Procreate Animation for Beginners: Animate a Christmas Greeting Card

1. Introduction: Hey, everyone and welcome to the sketch art class. My name is Leah and I'm an illustrator and animator from Germany. In this class, you will learn how to make your own animated greeting card in Procreate for Christmas. You will need an iPad Pro and an Apple Pencil, and of course, Procreate. You will learn how to animate several textiles, we will animate some Christmas motifs, and of course, some background animation. At the end, we will combine everything together and export it so you can send it to your friends. I hope you will enjoy this class. Make sure to upload your class project and share it with us. I'm so excited to see all your outcomes and let's get started. 2. Setup your template: At first we are going to look at the setup. Open up Procreate. We're going to generate a GIF template that you can use later on. Press on the plus over here and press this button. For dimensions, we're going to use 1080,1080, that's fine. For the DPI 72 is also fine because we don't want to print it, it's just for online. For the color profile we're going to use RGB also because we do not want to print it. Time-lapse settings, whatever you like. Canvas properties, I'm going to choose a light gray for background because maybe we're going to do something in white. Let's check that out later. We're going to call this GIF template. Perfect, create. Now we're ready to go. 3. Text 01 - Christmas: On the next lessons, we're going to learn how to animate text in several ways. For that, at first, we're going to start really simple by adding a text layer. You can add it here, at text. Maybe we start with Christmas. Here, you can change your text settings, choose a font, double-tap it, and then select it, then you can choose a style you like. Yeah, let's go with this font, then press on "Done", and I'm going to make it a bit bigger, center it. Perfect. Now, I put it below as my first layer and set the opacity down a bit, so I just have it as a guide for later. Now let's start animating. We're going to activate the Animation Assist here. Below you can see the timeline. There are a bunch of different settings you can choose right now, let's click on the A, which is our text layer and set it to Background. So now you can see with the blue box, this is the background and it will be always visible. Later on, we're going to turn it off. Right now, we're on the layer 1, which is this one here. Now choose a brush. I like the dried ink one, this is German, which is a default brush in Procreate. For the first animation, we're going to make wiggly lines, wiggly text animation which is really easy. You just have to draw over your text several times. I'm going to rewrite Christmas and we add another frame. We're going to the settings and set down the onion skin frames to one, and the onion skin frame opacity down to 25 percent. We still can see our reference layer quite nicely and then we do this again. It doesn't have to be perfect. It's even good if it isn't. We do wiggles a bit more. Great. Now we're going to turn off the background layer. We're going into the settings and we choose Loop and also Frames Per Second, maybe eight. Let's have a look and press "Play". There you have it. You first text animation and it looks quite nice. Let's try something more difficult in the next lesson. 4. Text 02 - Merry: In this lesson, we're going to animate text while using a mask and filling the mask with snow so the text will appear with a special effect. At first, of course, we need our text layer for reference. If you are a letterer, you can just write down your beautiful text. I can't. Let's go for Merry this time. Double-tap to select. I'm using the Futura bold and really big and add some kerning to it, so later on, you can read it a bit better. Perfect. This looks great. But don't worry, we're going to draw over it, and then it's going to look a bit nicer. Let put this at the bottom, turn down the opacity, and draw over it. You can also use the selection tool for this one. Just use the text we use as a guide, you don't have to stick to it perfectly. I'm making this a bit more of my own, and select your letters. Perfect. Now we're going to use here a white color, drag it onto this, keep your pen on the tablet and push to the right until everything is filled. Perfect. You can see I made a mistake here with the e. I will use the selection tool and you erase it. Perfect. Now we can delete our text layer, and this is going to be our mask. Now to animating. Let's select everything in this layer by clicking on it and choose Select. Now everything is selected. That turns off. Add a new layer, click on it, and select "Mask". Perfect. If I draw on this layer, everything outside the mask won't be visible, as you can see. Let's activate the Animation Assist and put our background layer to background and turn down the opacity quite nicely. Let's name this one to keep it neat. I will duplicate this several times with the mask, so I don't have to delete what's in it later. Just at times rename it to keep it neat. Let's start on the first one. Let's go to the Settings and turn down the onions skin frames again, also the frames per second to eight, and the skin opacity to 20. I think it would look nice if there's snow appearing and everything will be visible at the end. I'm making some dots inside my mask on the first layer. I hope this is not too loud for you, on the mic. Go to the next layer and start making some more dots. Then I'm going to duplicate some more free empty layers and keep on making those dots. It's important that you increase the number of dots with every layer. Now we can scrub through the timeline and we can look at what we already made. It looks quite nicely already, but if we turn off the background layer, probably it's not quite readable yet. So let's duplicate the last layers we made. It snows a bit longer, and then we're going to animate some snow filling from the bottom to the top to it so we can read better. Select that one, select "Duplicate". Well, you can duplicate with swiping to the left. I'm pressing "Duplicate" as you can see here. Nope, just selecting one. Put this on top of this, and this, and this one over here. You see the naming of the layers is pretty good, so now you know 4, 5, 6, 4, 5, 6 is duplicated. Now, we have it a bit longer. I think we could start filling it on the fourth frame. We're in the fourth frame, and we're going to activate our background again so we can see it a bit better. Now let's just draw a bit of snow at the bottom, and maybe now turn on the onion skin opacity a bit bigger so you can see how high your snow was in the last frame and continue to fill that. Maybe start slow with only adding just a bit of snow with each frame and going a bit higher towards the end. Maybe we don't even have to fill it up until the top. Maybe it looks good like this already. Let's have a look. Well, that looks quite nice. Let's press "Play". Nice. I think that looks nice. I don't want to fill it up the whole way because it looks just really sweet. So I'm going to add a new frame by duplicating my last one, and now we have to delete everything that is within that frame 6 here. We could also rename our duplicated layers. I tell you, sometimes, later on, you will be happy that you named your layers. Now, actually, just some of it we know we will add the snow in, but the lower part will stay the same basically. Let's duplicate that one maybe five times, so there is a bit of an end. Where do we start? Here, with a 10. Let's add a new part of snow at the top and some more snowflakes to it. Now repeat this step several times until you filled up all the layers. Awesome. Let's have a look at what we made. Let's turn off that background layer and press "Play". But we can still see that background layer. I missed the checkbox. Let's try again. Nice. Give this a try and share your progress with the class and show us in your class projects. 5. Text 03 - from: Now, for the last example, we're going to animate the text layer itself. For that, we're going to add another text layer. Let's use the word from, double-tap, and I'm going to choose a strawberry milkshake form, and I'm going to make it bigger so we can see it better and add a bit kerning so we can separate them easier from each other. We want each letter separately, so let's press "Done", and we can delete our first layer, tap on it, and then choose rasterise. This way it's not a text layer anymore. You can edit its pixels. Let's put this in the middle of the canvas. We're on this layer, choose the selection tool, freehand, and then select the first letter and press "Copy and Paste". Now it has its own layer, and we're going to do this with every letter. At first, we're going to rearrange them so they are not that far apart anymore. Maybe let's add an ON touch to it. Let's add another layer and call this "line". Let's put a nice wiggly line below it. Now to the important step, we're going to put everything in one group by dragging to the right, you can select multiple layers, and then press up here on group. We name this "1" because we name our stuff neatly. Now we're going to do what we've done two times already. We're going to activate the Animation Assist. Now each frame is going to be the group. You can have multiple layers in one group and change them, but it's still going to be one frame. Let's duplicate this and let's rename this into "ref" and turn it off. Just if we need to come back to it, we can use this. Because I want to start with them already wiggling, I'm going to choose this tool and turn it a bit. Let's turn the r to the right so that everything is already a bit crazy. Perfect. The reason why we did that ref layer, if you zoom and you can see that our pixels are a bit crazy right now, they don't look that neatly. That is because if you turn something around or drag it or scale it in Procreate, it uses quality. I wouldn't copy the number 1 layer here and transform it again because it would lose more quality with every time we duplicate it. We will duplicate the ref one instead, put it on top, turn it on, rename it into "2", go into the settings, turn down the onion skin frames to one, the opacity down. Also we can already turn down the frames per second here and turn it a bit to this side so we can see it better. We start with the f and let's turn it just a bit to the right. We can see in the previous one it was turned a bit to the left. Let's just do the opposite of what it did on the last frame. Okay, perfect. The line you can erase it or you can make a new layer for it, whatever you like. I'm just going to do a line which is the opposite from that line we had before. Perfect. Let's turn down the frame per second to two. Let's have a look already. You see this works. You could repeat the steps we just did several times so it wiggles with more verity. But I think that already works quite nicely for an animation. Now that you know several steps for text animations, let's look at our main motive. Let's animate some Christmas or winterly motives for our carge. 6. Lets animate 01 - branches & bell: Let's animate some Christmassy winterly motifs. At first, we're going to start with a sketch. I like to sketch with red. Let's make a decorative branch. Maybe turn it a bit and make another one. I already made the first mistake, putting these on the same layer. I want them more like this. Since you already know some basics of animating, maybe let's add just a tiny detail, which make it a bit more difficult like a small bell. Maybe even add a ribbon. A ribbon would be nice. That's sweet. I'm going to draw everything on separate layers now and I will fast-forward it. But just so you know, I will put this in one layer, this in one layer, the ribbon in one layer, and this in one layer. At the end, we will have four layers. All right, so now we can delete our sketch layer, and we will put the bell and the branches in one group and call this 1. Why not the ribbon? Because we will not animate the ribbon, and we can lock it as our foreground layer. For that, turn on the Animation Assist, and if the position of the layer you want to lock is at the bottom and you press it, then you can lock it as a background. When it's on top, you can also move it around here. It's going to be a foreground. You can have both if you want to or you need to. Now we have to think on how to animate this. I sketch over it real quick. I want the branches to wiggle a bit to the sides and I want the bell to wiggle as well. But I know that the bell will be a bit more complicated to loop. It will need some more frames. That's why I would start with the bell and animate the branches at the end with a more easy animation. In the end, they fit into the count of my frames overall. Okay, let's delete this and duplicate our layer like all the time. Maybe this time we use two key frames, an Onion skin frame and let's turn down the opacity. Actually, I think it would be wise as well to save one as ref. Then we start with the bell at the most left side. Ultimately, this is the most left position it can be. Then we duplicate your ref layer and call this 2. Activate it. Let's set this opacity a bit higher, so we can see it better. It really depends on what you're making. Let's turn the bell again and let's zoom in a bit. In the first frame, we want to just have a tiny movement really easing into the motion. Then again, duplicating the ref. Call this 3. We return it to be exactly in the middle like it actually is in the ref, so we can leave it, and since we did not move it anywhere, this time we can just duplicate for one, it won't lose quality. Name this 4. Move the bell to the right. Duplicate the ref again. Why are we duplicating the ref? If you skipped the text animation lessons, we don't want to lose quality because each time we use the transformation tool, it will lower the quality of what you transformed and let's animate. One last time, let's turn it one last time to just a tiny bit at the end. If we scrub through it, that looks already nice. Let's try a Ping-Pong shot in this frame. A bit fast. Now let's animate the branches. For that we go into the second layer and we turn it just a little bit. Also, we write one just a little bit and continue this until the last frame to go just a bit more up than the last one, so it's not too much movement. Now let's have a look. Perfect. So now you have your first Christmas motif. You could already combine this with your text and have a nice Christmas card. But let's explore some more things we could animate. See you in the next lesson. 7. Lets animate 02 - smoking chimney: For this one, I thought we might make a nice house and animate a smoking chimney. I will design it first how I want it to look, and I will fast forward to that to the point where we will start animating. This time, you can take inspiration from that or you can sketch out your own ideas. Now that we have our background, let's activate the Animation Assist and let's turn that background into our background. We wants the smoke to be white, but if we start drawing with that white color, it might be a bit too white. So I would start with adding the white smoke and then turn down the opacity until you have a white that you like. Then we're going to pick the color and put that in so we don't have to go through every layer and turn on the opacity to the right amount later. Here we have actually our first, not problem, but It's annoying if you try to match the chimney here each layer. It will be visible later. So let's take the house out of our background, put it on top, and make it into our foreground, in that way, we can draw behind it. Perfect. This will look a lot better. Now I'm actually already quite pleased with my smoke, so I will keep it. Put down your onion skin frames, maybe to two, and the opacity down. Now what we are going to do with smoke and steam, we want to animate waves. That means, in general, if you have a wave and you want it to move, it will move just one step at a time, and you'd have to fill in what's missing to the starting point. It actually is pretty simple. It also looks quite nice. It actually is pretty simple even though it looks a bit complicated, but you can just try to draw the exact same line just a bit further down your page. It doesn't need to be correct, and then you add what's missing in the beginning. It will look nicely, I promise. Let's start with that. Add a new frame. Now we want that smoke to move up of course, and a bit further. I think maybe it's starting to move to the right a bit. It looks like that away a bit. Let's go up, up, up, and fill it. Let's have a look. It looks already nice. Add a frame, and maybe just work with one frame right now, it's easier. Maybe start at the top, maybe it's easier for you. The big pulp is leaving the screen and we'll have only this here. Now let's maybe be a bit more bold. The smoke going to the right, we started that already. Let's make that curve bigger. You see this curve here is now here; this curve here is now here. Look. It already looks nice. Maybe a bit flat here, maybe let's add a bit more roundness to it. It looks nice. Let's add some more frames. Let's imagine how that wave would continue downwards. It needs to go to the left again, right? So if we pull out that wave, it will go up in that direction. This curve will be here and since it's a wave, it needs to go the other way around again. I'm sorry if I'm talking a bit bad English. I'm a native German speaker and I don't speak English that much, so it's a bit difficult for me to switch completely, but bear with me. I'm trying my best. Let's make this curvy. It doesn't need to be perfect because, well, there's also wind. Maybe it's a little bulk, I don't know. We're not. Let's have a look at it. I like that. Since we decided that it will have a little bulk coming out here, let's add that here. One frame before that, that it's already starting to bulk a little bit here, so there will be no surprises. Let's get it to the frame. Continue with our wave going a bit more like this. We've got to close that shape off. Perfect. I think that looks already pretty fine. Now you can add as many frames as you want. The more you have, the more realistic it will look, the less you will see it's a loop. But we want to close that loop. I think we can have a loop, but it won't look as good already. It won't look as good right now because you see it jumps really fast to the side. It already works, but we can make it a bit better by duplicating the first smoke. Let's rename them first. Let's duplicate that one. We don't need it at the end, but we need it for guidance now. Let's add a new layer in-between the last one and the first one. Let's put something pretty exactly in between what we're seeing here. It needs to be here somewhere. It's making this curve here and this curve here, so it's easy to make it straight but we don't want that. We have to improvise a bit to make it look smooth. Let's just try to make it still curvy. You can just play around a bit and have a look on how it looks at the end. It won't be the perfect one. You can also add in-betweens if it doesn't work. Delete the number 1 layer because we already have that in our loop. Now you see it, it doesn't snap as fast anymore and our chimney smoke is completed. Now, if you want to, you can slow it a bit more down. If you want the stars to look through, of course, you can still lower the opacity to 60. Let's have a look how that looks like. Since we put that house in the foreground, it's now over the snow, which I do not like. Now we'll just throw off the snow on top of it. Perfect. It's done. Please show us your project in the class. I'm really excited to see what you've done. See you in the next lesson. 8. Let's animate 03 - dancing Jimmy: Hey everyone, for this last one, I've decided we're going to do a bit more advanced frame-by-frame animation and we're going to animate a dancing ball decoration for the tree. Let's have a look. Put him in a dancing position. Now we have our starting position. You can draw them in any position you like. You can also try to animate a floss dance if you're really adventurous. I will improvise on the way. So we'll see what this little ball is going to dance for us. For this, we're going to animate some key positions and put in some in-betweens, I think. Afterwards, we're going to clean up everything. Let's start the Animation Assist. We will keep the naming of the layers just as they are at the moment because we are probably going to delete them later on anyway. Let's add a frame. Go to that frame by clicking on it or by dragging. Let's go through the second frame by dragging to the left, and let's put that skin opacity a bit higher. So he goes down to the knee. He will straighten that leg and put that leg bigger. If you wondered what I just did there, you can draw any shape. Keep the tip of the pencil on the screen and drag it so you can change the size of the shape you just did, and then you can edit the shape up here. Maybe you can do a different kind of ellipse or turn it into a circle, which is just what we need right now. Delete it. He's going up. Maybe he is also putting down his arms when he's up. Yeah, I'm feeling it. I think he will go down again, pretty much in the same position. Looking to this side now, bending that knee, and stretching that other foot. Putting up the hands again. Let's have a look with ping-pong right now and just four frames per second. I think it looks pretty funny. Let's put in some in-betweens here. Let's add a frame in between and let's put down the onion skin frames to one so we just see the ones before and the one after. Let's put in a circle first right in between there. Then we know this is here, this is here, so it needs right in the middle face. He would stretch the arm. Here's the beginning of the arm, here is it, and we need to go right in the middle, and the elbow will be here and here, so we need to go there in the middle, and we end somewhere in between. Same procedure here, somewhere here. Let's see what is he going to do with that left foot. Is he dragging it back? He could do that, or is he putting it up? I think maybe he's putting it up. I like that. What do you say? I look at the way the foot has to go, pick up the middle, go in the middle of that space here and draw in the leg. Perfect. We do this as well for the other side. You can also copy and narrow the frames if you want to. I don't want to because it looks more organic that way. But it's totally legit if you want to. I'm just showing you the whole experience here. Same procedure. Let's have a look. It's super cute. The bell always stays the same, so we would draw that out as one image and we will duplicate it and we will draw in the arms on each frame. At the end, we will add some editing frames, probably. I'm going to start with the middle pose as reference and I will put those two in the same group. Turn off the onion skin so I can focus on my design here. Turn down the opacity of the sketch and draw on top of it. Maybe this one won't get any lines. Let's make it a shape. Well, that's great to do. Let's change the color to maybe red. That's okay. Let's get some reflections to it. You can add as many details as you want to because you won't have to draw them on each layer, we're just going to duplicate this. Some shadows as well. When you're happy with your design, let's add the face. Put this in multiply so we can see better. I wouldn't animate the face so I will draw it on top of the bell, but you can keep it in a separate layer if you want to animate the face. We still need the tiny silver thing on top. It's like a small hat. I think it's cute. He's like a sailor. I don't know why I'm thinking of sailor, but I think it looks like a sailor. Let's lock it, put a bit of shadow. Well, that's a bit less, and some reflections. Too much. Maybe like this. Let's turn off the sketch. I like that. Perfect. I'm going to merge this because this will stay the same at all times. I will change the background color too so we can see better to dark gray, and we call him Jimmy. So Jimmy the Ball. On a separate layer, we call this arms and legs, or whatever you'd like to. Turn on the sketch again and draw in exactly what we'd sketched out. We put it behind Jimmy so we won't have any problems with shaky line endings. We can turn off the sketch and play it. He's already going to look good on one frame. Perfect. Now, we're going to name this. I would name it middle pose because probably we're going to add some easing frames later, and so we don't need to give it any numbers. It's okay. I will duplicate Jimmy and take him to the first frame. Select Layer 1, move it so I can see both. I would reposition Jimmy to the bottom and turn him a bit, not as much as in the sketch. Now we have to have a look how that turns out in the end with face. Maybe we have to redraw the face. I don't know. I want him to look to the left, so I'm probably going to draw over the face. I will turn him some more. It's trial and error. It's always trial and error. Let's draw over the face. Sweet little face. I won't draw it at the exact same position, maybe somewhere more in between the original pose. It looks fine. Let's add the arms and legs. It's a bit long. Maybe I go with A and L later on. Let's draw on the legs, and let's turn this to multiply so we can see what we're doing. Let's set up the sketch. It looks already so cute. I will continue to do this with all the remaining frames, and I will fast-forward this. See you in a bit. I think we did a quite nice job. Let's maybe let him dance a bit faster. Six frames per seconds looks nice. Now he looks so cute, adorable. If you want to make that even smoother, we could add some in-betweens. How are we going to do this? We are going to duplicate that frame. Duplicate. We call this in between, open it. We're going to move him just a bit into the direction of the next frame so he starts that movement. For the arms and the legs, we're going to erase them and also draw them closer to the original frame than to the next frame. Fold elbow here. Sides go up a bit. He is getting that leg into motion. You see he's starting on the movement, then he's in the movement. Now we're going to duplicate the middle frame, actually. We're going to let him ease into the middle pose. Put him just a bit below the next frame to leading the arms and legs. Now the arms and legs need to be closer to the following frame, so I will just put them right here in between. Now what I did, this was right. For this one, needs to be more like this. Maybe there's still a slight curve in the leg, and for that one maybe there's just a tiny curve. Let's have a look. Now he's easing into the motion. That looks nice. Now we continue to do that. Now he's easing into the next position. We're going to duplicate the middle pose again. We can move him down a bit. Erase those arms and legs. You will start getting into position. That's right. Getting a slight bend here. Getting a slight bend here. Let's duplicate the end pose. Put him a bit up. Let's ease into the last position. Again, let's draw them really close to the end position. It doesn't need to be perfect. Just somewhere in between is fine. Maybe he has just a slight bend here. Now let's have a look. It's a lot smoother than before. Maybe we can even make it go a bit faster now. Nice. I'm excited to see what you did with this. I want to see many dancing Jimmys out there. Please show them to me. Let's build an army of dancing Jimmys. I would love to see that. Now, we've got three different kinds of decorations or Christmasy motives. In the next steps, we're going to animate some background animation. Then we are already at the end. We will combine what we did into a greeting card. I will show you how to export everything. Now let's dive into background animation. 9. Background 01 - snow: In this lesson, we will look at background animation and we will keep them very simple. Let's choose a darker blue background for this and same as one. Let's immediately turn on the Animation Assist. Choose a white color and a brush you like. I actually like the dried ink one for snow, especially because it has a rough, fuzzy edge. If you make it a bit bigger, you can see it. Already it looks a bit like snow, right? I'm going to show you how to let it snow. First, draw in some snow, keep it random but would have it there, space it out and add a new frame and then draw each dot you already made near the last one in a radius like this, in that direction. We want the snow to somehow move like this. At first maybe this one here and this one goes there, does not need to go into the same direction and not at the same speed. Snow comes in all the different sizes and so it has different weight. Let's turn down the opacity a bit and also just one frame so we can see it a bit better. Of course, keep in mind, there need to be some new flakes incoming and the flakes need to come from somewhere. This flake is going here, but it came from here. Keep that in mind. I will have a snowflake coming from here which will eventually turn into that one. All right? Just keep that in mind. Add a new frame and do that again and this one? No. I hope not. This one will turn into that one, here one will be there, and let's do this one more time. I will erase the lower ones here. This you saw they didn't work as well. Now you got your snow and when you add more frames, it will look a bit more natural. Of course this is going really fast, so let's slow down a bit. It looks more like snow. You could use that for background and let's try another kind of background in the next video. 10. Background 02 - stars: Now, for this lesson, we're going to animate some stars. Let's draw in some nice dots and crosses for stars. Not too many because we have to redraw them every time. Some bigger, maybe this one bigger as well. Let's actually the Animation Assist and add a new frame. For the easy part, we just copy the dots we made at the same spot, almost at the same spot. If you're looking a bit messy like me, that's fine. Then we will change the size of the little crosses. The small ones are going to get bigger, and the big ones will get smaller. This one's supposed to be also a little cross. All right. This already works. Let's play it at two frames per seconds. I missed one there, two actually. This will need to be a bit bigger, and this will also need to be a bit bigger. So that already works. If you want to, you could add an in between like we did before and we will turn down the opacity. Copy these dots for the easy part. sparkle, sparkle. Hey, you could use this as a sparkle effect for everything. Sparkles make everything better. All right. But now we have to have a look, which one was big and is going to get small. This one is big, and we have to draw this somewhere in between that. This is small and gets bigger. Just draw everything in between. So let's play. Now, we have two options. The one way you can do ping-pong, so you don't have to animate another in between. Maybe make it a bit more thrust like this. Or you copy the in-between and put it at the end. That would also work, especially if you want to use that star background in your final composition, you could do that. All right. Now, let's combine everything. 11. Combine everything: For combination, I'm going to get a new file. At first, we will think about what we want to combine. In general, it's easier to animate everything in one file because that way you don't have to adjust how long the animation of each thing is taking, and especially Procreate lacks here a little bit because you only have that one timeline down there and you have to put everything that needs to be on one frame in one folder and then it gets messy easily. So if you want to try out other programs for animating, I can recommend CaliPack, which is pretty new. It costs a bit, but I think just it is pretty cheap for testing it out. There's also RoughAnimator, which I think costs a bit more like Procreate. I think it was only 10 bucks or so, but you have the license forever, and you don't have the problem there with one timeline, you have several timelines and you can adjust that better than Procreate. But the brushes and effects and everything is so amazing at Procreate that I still like to animate in Procreate, even though it has just that one timeline. Whatever. Let's sketch out our composition. We could have different things. We could put our bell here, and have it say merry Christmas, just like this. You don't have to combine everything. You can just combine whatever you want. You can also do a completely new animation with everything you learned. We could put the Merry Christmas in the center and just let it snow, maybe have the little branches with the bell and the ribbon below that. We could do that, or you could use the little house with the smoke for the background and put some star animation in the back with Merry Christmas right on top. For inspiration maybe, you could also do something completely new. For example, you could animate a cat with a nice Christmassy hat and a scarf saying Merry Christmas and let it snow in the back. I didn't know, the options are endless and I'm really curious to see what you come up with in the end. Also, please tell me if you share it on social media. I would love to see what you've done. I think I'm going for the house cause we didn't animate that with ping-pong, I think. The ping pong animation doesn't work as well for combining. If you have a ping pong animation, I show you what you need to do. You have that frames, 1, 2, 3, 4. It normally would go like this all the time. But then you want to combine it with something that's longer and it loops. You can combine it that way because this one loops and this one goes back and forth. For that ping pong, you would duplicate that one over here and that one over here. Now you don't need to ping pong any more, it loops. But then you still have to manage that everything has the same length. So maybe you put in some in-betweens or let it pause at some point or does it really need those two, or is it long enough like that? Excuse my sketchy explanation here. But I will show you anyway right now. Let's go with the Christmassy style here. I will go back into my gallery and duplicate the smoke project. Then from the background, I will delete the stars. We have this as our basic animation. Let's bring in our text. The first thing we want to do in this project is we want to flatten down our masks. So we click on each layer and say, merge mask. Now that we have our final animation merged, let's select all of the layers. Perfect. Then take your Apple Pencil into your left hand, and with the right-hand for me, drag your layers outside the layer panel, tap with the Apple Pencil on the gallery button to close the layers and go back into the gallery and then move to the project you want to go in there, tap it, and let go. It's importing all the layers as we'd want to. Sadly, it renamed all our layers and inverted the sequence. Well, whatever, we're going to combine this anyway. Just dropping it again. It's a bit easier to make everything at once. Let's put them somewhere else. Let's position it first. I think maybe let's scale that down, the whole Merry part. I will rename them again really quick, so if we change the position, we will still know what is what. I suggest you do the same. Now we're going to arrange those layers again. At first, I'm just going to drag down on these five layers here. So it's going to be a little bit quick, 2 to 2, 3 to 3, 4 to 4, and 5 to 5. Then we know that our smoke loops after six frames, so I will delete the 14th and the 13th frame. So we know that when we repeat the smoke twice, we will still have 12 frames overall. In Germany, you'll say hot normal sign needs to be neat. It needs to be neat with a t. So let's duplicate each small frame and put it to the right frame. That should work. We were going to combine them in the photos now so we can see both at the same time. Then we renamed again so it won't get messy. Let's have a look. Perfect. That's pretty nice. Now, we need our Christmas. Let's go into that folder. Like before, we're going to select all of them, drag them out, type on the gallery. Go back into the smoke project. If you're having problems or troubles dragging in the layers the second time, drag them directly into the Layer panel. You come with the layers and you click with your pencil on the layers while your finger holds the layers, and then you drag them directly in, then it works. We select those three, and we reposition it here. Mixing the textiles. Now, we have to duplicate them four times. Now, we could also do that backwards, we just drag it in. Let's have a look. Now, this looks already really nice. Let's add our stars. One last time, dragging this layers in. I'm going to show you again. Let's rename them. Drag them into the gallery, into our project, and then let's open the Layer panel to make sure it gets imported. Great. Now, let's have a look. Now, you see our stars are a bit in the way, and we could add some of the foreground to the house, but I will just erase those four in the way, real quick. Like we did before, I will duplicate them and put them in the right folders, and make sure they are behind your text so the text is in the foreground. As a last step, I will put the Christmas in front of the smoke in every layer. Now, let's have a look at what we've done. It looks really sweet. At some finishing steps, I would go back into the gallery, select our project, and duplicate it one last time, then I would name this original and card flatten, because in this part, I will flatten the layers down to the actual frames, so the file isn't as big. Then I would probably add some more details in the fore and the background, add my name, everything. I will fast-forward that, and you can watch me do that. Then we have a look at the finished part we did together. I'm pretty happy with the outcome, and I hope so are you. In the next lesson, I will show you how to export this. 12. Export: We can export this in different ways. Let's go to Settings, Share, and at first, we're going to export an animated MP4. When you want to post this on social media, I personally don't want to export web-ready because the quality sucks a bit, so let's choose max resolution, and you can still change the frame rate here if you want to go faster or slower, I think six is fine. Then you just press "Export" and choose a place where you can save it, I will just save it on my iPad. But you can also, if you want to, save it as an animated GIF. I would advise to use web-ready here. I can play around with the settings, what looks better to you. I would just leave everything off here and export it as well. You can upload that to your Giphy channel if you want to and share it with the world. Also, if you want to share it via Messenger, I would advise sending a GIF to your friends and family because it will repeat itself, it will loop. The video won't loop if you send it with the Messenger, but the video will loop on Instagram, if you post it. Also, on Facebook, if you want to post it, use the GIF, and for Instagram, use the video. Now, some final things. Of course, you made beautiful stickers and GIFs on the way. For example, with dancing Jimmy here, I would crop down the canvas to fit him nicely. I'm not quite sure that is okay, so look on while I cut him. The best way to avoid this is to turn on all the onion frames so you can see the range where he moves, and then crop down to fit him so you don't export empty space. Done. Then go to Share, Animated GIF, Web Ready, Transparent Background, and he's ready. You can export him and upload him to your Giphy channel or to your story. At the end, I want to thank you for sticking around with me. I had lots of fun doing this, and I would be so happy if you would join my GIF advent calendar on Instagram right now. I'm making fresh stickers every day until Christmas. I will hand out free story templates, where you can add your self-made GIF stride or cool GIFs you find on Giphy or wherever, and share them with your followers and your friends, and I would be so happy if you share them with me as well and join me on that adventure. I wish you all the best. I hope everybody's healthy out there. Keep safe, keep cozy, get yourself a cup of tea and a cookie, you did well. I'm excited to see all your class projects. 13. Outro: I hope you had fun in the class. I surely had. I would be so grateful if you would leave a review. This will help me so much with this class, and also if you have any suggestions for future classes, I would be happy to hear about them. Also, if you liked this class, maybe you can check out my other class. It's about animating cute cats and kick-start your Giphy channel, so maybe that's interesting for you. I hope to see you soon in the next class. Bye.