Transcripts
1. Introduction: Welcome to Moving Illustrations. My name's Hannah Lau Walker, and I'm a 2D animator who's been working in commercial for nearly 10 years now. My absolute favorite thing to animate are morphs, so this class is going to be teaching you how to create morphs in Adobe Animate. Morphs are special effects animations that change one image into another through a seamless transition. It's a great place for beginners to start as it's the kind of animation that focuses on your timing and allows you to be really loose with your drawings, which really frees you up to have some fun with animation. The core skills I'll be teaching in this class will be to how to train your eye to see what style of animation suits what style of illustration, and how to use animation principles to emphasize that style. We will begin by discussing different types of morphs and the illustrative styles that suit them before we work through some basic animation principles. Then we'll go step-by-step through Adobe Animate and work through the animation process. Morphs are the most exciting part of animation. They're loose and free in a place where you can be almost creative. This class will teach you the principles of animation and then allow you to push those principles to their limit when using them to morph your own illustrations. By the end of this class, you'll know your way around Adobe Animate. You'll know how to move one illustration into another. But most importantly, you'll have started looking at your illustrations in a new life and be able to imagine them busting into life on your screen. That's the most amazing thing about animation. If you can imagine it, you can make it.
2. What's the Project?: This class project, we'll be animating morphs in Adobe Animate. This project gives illustrators the chance to think about the kind of animation that best suits their style. As morphs are really flexible, it creates a great space to experiment and have fun with animation. It's a perfect topic for beginners, as unlike other types of animation, morphs are a lot looser and less technical so you can learn animation principles and test them out without getting so bogged down in the details. I think it's important that before we begin animating, we take some time to consider what the best approaches to our design. Animation can be a really long process and it's important to do these early stages and really consider what you're making before you start animating. What you don't want to do after a long day of animating is to realize that a different style would have been better, or that you could make a few tweaks to your start frame because that can mean hours more work, and sometimes even starting again from scratch. Now, our first class, we'll be looking at what morphs are and why they're used. We'll be checking out different styles of movement and how these movements embody the tone of your design, giving real energy and life to your illustrations.
3. Breaking Down Morphs: Our first class will be introducing you to the world of morphs what they are, and where they are used. Morphs and animations are classified as special effects that change one image into another through a seamless transition. Commercially, morphs are used to transition from one scene to another or transforming one image into another. I think people like to use morphs for transitions from scene to scenes because it can help keep the rhythm of the animation. Instead of using cuts like you would in live action, in animation you can have more fun morphing, keeping the fluidity of the storytelling, and sometimes even using that morph to add another layer of meaning. Now let's look at a few different styles of morphs. We'll focus on morphing one image into another, and we'll begin by looking at the most basic straight in-betweens. It's super simple but doesn't give off that much personality. Whereas you can have a morph with more squash and stretch, which has a lot more energy in character. Perhaps you don't want so much happening, but you want to get quickly from one image to another. In that case, you can use a morph that focuses on it's eases. Here we're relying heavily on easing into our final image. There's actually very little in-between our two final keys, and yet you still feel as though you're changing from one image into another. Using this technique allows it to be a little less harsh than just cutting from one image to another. When most people think about morphs, however, they're often thinking of something more like a smear. There's much more distortion and it's a lot more fun to animate, creating really elongated images. With this kind of star, you really get to push your animation to its limits. Another morph that pushes a design is when you break apart the image and have it rebuild itself into another image. I love this thing. I've done quite a basic version here, but you can really push this animation to be much more expensive. Those are just a few ways you can animate a morph. But you can really do anything you like, and it can work really well having a mixture of these different types. By using little bits of each element, you can give more texture to your animation, which in turn makes it even more satisfying to watch. Now that you know a few different styles of morphs, you can check our animations that you like and see where these techniques have been used, and if there are any other stars that you'd like to learn, it's really important to start thinking about how these techniques can be used in your own work and training your eye to see them in others.
4. Designing Movement: In this lesson, we'll be looking at different styles of design and discussing what style of animation suits them best. Let's begin by looking at more graphic designs. Here you can see, when using a more graphic style lends itself to bigger, bolder moves, show more squash and stretch, and can use much snappier timings. Now let's compare those with more hand-rendered designs. With this hand register, you can break apart the design a lot easier. Leaning on textured marks to transition from key to key. These animations are less bouncy but more fluid using the marks to create textures that emphasize the movement. Now, let's put this into a bit of context by taking two illustrations and animating them in two different ways. As you can see, these designs are very delicate so let themselves to a more hand-rendered style of animation. I would animate them in a much slower and more fluid way, like this. Well then a bigger bouncier style like this, it just doesn't fit the design as well. We want to evoke the feeling of the illustration within the movement rather than fighting against it. It's important to take the time to think about the design before you start animating. Now, let's look at illustrations. Really any illustration can be moved, but some designs work much better than others. Here's a selection of illustrations that worked better for morphs. As you can see, they're more graphic and less detail. Having these strong shapes makes it easier to animate and gives you more flexibility when it comes to your movement. One thing to remember when you're morphing is you want to make sure your designs have different silhouettes from one another and it makes you a much more interesting morph. To compare, here's a selection of designs that'll be trickier to morph. Having too many details and textures will make it more complicated and potentially quite overwhelming to watch. You want clarity within your movement, so having complicated designs when morphing can get visually confusing. Having talked about how design directly influences movement, it'd be cool for you to check out animations you like aesthetic style of and then focus on the animation. See what it is about the animation that works with that style. Consider the timing, the rhythm, the shape of the movement, then take some time to look at your own design style and think about what kind of movement would work with that.
5. The Principles of Animation: For this video, we'll be discussing animation principles and highlighting a few that are particularly useful when animating morphs. Let's begin by looking at spacing and easing. When we talk about spacing, we're referring to the distance between each of your drawings. We use spacing to time out our animations, and with good timing, we give intention to the movements we're animating. We're giving the movements an attitude and a feeling. The spacing of your drawings even gives weight to the objects you're animating. So spacing is a really essential part of animation. Spacing also incorporates easing, which describes the drawings either end of an action. I think using ease is the most important part of my job. In my opinion, you can sell any animation with the right amount of easing. Let's take a look at some spacing. The first morph has completely even spacing. You can see that there's not much personality in this animation, and the morph isn't really saying anything. The second animation is a bit snappier, and you can see we favored our case slightly more. Now, this third morph is much snappier, it's all eases, and we've really pushed them in between to ease into our case. You can see how much personality is in this morph compared to the first one. There is a lot less energy. Both can be used there to tell a story. The even pacing of this first one definitely fits a certain style and can be used in slow and more thoughtful animation. Compared to this last morph, they'll be more likely to be used in high-energy and fast-paced animations. Now, let's talk about anticipation. Sybil Tyler said there's only three things in animation: anticipation, action, and reaction, which boils down to tell them what you're going to do, do it, then tell them what you've done. Anticipation is really the first part of engaging your audience. We use anticipation to attract the audience's attention to the right part of the screen at the right time. The size of the anticipation is going to reflect the size of the movement it proceeds. So if you're having a large action happen, you want a large anticipation to prepare the audience for what's about to come. Let's look at some examples of this. This first morph is totally even, so it's just straight into the morph. This second morph, you can see there's a slight upward movement before it goes down into the morph. This little up is used to catch the eye of the audience before the bigger movement, that is the morph. Now let's see a more extreme version. Let's move on to squash and stretch. We use squash and stretch to give our animations more character. Using squash and stretch makes our animations feel more fluid and alive. This first animation has no squash and stretch on it. Now, let's compare that to one that does. You can see here how we stretch our apple on the anticipation and squash it going down into the morph. As we then come out of that morph, we stretch our animation and then we ease into the final position with the squash again. This gives the animation a really nice bouncy feel. Now, let's push that further and compare this first squash and stretch with a more extreme one. You can really use all these principles to varying degrees, and I think the style of illustration you are using will dictate how much you want to push each principle. The last principle we'll look at today is follow-through. Follow-through is the extremities of your object as they drag and settle after the main movement. That can include arms, for instance, when you're doing full body movements, or hair settling when you turn your head. When using extreme or snappy movements, follow-through helps to sell the movement. Often with having something settle into place after a quick movement, we give the audience a chance to register what's happened. Let's look at some examples. This first one is just our basic animation with some squash and stretch on it. Now, let's add some fire to it. You can see here that the leaf and the straw are following through. The leaf has a slight movement that leads on from the anticipation, and then we see the straw follows through after the juice box finishes it's move. This follow-through really sells the morph. Just having this still extra movement helps us not feel as though we've come to a sudden stop. Now, let's see what that looks like, pushed further. You can really see how we increase and decrease all these principles to differing degrees, and how these might work for your illustrations. These more extreme versions often work better with round and more graphic illustrations, but more subtle use of these principles or what better way than more hand-written style. Those are the main animation principles I feel are important when animating morphs. For me, I like to use all these principles, but to different degrees depending on the design. Now that you know these principles, it'd be great to look at your design aesthetic and think about the principles you'd like to focus on. Maybe even go back and look at animations you like and notice why are they using these principles, how are they using them, and how you might be able to do the same for your designs.
6. Setting Up Adobe Animate: We're setting up your Adobe Animate project. First things first, let's create a new file. "File", "New" or Command N. I like to use HD, which is 1920 by 1080 at 24 frames a second. If you're going to be posting stuff online, 24 frames is normally a good benchmark. So let's create. This is Adobe Animate. You have your tools over here. I like to have transform underline just on hand. You can also add these in "Windows". Then over here, we have our library. This will be where your style frames get imported to, and your Properties. But the main thing down here is our Timeline. So all the layers and the onion skinning, which we'll get to later. First things first, let's save this file to the Skillshare version 1 and then my initials. I like to firstly change my stage to light blue. I just find the whites a bit bright, and if you've been working all day on animation, it can be a bit tiring with your eyes. Also, you want to take off these advanced layers. That's for exporting and you don't really need right now. "OK" and I've got a nice blue stage. Now, we'll import our style frames, which will act as our keyframes. If you prefer to use the design that I'll be using in this project, you can download those from the Projects and Resources tab on this page. Let's get importing, so go to "File", "Import to Stage". Then we want to grab our two style frames. It's the first one. If we go into "Align", we can send to that. Make sure Align to stage is clicked on. That's our first style frame. Then if we click on this second frame here and press F7, that will create a blank keyframe and we can import our second style frame. Again, if we just align that to the stage. There we go, two style frames. Now, what we want to do with this layer is turn into a Guide. If you right-click on the "Layer", click on "Guide", and that just means that when we export the final animation, this layer is not going to pop up. It's sort of a hidden layer. If we rename that Style Frames. Then we want to go back into "Properties", right-click and click on "Opacity 50" just so that sort of hidden, it's not so over. Then create a new layer, which is just this button here, and label that Rough. Now, you are ready to go until the next lesson. Our next lesson will be roughing out the animation. Okay, great. Thank you.
7. Roughing Your Animation: Now our file [inaudible] is up. We want to start roughing up the animation. I like to do all my rough animation using the brush tool. So if we click on "Brush" and click on the pressure, it just means we get this nice tapered edge. Then if we go to Properties, I like to have the brush quite thick so it doesn't get too skinny, especially with a style frame like this. Also, if we keep zoom with stage on, that just means that whatever close or far away you get from the stage, the brush will stay the same size. If we take it off, you can see it'll it be like [inaudible] , which is good when you want to do a lot of details. But for the roughing stage, I think it's good to keep big, bold moves and then get into the details later. Our pressure on brush, and I have mine on blue. The first thing I like to do is just trace over my style frames. That's one. Then if we go into the timeline and click on the next frame and press F7, that creates a blank keyframe. Then I can draw over the next style frame. Great. That's two style frames just redrawn onto the stage. Now, the reason why I do that is I like to hide the style frame layer just so we're all blue lines. I think that when we get into roughing and using the onion skin, you'll see why it's so useful to have it all redrawn in this way. The next thing is to add in an extra frame. So if you click F5, that creates a new frame, and F7 will create that blank frame. Now we have the space in between the two keys. We want to click on the onion skin here, and you can see those two key frames, the purple referencing the frame behind and the green referencing the frame in front. I like to take for green layer off just so that we're focusing on our first style frame and moving out of this into the next one. You can see I'm already squashing. I want to make sure that we follow the arcs of these leaves. Arcs really help to create a smooth animation. Then to see how that looks we can press the less than button, which clicks back, and then we if want to go forward we can click the greater than button on the keyboard and take our onion skin off. Then we just now want to keep in frames. That's F5, and then F7 for a blank frame. I do all of this frame-by-frame. I don't really key out as much as I would in something technical just because it's a bit more fun just doing it a bit more freehanded. We don't want everything moving all at the same time. At the moment everything is pushing down and out, but we want to have this base start coming up, I think. So while the top is still pushing down, the base can be coming out, which just adds a little extra. It's nice having things moving at different times just because it feels more natural. If you just want to test how it looks, you can press Enter and that will just give you a quick playback. Now, everything I've currently got is on ones, and it will be on twos later, but I just like to keep all of my frames close together while I'm just testing stuff out. Now, as we're move it up, we're moving into the next keyframe. I like to then put that up here. So we've just got somewhere to aim for. You had gone down, and then you're coming up. We want to push up quite. Then you're going to add in a frame here and go push beyond. You just want to overshoot that frame, go up, and then come back down. Now, let's see how that looks. Yes, that's working. We've squashed all the way down and then we've stretched up. We want to squash a little bit more before we settle into that final position. That looks a bit nicer. When we get to this top point and come back down, I think we should start revealing the flowers. I want that movement to be slightly different, so still be unfurling. I'm going to follow that movement, follow that through. This pot is actually beginning to settle in. When this happens, we are going to find that the pot finishes before the plant does. That's just having the nice follow-through of the plant. So when that begins to happen, create a new layer and plot the plant in separately. Then in here I'll just get the lasso tool, which is up here, key L, and just get the pot from the final style frame. Copy that, Command, C, and then Command, Shift, V to paste in place. So then that pot's in the final. If I pull that frame up to a different layer, I'll just keep that pot visible and still onion skin. Because when you lock a layer, you can't see the onion skin anymore. Then that plant puts on a different layer, but I can still see previous layers for the movement of the plant. I need to get this plant down, far enough down that it can then flick back up into there. I really tend to worry about the actual high proportions of things at this point because it's just trying to get the movement in there. I think we should probably squash down for longer. Now, if you press V or [inaudible] arrow, you can just select all of this and we can go back and see we've gone up, and then we want to come down. But I don't feel like we've squashed enough on this down so we can squash here, come out of this squash, and probably remove that frame. That feels a bit nicer. Stretch. If you press Q, you can also use the transform tool. Press Q or this button up here, and then let's take the anchor. Then if we just squash it down, I think that's the thing with flashes, that you don't have to be super traditional. You can be a bit scrappy. I feel like we are in this position for too long. Now we've got a rough idea of the movement. I'm just going to put everything on twos. That looks like it's in a good place. Now we're going to go back and add in some anticipation to the beginning just to draw the audience's attention to the fact that a morph is about to happen. Join me in my next class where we are going to be adding in some anticipation and continuing roughing out. Thank you very much.
8. Building Anticipation: In this class, we're going to continue roughing out our morph animation and start by adding in some anticipation. Again, like we said before, anticipation is drawing the audience's attention to something that's about to happen. As we go down here, the anticipation want to goes up. Like, "Hey, something's about to happen here." As the pot goes down, we want the pot to go up in the anticipation, as the plant comes down, we want the plant to go up. Let me just play that through. The thing that I like to do when I know something is watching over and over again. It just helps to really pick up on anything. Let's time that out. We just want to add in, we want to give enough time to this anticipation to prepare you for the larger move that's about to happen. We also want to make that smooth, and by making that smooth, we have to in-between it, so that it doesn't feel so abrupt. So we want to ease into it with an in-between. We want to ease out of it with an in-between. Maybe even to going in. Now, looking at how bouncy that n part is, I felt like our anticipation could be a lot bouncier. So we roughly know what our time is looking like. We just want it to be a little bit bouncy, which means we can stretch it a little bit more. But I guess a little more bounce, just can roughly in-between that. You want one in-between favoring here, and then one in-between favoring the first frame. That was a little slow. Really close in-between, just gives us enough time to register that move and then register that. We're about to do something dramatic. I'm even tempted to go back and really tie in-between favoring that first frame. When you're doing sort of these in-betweens in this, favoring, in this way. I think some people think it's a bit overkill, but I find that even the slightest movement really gives the whole animation a lot of texture and subtlety that maybe, see that's a nice feeling there. This pops a lot. I think if you notice when we watch it through, sort of pops out and we don't see it for very long, which I think makes it be a little off. What we can do when we see something popping is just see if all these are flowing into that. We could push this drawing out a bit, and then this next one, we can favor that drawing a little more as well. As you can see, I'm just being rough, deleting whatever you want instead of, you don't have to be nice and tidy in this section. The roughing bit really is rough. No one's supposed to look at these drawings, really. Okay. I think this first part is looking good. In the next class, I think we're going to concentrate on this end section and add some follow-through into these leaves. So if you'd like to join me for the next class, please do. Thank you so much.
9. Adding Follow Through: In this class, we're going to continue roughing out our morph animation, focusing on follow through. We've got this nice movement here with these follow through quite quickly and because that move, backup is so quick. I just wanted to settle a bit more so that it feels natural rather than just go straight into here and we can overshoot them slightly. More so it's good if we don't have everything finished at the same time. I think there's something very surreal when you see animation and everything stops in the same moment. It doesn't feel very real. This one is going beyond its endpoint here. We should be able to settle it in. There was this. We can just push past at some point, so we're just overshooting the endpoint. Just want to favor that overshoot before we set it back into the final position. It's so detailed here with my wiggly lines, it gets a little bit misty, but when we tie that down, it should be a little clearer. So just duplicate it the last key frame. I'm just deleting a bit. I don't want to settle yet. Just to increase my [inaudible]. I just want to check this part to make sure. It's working down up. I think you want to make sure you don't have any bits like this which is sticking. You want to make this bit. Favor the previous frame, and then this one, favor the next frame. Just because with everything moving so much, you really notice if something does get stuck at a certain position. This can just really chunk out. This end position comes in really hard, so you see how everything has a little bit more subtlety and it's perfectly fine to have that come in as hard as it does, but just prefer to have a little softer leaning into that previous frame a little more. Then if we just put a key frame here, which is F6, and then delete this previous frame, or you can just put in an in-between favoring, that one. It doesn't feel as hard when it stops, which I think is important with morphs. So you're going to keep everything quite fluid and not have anything happen too abruptly. I think with the follow through that it lessens the abruptness of that stop. But with just that in-between, it softens the hardness, and I think that's same for about the anticipations and things. it's just about like you might not necessarily need that frame. But for me, I feel like you just want to soften those edges. Just looking at it again, I feel like maybe in here, this tree disappears a little bit quickly. It'd be nice to just see it for a little bit longer. Sometimes I like to just draw over something because I feel like you like what you've got-ish, but you just want to draw over the top to just dream line wherever it is. You want to be able to see everything at once. I think drawing over and apply a color can really help with that. You can just highlight it and if you press "Shift," you can click off the one that you don't want and color pick the blue back and just fill that line. That feels a bit more. Doesn't feel as fat. Still feels a little fat though. Let's see that. Just with the "Transform tool," just make it a little skinnier. There's a lot then. We can just have it loop the playback in control. Loop playback just to see it bouncing along, but I feel like that's in a good place. The next stage will be cleanup and bigger productions, normally, you'll have a tie-down stage where you'll take your roughs and tidy them all up for somebody else to clean up. But when I'm on a project just for myself, I tend to merge, clean up and tie down into one process, so that I can save some time because I know the intention of the animation, so I don't need to second guess what's happening. Great. So I'll see you in the next class for some cleanup.
10. Cleaning Up the Lines: Now that we've finished all our rough animation, it's time to clean up. I like to put all of the animation that we've got into a folder. Just label that rough animation and then click on the top layer. If you hold down Shift and click on bottom layer, I'll highlight everything and you can just drag it into this rough folder. Then we want to go into properties, so right-click. Click on "Properties" and take that down to, let's go to 35 percent opacity. Now if we play through, you see that the whole rough animation is in one layer or 35 percent opacity. For the moment I'm just going to turn off and turn back on our style frame there. Here are our two original style frames. I'm going to start cleaning up with my line. I create a new layer, line layer, and then the line look is turning black. We just want to match our brush to the brush used in the style frame. As you can see here, it's got a tapered edge. Might be slightly larger. If you go to 17 in the properties. Here, there we go. If you press F4, it'll hide all of your tabs. Now, cleaning up the line layer, we just trace over this. Now let's turn off that stuff in there and turn back on our rough layer. Now you can see this actually isn't the final frame, so just click and drag that frame to the end there. Also, I'm just going to extend this, clicking F5 to just add in a few frames just so it holds on each frame. Now I'll like to go through and find all the keys really. That's one here, it's your highest point and then we've got one here, another highest point, here our lowest point and it could be opened. I'm just going to pop in a layer for the pot sitting as that finishes earlier. You want to get that last Sue tool, so let's seal the section and then hold Shift and then Command X takes away that pop, Command Shift V Pops it back in there. You can just clean up a little bit. First things first. We want to clean up these first frame but we want to put the onion skin on just so that we can see the frame before. So it's your first key. Take off the onion skin and just check it, just hiding the roughs. Then lets do our next key. It's good when you're cleaning up to just make sure that you're doing it consciously, and you're not just tracing over the line work that's there because roughs can be quite rough. You just want to make sure that everything actually works and that there's no wobbles and there's no pops. You're still having to think about the animation and movement. Let's take that off and just check. We can play it through. It feels nice. Turn the roughs back off. With this key we're going to want a CPN frame as well because when we get to this base, it's going to be affected by that. We just put the onion skin on and drag anchors to the end. You can just see where the base of that is. As you can see in rough, we come up and down and into that. We just want to have it come above. We just always want to be aware of where we're aiming for. When it comes to these leaf details, they will do them in a different color because parts of them will overlap the others. If we do them in a different color we can delete it like this for instance. As you can see, this one and this one, are in front of these two. That's this one and this one, so we'll do those ones first. You just say here, Command Z as undo, so when you see things disappear it's just because I'm Command 'Zeding' them. You can just delete that part. Now that's done. We can highlight the whole thing and turn it bold black. Let's just take off the rough on the onion skin and see how that looks. Just put F7 key there so we don't have to see that. Lock them so that none of them is selected. That feels good. Now if we turn back on our rough, so now I've got my keys. I will just start putting in blank frames. It's total rough. I'm just going to save a new version, version 3. We want to keep saving things throughout because anime can be a bit tricky and it does like to crash. It's just good to make sure that you've saved multiple versions. Now, we're going to put the onion skin back on and we're going to look at our rough animation and our keys. The reason why we do the keys is so that we're making the animation as smooth as possible. Because I do see a lot of people like clean up straight ahead, which just means there's the potential that you're going to get more wobble in your line. Just using keys, I feel like helps to stop them. If you want to go into your advanced settings, you can change the opacity of the onion skin. If you just take it down to 50, can be a little less intense. I hope you see your own rough animation. She might even put it down to, that works better for me. If you click on this loop button, it will allow you to just see a small section over and over again. You can see here that these elements are flickering, which is basically your brush going from thick to thin, which you may or may not like. For me, I like it, but also I don't want to do it too much. I'm just going to make this one thicker. I think sometimes flickering can give it a nice bit of texture, but sometimes like here, you can see it's just because the in between is off. While cleaning up you do want to be constantly checking your work just to make sure it's not going off model or all the animation doesn't work in some way. This first section, it's nicely cleaned up. Now let's move on to the second section. We should aim for this frame first because it's got the largest move so this is where we'll stop cleaning up. I like to draw rough arcs for when I animate, just so that you can make sure that everything is going in the right direction. Sometimes it's hard to see that without a guide for yourself. If you just draw a line of action for yourself, I find that can be quite useful. Now this is a good next frame, because it's in-between these two compared to this frame that's favoring the frame full. If we move on to this one now. For a project like this we're missing a middle step, which is tying stuff down. After the roughing stage, you'd have a tie down stage where you put everything on model and clean it up to the extent that someone here will come in later to clean up, won't become confused by any rough lines. But because I'm cleaning this up myself, I tend to like merge the tie down and clean up into one job just because it saves me amount of time because I'm not having to consider what somebody else has done in that rough. I already know what the intention of the animation is. One thing we do want to make sure is that all of our lines fall in the in-betweens. See how that rough like didn't quite fall between these two frames. We want to make sure that everything gets smooth and all the in-betweens work smoothly. Sometimes when you want to see several different frames like I want to see this end frame, but I also want to check out the roughs. I'll just press Alt or option and drag a new frame over here, so I can just see that next door but also be able to see the roughs below without having to cover all of these roughs and seeing way too many frames. I'm just going to add a few more frames in here just to settle these leaves because I feel like the leaves themselves are so detailed but it'll just help having a little extra settle in there. But yeah. Now we're all cleaned up. Great. Now the line is done. We'll move on to the color.
11. Coloring the Artwork: In this class we will be moving on to the color. I like to duplicate the line layer, so right-click Duplicate layer and move that underneath the line there and name it whichever color you are going to do, let us do the leaves, so this is green. Then if you just hide everything, I tend to change this line layer to be invisible. I am going to highlight all the layers. If you click on this, this is the onion skin where you can see and edit all the different layers that it is highlighting. If we do all layers and then click on this highlighting everything, you can then go to color and change the Alpha to zero. All the lines are invisible, but they still exist. That just means that you can now fill that whole layer with the green color and you won't be able to see the lines, so if you need to export just the green to do some form of texture or something and aftereffects, you will just have that green fill case. Then if we open up the style frame, uncover it, change the properties to visible, we can color pick. So if we press I, I will just color pick the green color and then I can hide that again. Click on your green layer and just fill. Now we are just going do the same thing for the other colors. As you can see, you cannot fill something like this because actually the layer is in that part, so actually this is not really form shape. You need to close this gap and to be able to fill out. Obviously, that means that you will have a bit of overlay here. So we just want to move the light layer over the top just so that it covers any of these little bits. I think when you have elements like this that turn from one color to another, you just need to test out where it fills right for you. Which part of the movement will hide that color change the best. When we get to this point, we are transforming into the next style frame. It feels like a good place to start the color change. There we have it. All cleaned up move, all nice and colored. Now that we have are move, in the next class we will be exporting it. So please join me for the next session. Thank you.
12. Exporting: I have all these layers here on. That means that the rough animation will be coming out in the export, but we can turn those into a guide layer. Right-clicking, turn into a guide. But there's something else I find quite useful when you want to make sure that these hidden layers don't come out in your export, and that's if you go into File Publish Settings and Include hidden layers. So you want to make sure that is unticked. That just means anything that you've hidden isn't going to come out on the export. When you get into using symbols and things like that sometimes you can have a hidden layer somewhere deep in a symbol, and when you export it, it flickers all the way through your animation and you've got no idea where it is. That just means that everything that you see on the stage is the theme that you'll in the export. I hope you know hidden things appearing suddenly. Great. Now, we're ready to export. The first thing you want to do is consider where you want to export to. For instance, if you want to export to a Tumblr, you're going to want to export a GIF. If we want to export a GIF, we go into File Export, Export Animated GIF, and then this will come up. There are a few things on here that you want to check out. First thing is transparency. Do you want your transparency on or off? If you want it off, it'll come up for the stage color you've got. If you want it on, it'll just have an Alpha behind. I think when you're exporting GIFs for something like Instagram stickers or GIPHY stickers, you want to make sure your transparency is on. That just means that the animation is the main focus of your sticker, it doesn't have a box around it. Other things you want to check are the size, whether this is the right image size for you if you want to stick with your HD, and also if its looping forever. It's important to have the looping forever one as otherwise, I'll just play once and there will be a still image. Another thing that's good to check up on this is, is down here you can see the estimated size of the file when you export it. So it should come out at 1.5 megabytes. If it's someone like Tumblr, sometimes they have a cap of how large that file should be. If for instance, you wanted this to be smaller, you could change the size of it in here. You can just pull it down to 50 percent, so it's just a smaller image. Then obviously it will be a smaller file size, but let's export 100 percent. We want to go to Save, and this will pop up. You want to make an Export folder and then just pop it into there. Now, if you go back into our Finder, Export folder and there's your GIF. Other places where you might want to export are somewhere like Instagram or Vimeo, then you're going to want to explore MP4 [inaudible]. If we go back into Export, we can go into Export Video/Media, and that'll bring up this box. H. 264 is a standard export. You just want to make sure it's going into the workplace, so our Export folder. Here you can choose whether it has an Alpha or not. I'm going to keep my stage color blue and then I'm ready to export. That will then open Media Encoder, which is up here. Once it's exported, this will pop up. You can just click in here. It's quick to find it, and that's your animation. Now, this one doesn't loop unlike the GIF. If you want to make something that loops a couple of times, you can put on all two option. You can drag and copy the animation so that it will play twice; this is a cheap way to do it, or you can import it into After Effects and have it loop in there which is quite useful. If you do want import your animation to After Effects I would recommend instead of important your MP4, create a PNG sequence just because it's a hi-res version. We're going to Export, Export Movie, and I just put a little underscore at the end of here, and create a PNG sequence. Your PNG sequence won't have your stage backgrounds, so it will create an Alpha layer for you which leaves you just with few animation. PNGs can be quite heavy, so you can also export a SWF for an After Effects files. SWFs are really great for importing into After Effects because they're vector-based, so you can enlarge them and decrease the size and it won't change the quality of the animation. Whereas the PNG is a still image, so it will pixelate the more you enlarge it, whereas the SWF way, which is really useful. Let's open up After Effects quickly and show you how to export a looping version of your MP4. I'm going to import a SWF. Here is our SWF. If you right-click, you can then Interpret Footage, Main. You see down here, you can loop it several times. So I'm going to loop it five times. Then I'm going to drag that SWF into here, it pops onto the stage. It's good dragging your SWF onto here, because it will keep all the sizing of your file onto the stage. Then I'm going to create just a background color, it's just a shape. Pop that pine there, and then you can see your animation. Now, to render that we want to go to Composition, Add Media Encoder that we used before. Here we have Media Encoder. Again, we're exporting at H. 264. This is just a bit more information about the export. If we click on the output just to check where it's going, Skillshare, Animation, Export, and in here. As you can see, it'll be exporting it as an MP4 and then export. Then we can click on here and find our export. There's our repeated animation. These are all of the exports and it'll be amazing to be able to see all of yours. If you want to post up any of the most you make in the discussion boards, or tag me on Instagram or something. It'll be would be just really cool to see what you guys have done with the class. Amazing. Thank you so much.
13. Final Thoughts: Congratulations, you've made it to the end of the class. We've covered everything from choosing your illustrations to exporting your animations. If there's one thing I hope that you can take away from the class it's this, with a few principles you can bring any illustration to life. But to make sure your design feels true to itself, take the time to consider the movement you're animating. Please upload your projects to the Projects and Resources tab on the class page, as I'd love to check out your works if you get time to make them. Thank you so much for watching my class. I hope you find it useful and I really hope you had fun; more finger illustrations. Thank you.
