bring out the featured and help topics. I'm going to scroll down and click "GIPHY" for Artists on Brands. This actually depends what you are. I am going to be applying for an artist channel because I am an artist. If you're brand, you probably want to apply for that. It's just up to you to fill what fits the best. You send off an application to get to your stickers up. This is super easy to do. It doesn't take that long. I'm applying for an artist. I'm going to click on "Apply For An Artist Channel". As I mentioned before, GIPHY say they you have to fill in your profile details and you need to have some stickers and GIFs already ready. I'm going to click this button and apply now. I'm going to load the GIFs right now. This is the folder with all my stickers and I'm just going to drag them down over here to upload them. You actually have to add in some tags, and add in a source. I'm going to put in my website. And then for tags, I'm actually going to tag myself so I can easily search for them. I'm going to put in pollygone illustration. Here, I am just filling in with some relevant tag names. I think it's really important to go for your brand name because that will both make it easier for you to find those decades. But if you want your clients, your friends get to use them as well, that will make it super easy for them to find them and I want to be searching through thousands of GIFs. I am now going to press "Upload to GIPHY", and that is now going to upload them. It might take a while because you might have a lot to upload and gifs on particularly the smallest files. You might just want to sit back and wait for them to do. Now, you can see that the upload is finished. I'm going to click on this button which says "Upload complete and then continue." This will take you over here and you will need to fill in this again. I'm obviously going for an artist, but if you wanted to go for brand, pick a brand, and then press "Submit Application." There you go. Your application has been submitted. It is possible that you might be declined, your application might be turned down. But if that happens, you just need to go and work on your brand and on your stickers and try and get them to really like all fit together and work well. But I'm going to come back in a few days where my application has been accepted. It's now being a few days and my GIFs are now up on GIPHY, and I can also access them on Instagram too. You'll know when you've been accepted, when you receive this email from GIPHY and then if you go over to your profile and GIPHY, you will be given a little blue tick next to your username. Just as a little bit of warning, it does take a few days your GIFs to appear on Instagram. It took me, I think two, three days for them to appear after I had sent off my application. Obviously, if it takes GIPHY a bit longer to look at your application, it will then take longer for them to pay on Instagram. In the next lesson, we are going to be looking at how you can create your very own Apple stool up, which you can use on iPhones and your iPad. 8. Creating a Sticker App: In this lesson, I am going to show you how you can create your very own Apple App Store app. To do this, you will have to either have an iMac or a MacBook, otherwise, you won't be able to do this because you are going to need to download Xcode. You can get Xcode for free on the Apple App Store. Just search for it, and it will come up right away. This is what the page looks like. Once you have clicked download, and downloaded it onto your computer, you want to open up Xcode, and you will get this screen here. You want to press this one which says create a new Xcode project, create an app for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple watch, and Apple TV. We're going click that, and it will bring us to this screen, which gives you lots of different options to make different types of apps but we are going to make in a sticker pack application, so you want to press that, and then press next. You want to give your sticker pack a name. I'm just going to call mine Pollygone Illustration Stickers, and then you want to press next. Then you want to select the place where you want to save your sticker pack. I'm actually going to save it in the same folder as I've got my sticker in, and then I'm going hit, "Create." If you want to sell your app on the app store, you are actually going to have to pay to do that, and that cost around $100 a year for you to be allowed to do that. If you want to get the app on your phone for you to use for personal use, that's fine. I will actually go through that later. That is possible but if you want to sell your app, you will unfortunately have to pay but it is a good price as that means you can get money when people buy your sticker pack. Down here you will see this button here which says Stickers.csstickers. We're going to press that, and this will bring you to this screen where you then can have the option between the iMessage app icon on the sticker pack folder. The iMessage app icon is where we're going to make all our icons. It's really annoying but you will have to create the app icons to fit on each different screen sizes but we will do that in a minute. First, we're going to upload our stickers. You want to click on the sticker pack folder, and you can see here that there aren't any stickers here, and it's asking you to drag, and drop your stickers into the folder. I'm going to get my stickers, and I'm going to select them, and drag them into Xcode. There are my stickers. Some of these stickers, were already made for Instagram. I'm going to select these, and I'm going to pick, delete, and get rid of them. I'm going to load up the simulator now so we can see what they look like. If you click this here it says iPhone 7 Plus but it may say something else on someone else depending on what version of Xcode you have, and you can see here that it gives you lots of different options for different Apple products. You've got the iPads, you've got the iPhones, and you've go each different version of the most recent phones. I'm actually going to go for the iPhone SE as that is what my phone is. I'm going to select that. Then over here you can see they've got a play, and a stop button. The play button actually builds a sticker pack for you, and it creates the app in a simulator, which will load up in a second. I've hit that now. I'm just going to wait for the stickers app to be built. This is what the simulator will look like once its loaded, and if you scroll down you can see the messages button there so I'm going to press that. There you can see there's some fake messages that have appeared. I'm just going to click on this, and then go to the bottom, and click on the Apple store logo. It will then give you this, and you can see here, its got my stickers I uploaded. You can see all your stickers there already in the app which they're ready for you to use. To send a sticker, just click on the sticker you want to send, and it will pop up over here, and then you just have to press this little arrow, which will send it, and there you can see it. Here you can see that there isn't actually a logo, which is what we're going to go and create now. You don't want to keep this blank. You want to have a nice logo that will attract people to use your stick set. You'll want to download a template. We can find that by going to developer.apple.com. You want to click on, "Design," at the top of the page, and then that will load this page here. You'll want to scroll down, and click on, "View Design Resources," and then you'll want to download this thing here. I'm going to download for Photoshop but you can download it for wherever you will need to, and this will be a whole bunch of resources you can use to make your icons. Once you've finished downloading your Apple Design Resources, you can double-click on this folder, and it will open up this screen for you. Then you want to click on, "Production Templates," and open up that folder, and here you will see a range of different templates to use. We want to use this one which is the template for the iMessage app icons. You want to double-click that, and open that. Your document; you have all these white squares which we are going to fill in. There you can see all the different icon sizes that we are going to create. I actually want my icons to be exactly the same thing. I just want it to be the face of my little girl logo. You can see here on the side where all the layers are that there's little individual folders, and in here there's more folders for each different icon. You can see there, I will need to put my design on each of these Photoshop files here. I'm going to go and find my icon, and I'm going to fill the Photoshop file with my little girl logo. Once you've done that, what you need to do is click on, "File, Generates image assets," and then Photoshop will just help you create the icons without you having to actually do any work, and save them individually, and this is just a lot quicker than setting up different file sizes. To upload the app icons, the iMessage app, you need to get up all your icons, and you need to find the right ones which go in the right place. If you put them in the wrong ones, it won't work properly. You just have to spend some time trying to figure out which one is which. This one needs to go in there because its 27 by 20 pixels, and it's three times. Now that is done, let's build the app again, and test it in a simulator. You can now see that the app has got it's little icon. Now, we're going to create the sticker app which we are going to put onto our phones. What you need to do is you need to plug in your phone into your computer or your MacBook, and then you need to go up here, and make sure that your iPhone or iPad is selected underneath device. Sometimes it will do this for you but sometimes you will have to select it. Once that's happened, you just want press the play button for the build to be created. Once the application has finished building on your iPhone, you should be able to see it on your phone so what you need to do is open up iMessages, and now you will be able to see that the app is on your phone just like it was on the simulator. You'll be able to see all the stickers you have made on the app, and you'll also be able to drag, and drop them onto the screen, and add them on top of messages, and just send them as their own individual message as well. You've got to play around, and send some cool, fun, exciting messages to your friends, and it's just that extra little way of expressing yourself over text. You have the added option of selling it to other people on the app store, which is a really exciting thing to do if you choose to do that. 9. Finishing Up: Congratulations, you finished your first set of digital animated stickers and you've either uploaded them to Instagram or to the App Store. In this lesson, I showed you how to design stickers and I gave you advice on how to make them the best stickers they can be for you. I also taught you the basics of animation and took you through different skills that you have now used and implemented throughout the whole class. Then I showed you how to create the stickers using Procreate, [inaudible] and Photoshop. Now you've finished your sets of stickers. Why not share them in the gallery so we can all take a look at them. I hope you enjoyed this lesson and I hope to see you again soon. Don't forget to check me out on Instagram and YouTube. I've also got my online store where you can find products that I have designed. Thank you again so much for watching and I hope you found this lesson useful. I'll see you next time. Bye.