Procreate Animation for Illustrators: Create Easy GIFs in Procreate 5

1. Animating for Illustrators: Create Easy GIFs in Procreate 5: I'm an illustrator, not an animator. The Procreate's new animation tools are so easy and it's actually very fun to use. In this class, I want to show you how to add really simple, easy motion to the illustrations that you already have. For the busy artists who don't have time to sit through a long class, there's a quick straight up breakdown of what the new tools are and where they are. Next we'll brainstorm what kind of movement to add to your art. There's going to be a bunch of step-by-step examples so you can follow along even if you've never made a gif. This is not a class about serious animation. We're not going to be making really labor-intensive, complex animations. Just fun, easy, tips and tricks for adding simple motion tier. "Hi, I'm Brooke Glaser, I'm an illustrator and I top teacher on Skillshare. My goal is to give you inspiration for your existing illustrations, so you can start making gifs straight away. Even if you don't have your own finished illustration, there's going to be practice files so you can jump straight in and try it all out. I didn't do a lot of digital drawing before Procreate. Procreate totally changed the way that digital drawing felt for me. It was fun and that's what it's done for animation. Anytime I've opened Adobe After Effects, I just, noped right out of there. Way too techie for me, but Procreate's new animation tools are so much more intuitive and the gestures, everything just flows so much more naturally. If you are ready to add new life to your art, then let's dive in." 2. How to Use this Class: If you are brand spanking new to Procreate, I highly recommend you check out my intro to Procreate class. It's quick and it will show you exactly how to use all of the really cool tools and gestures and shortcuts in Procreate. If you have a moment in this class where you're like, "Wait a second, how did you do that?" That's likely going to be covered in the intro to Procreate course. But honestly, if you just have a basic understanding of Procreate, you're going to be fine with this course. If you're super eager to start animating right away and you really want to just jump straight into it, check out the lesson on how to animate in Procreate. It's going to be a quick in-depth breakdown of all of the tools. So you can just get started. After that, I'm going to dive into step-by-step real examples of how I make animations using these tools. The idea is to give you a lot of ideas for animations that you can make with the illustrations that you already have or help you plan animations for illustrations that you want to make in the future. Don't forget there's that handy-dandy rewind 15 seconds button. Enough, let's get into it. 3. How to Animate in Procreate: So, the first thing we're going to do, is turn on the animation assist. I'm going to go the wrench icon, hit the canvas tab, and I'm going to go to animation assist. That's going to bring up this cool little toolbar, which is the animation assist. Procreate works by doing frame-by-frame animation. If you've ever made a little flip book, this will make a lot of sense to you. So, basically we take different frames and we draw us a change in each frame, and then procreate plays that in a loop, and it creates the illusion of motion. Procreate will treat a group in your layers panel as a single frame. So, for example, right now, if I push play right here, all of these elements are on their own layer and they're not grouped together so they are being treated as a single frame of animation. If I come in here and I group these, now they all come together into a single frame of the animation. And I'll turn on these other frames and if I push play, that group is treated as a single frame of animation. Procreate built some really useful tools streamed to this toolbar, so you don't always have to be jumping back and forth between the Layers panel. My favorite is, duplicate frame, and you can do this in two places. So, the first one is if you tap on the frame right here and you hit duplicate, you can see there, it added a extra little frame right here and if you open the Layers panel, it also added another frame in here. This is super useful because now I could just come in here and I could just redraw a little bit more of her eyelids closing. Instead of having to redraw everything, I can just duplicate the frame and then draw on top of it. The other place that I can do that, I can make sure that whatever frame is selected and you can tell it selected by this little blue bar down here, if I tap and hold add frame, it will also duplicate that frame. Now, I can also add just a blank frame if I wanted to draw something completely different, this might work if your animation is super simple. You might just be wanting to add frames inside of it. I can also delete frames directly from the timeline right here. So, for example, I don't need that blink frame and I can see it up in here. If I just tap on the actual frame and hit delete, it'll delete it. Now to be noted, it also deleted it from the Layers panel. If you want to remove something from the animation timeline, but you don't actually want to delete it, just turn the visibility off. Whatever you have visible in this Layers panel is what's going to show up in your animation timeline. So, if you're wondering why some frames aren't in your animation timeline, you may want to check the visibility in Layers panel. Another neat tool in the animation assist toolbar is that you can actually grab, and move different layers around so you can swap these layers so they go in different order and that is going to do the same thing in your Layers panel. Sometimes it just makes more sense visually to be able to move them in timeline order, than it does in layer order so this is a really useful tool. So, speaking of visibility, I actually made a bunch of textures for the background of this animation. But unfortunately right now, procreate is treating it as a frame of the animation, but I don't want it to be a frame in the animation, I want this stuff to sit behind all of these layers of animation the whole time. So, there's a way that you can do that, by tapping on the frame and hitting background. That's going to treat these frames, or in this case, this group of layers as a background for the entire animation. You can also do this for something in the foreground. So, let's say that I want to draw a little monkey for her shoulder and I just want this to always be on top of the animation, I don't want it to flash on and off. I just want that monkey on top of her shoulder all the time. Well if I tap here, I can hit foreground and now it's going to sit on top of her shoulder. You can see during the animation, the background is on the back and the foreground, the little monkey, is on the front. It's worth noting that in your Layers panel, you must have the background on the very bottom layer, and you must have the foreground on the very top. You cannot move this somewhere else in-between. See it, procreate, actually just forces it back to the top. Now, you might have been wondering, why do I have all these shadowy ghost leaves up here? And that has to do with onion skinning. You might think that the term onion skin refers to food, but, onion skins are the tracing paper of animation. It helps you see what came before, or after in your animation and it can help you judge exactly how much, and how far you want to move what you're drawing. You can control how many frames that you see, and you can also control the opacity. Now, opacity is just a fancy word, meaning how transparent or how see-through something is, and sometimes it can be really useful to have the opacity really far up, and sometimes it's just going to be distracting and you're gonna want the opacity a lot lower down. This is totally going to depend on your unique animation. Another cool setting, is the color secondary frames and this is very useful in helping us see which onion skin is the frame before the current frame that we're on, and the frame that's after the current frame we are on. So, these earrings, they're all green and that's because those frames, those onion skins, they are frames that are coming next in our animation. So, I am currently on the very first frame of animation, that's the gold earring right here, and if I tap on to this one, now I'm on the middle frame of animation. And the frame that I was just on just turned into a solid pinkish-red color and that tells me that this frame has already passed. I know that this onion skin is the one that's coming up next because it's green, and I know that onion skin is the frame that came before because it's red. If I tap on the last frame, now both of those onion skins are red, so I know that both of those happened in the past. Another useful tool is this blend primary frame. Now your primary frame, is the frame that you are actually on and I can tell which frame I'm actually on by this little blue underline here. And if I tap on to this middle frame, now this is my primary frame. If I turn on blend primary frame, you'll notice that this kind of dimmed a little bit. Essentially what that does is it turns the primary frame into a semi-transparent onion skin as well. This is useful because in this animation, I'm having Frida's eyes open and shut and if her face was fully on the screen with no opacity, I couldn't see how much her eyes had closed from the last frame. Because the primary frame is now an onion skin, I can see through it. Depending on what you're animating and what you're doing, this can be super useful or it can be distracting. Procreate gives you a couple of ways to play back your animation. There's one called loop. And if I play a loop, it plays to the very end frame, and then it jumps back to the very beginning frame, and so her eyes pop open. For a lot of your animations, this looping is going to be super perfect, it's going to work really well. In this particular case, I want to use ping-pong. Ping-pong is really great because it essentially goes backwards and forwards on the timeline. Ping-pong animation is a great way to save yourself some drawing time. If the action you're drawing works the same in reverse, this can save you this extra drawing time. For example, when Frida's eyes open and close, the action is the same whether she's opening or closing them, I don't need to draw her opening and closing them. I just need to draw one direction, and then use the ping-pong animation. The other big perk, is that this actually saves you layers. Procreate has a layer limit to help with stability and using ping-pong animation can help you save some extra layers. Another great way to save layers is an option called hold frame. So, even if you've maxed out your all of your layers, you can still use this option. So essentially, I want to have the animation hold these hands, here in the center, for a few more seconds. So, I'm going to tap on that frame and I'm going to say hold duration, and I'm going to say, let's have it hold for two extra frames. And you'll see in the timeline, that it's created these half transparent extra frames. It's duplicated this frame, without adding more layers to your Layer panel. So, if I press Play, now it's going to hold for just a beat at the middle when they meet. 4. Prep Your Art for Animating: I never create my animations using the same file as my original illustrations. I always create a duplicate document for animating. That's because in the animation process, I merge on almost all of my layers. I always want to have a copy of my full illustrations with all the layers separate in case I ever want to change things. Believe me, that happens a lot. A client can easily asked for this ice cream cone to be a different color. In this case, the ice cream and the sprinkles are all separate. The hands are separate from the nails, the cheers up here is on its own layer. So what I want do first is I'm actually going to crop this because I knew from the beginning that I wanted to show this on Instagram. I wanted it to be in a square format. I went to the wrench icon, Canvas, Crop and Resize. I just came in here and cropped this down to five inches by five inches. Then I just move this guy up. The ice cream cones are fairly evenly spaced in here. I'll hit done. Then what I wanted to do was that since I knew what my animation was going to be, I knew that this ice cream and hand, they were each going to move separately. I wanted to make sure that they were all on one single layer. So I came in here and I merged the sprinkles with the ice cream cone. I was going to merge this hand with this ice cream cone, but I want to move it separately from this hand. So what I do is I come in here and I select what I want from this layer. I use three fingers, swipe down and hit Copy and Paste. Now that hand is on its own layer and I can merge it down with the ice cream cone. The same thing is going to have to happen with these ice cream cones here. If I isolate and just show you what's on this layer, it has both the ice-cream cone. Again, I'm going to need to remove each of these things and put them on their own layer. I also didn't want to have the cheers or the yellow decoration down here at the bottom, so I made sure that I removed those from the canvas as well. That's how I took a full illustration and prepped it to make an animation in a way that was going to make the animation super fast and super easy. 5. Animation Type 1: Position: Let's start with the easiest way to add a little animation to the art you already have. Take what you've drawn and move its position on the canvas. This could be moving left to right, up or down or even rotating something. For example, in these ice cream cones, they're just moving from side to side. The same with these cars. They're moving across the screen from left to right. I'm not redrawing them. I'm just moving them from left to right. I'm also moving them up, up and down just a little bit to give them a little bit of movement, a little bit of bounce, an extra character. You can also go up and down, not just side to side. This girl is floating upwards. And to help with that floating upwards, I don't just move her straight up and down. I moved her out a curving, winding angle upwards. I used a really fun trick to help me with this called guided motion. But enough of examples, let's dive into the exercises. 6. How to Download the Exercise Files: I've created several exercise files you can use alongside me. You can download them by going to brookeglaser.com/animate. And entering your email. I’ve also put a link in the projects and resource tab. This exercise file has everything on its own layer. It’s really easy for you to come in here, and change the colors of the ice cream, add sprinkles. You’re free to use it as it is or play around, and make it a little bit of your own. Once the file has downloaded, tap on it, and open it in Procreate. You may need to swipe to the right over here, and click "More" to open up the option to open in Procreate. 7. Exercise 1: Basic Position Animation, Cheers!: I've gone ahead and added my own details, and I've actually also added a background layer that has just a little bit of texture in here. You can see there's a little bit of a darker pink in here. The first thing we're going to do is turn on the animation assist. I'm going to go to the wrench icon, hit the "Canvas" tab, and I'm going to go to animation assist. Immediately, that's going to pop up that, this looks like a blank screen. I'm going to tap on it in the animation assist toolbar down here, and I'm going to hit "Background" and that's going to make sure that that background layer is always on the background of all of the frames of animation that I make. Now, you're probably saying, "broke all my layers are still gone. They've all disappeared. What's going on?" What's happening is that all of these layers are on their own. They're not grouped together. Procreate thinks that these are each individual frames of animation, so we need to group them. I'm going to swipe to the right to select them and I'm going to hit "Group." Doesn't that look better? Now, this is one single frame of animation. What I'm going to do now is, I'm going to make a new frame where the hands are starting to pull apart so that we can do a cheers in motion. I'm going to show you a really fun shortcut for doing this. Instead of coming all the way up into your Layers panel swiping to the right and hitting duplicate. We can actually do that from this toolbar, this animation assists toolbar. I'm going do that by holding add frame. It's going to pop up, you'll see a second group right there. Now, what I can do is, I can open this up, and I can come in here. I could grab the left or the right ice cream cone and I can just move it back a little bit. I'm going to turn off the little dashes right there. I'm going to do the same thing to the ice cream cone on the other side. I'm going to move it over a little bit. If you were wondering why there's this weird shadowy set of ice cream cones, those are called onion skins. It's just showing me the frame that came before, where the ice cream cones are earlier in the animation. This makes it easier for me to decide where and how far over to move the ice cream cones. Now, if I play this, that's a really fast tears, but I actually want this to be a little bit more smooth and I want them to go out a little bit further. I'm going to make sure that I'm on my layer where the hands are a little bit further out. I'm going to also duplicate it by holding add frame. I'm going to move those layers as well. Then I'm going to add one more frame of the hands moving further out. Cool, let's see it in motion. Part of this animation looks really jerky, and that's because it's jumping from the very last frame to the very first frame. If I tap on that, I can pull up this first, this last frame all the way to the first one, and that's really like after all this nice smooth movement that we put into there to jump all the way back like that a little harsh. What I want to do is, I'm actually going do a Ping-Pong animation. What that's going to do is it's going to ping pong the way it's playing. It's going to play forwards and then it's going to play backwards. I'll show you that, ping, ping. Now, you'll notice, remember how I turned off the little white marks. I turn them on. They only show up when these two ice cream cones meet. That's a really fun way to just add a little extra attention and motion. I would love to see how yours turned out, so please share them in the projects gallery. If you're sharing them on Instagram, please tag me so that I can see what you guys are doing. 8. Exercise 2: Guided Motion for Easier Animating: For this animation, I could've made this girl and the balloons go straight upwards, but I wanted to have a feeling of the balloons waving, and floating upwards, being pushed around by the wind, and to help me figure out where exactly I should put this, I used guided motion. What I did is, I drew this curve right here to help me figure out where I should put the girl and then how to keep it smooth in the movement. The first thing I want to point out is that I am going to need to keep a copy of the original girl, because I'm going to be moving her out of the frame. So if I duplicate this, and I bring it all the way down, you'll notice that the girl part has been put outside of the canvas. If I try and bring her further up, that's been cropped off, so, I want to keep an original so that I can continue to animate her. In this animation, the balloons are really guiding where things are going, but it's a little bit easier for me to line up this black guided line with the bow. I'm going to be roughly putting the bow in the center of this line, but tilting it according to the balloons. I will duplicate that layer again, and I'm going to move it just a little bit above the other balloon. You can see the old bow and the onion skins underneath here. I'm going to try and move it about that much every frame. Now these frames are out of order on the timeline, if we left them as they are, the balloons would appear to be sinking instead of floating. I'm going to drag and drop these frames, so that they show up in the correct order, and I'll duplicate that original layer once more, and then I'm going to move it to the end of the timeline, and then I'm going to tilt this. So again, you'll see that because the line is starting to curve towards the right. I'm going to start curving these balloons and the center of the ribbon, little bit more towards the right, and again, I can see that this bow is just a little bit higher than that one. I'll duplicate that one again, bring it to the end of the timeline, and things are getting really tricky to see in here. I'm having a hard time seeing where the last bow and set of balloons were, so what I want to do is lower the amount of onion skin frames I have available. So I'm going to slide this down to the left and actually just going to say, I only want like one so that it's really easy for me to see exactly what came right before this frame of animation. So now that makes it a lot easier to move this a little bit lower down. Now that I've got the entire illustration on the canvas, I can start duplicating the frame that came before. So this will make it a little bit easier to animate. Now I can see underneath of there is the [inaudible] skin, I'll duplicate that layer, and the line is starting to curve to the left now, so I'm going to start slowly tilting this towards the left. I'm going to keep going until she's completely out of frame following the flow of the guideline, and in my mind, she would be floating back this way, so I'm going to start tilting her a little bit in the other direction as well now, and there she goes all the way out of frame. So let's preview our animation, let's turn off that guided line by turning the visibility of that layer off, and I noticed that I have a glitch in here and that is because I still have my original frame in the center right down here, this was my original illustration that I was duplicating. I'm going to turn the visibility of that one off, and now I've got a nice winding path all the way up, and if I want to slow this animation down just a bit, I can move the frames per second down a little bit lower. So it really get that slow floating movement, and that was good at motion. 9. Exercise 3: Clipping Masks and Shifting Eyes: So for this animation, I have the lettering and her face on the background. Her eye lashes and the shadowing of her eyeballs on the foreground. And, the animating layers, the whites of the eyes are on their own layer. And, the eyeballs are on their own layer, but they are clipped to it. So if the eyeballs were just by themselves, here they are. They're just hanging out loosey-goosey, all by themselves. But, what I want is to make sure that the only parts of the eyes that you can see are what are inside of those white eyelids. So I'm going to tap on this layer and hit Clipping Mask. And that is going to keep the eyeballs only showing on what is on the Clipping Mask. Now, the clipping mask also has her hair and her hood in there. So I could have her eyeballs over here. But, I probably won't be doing that in this particular illustration. Now, this is super creepy. So, I'm going to turn on the rest of the illustration. I do have her face and the lettering back here along with the background. But I did keep her eyelashes. And I have a layer which created some shading on top of her eyeballs. That is going to be on its own separate layer. Because if it was part of the clipping mask, the lashes wouldn't be above the eyeballs. Instead, the eyeballs would have shown through the lashes. Also, I created some shading over this eyeball right here, with a multiply layer. And so I wanted, like, it's a lot easier to just have that on one separate layer instead of having to add shadows onto your eyeballs every single time. So that also is on a foreground layer because it needs to be on top of the eyeballs. Okay. I know that was a lot of information, but a little bit of setup and a little bit of extra work at the beginning can save us a lot of work in the long run. So I'm going to duplicate that layer. And, I am going to move her eyes from side to side. That's because Little Red Riding Hood has reason to be suspicious. She has been followed in the woods. Somebody's trying to hunt her grandma down and trying to eat her. But, you know, you could also have a sarcastic character or somebody who's rolling their eyes. But Little Red Riding Hood is checking her back. Making sure nobody's following her. Cool. So I'll keep duplicating this until she's looking all the way to the other side. There we go. I'm not going to bother animating her eyes going backwards because I can use the ping pong setting, which basically makes her look back and forth, which is super cool. But this is, this is like a crazy person looking back and forth. This is not like a person who is actually checking one side of their eyes to the other. So I'm going to create a hold frame because I want it to pause on her looking this way and then her eyes dart over to that side and look that way. So what I'm going do is I'm going to create a hold duration of, let's say, three frames on this side. So now she's really looking on this side. So let's have her really look on that side too. So on the end one. I will also have her hold three frames. She's really making sure she knows where that Wolf is. 10. Animation Type 2: Transformations: The next group of techniques we will cover is called transformations. It's making changes or modifications to what you've already drawn. And I promise it's a lot simpler than it sounds. A really easy transformation is to change the opacity of something. Opacity, by the way, is just a fancy word for how see-through something is. The lights in this glowing pumpkin. It's just a simple layer of yellow that has changing levels of opacity. You can also change the size of something. The bubbles in this potion are getting smaller and larger. You can change the shape of something by erasing or masking it. I drew these entire rainbows and then I just erased parts of it for the animation. I used masking on this spoon, so it appears to be sinking and swirling in the tea. And Procreate has a really cool tool called liquefy. Liquefy morphs shapes in really fun ways. I love using it for steam, fog, smoke, fire, and more. Next, we'll dive into the exercises. 11. Exercise 4: Opacity Changes and Pumpkins: This is one of the easiest animations I've ever done, and all I had to do was change the opacity of the yellow inside of the pumpkins. Let's take a look at how the animation file is broken down. The pumpkins are on the bottom layer and a background layer. This is how the pumpkins would look without the light on them, and the yellow is just this bright yellow spot. I'll isolate that one so it's by itself. You can see it's just the holes inside of the pumpkins, but it's also the light that would be cast out of their mouth onto the ground, so you can see that altogether. Here's some of the yellow on the ground as well. Now all I need to do is adjust the opacity of that yellow layer. So I'm going to duplicate the layer and I'm going to show you two ways to adjust the opacity. The first way is you use two fingers and you just tap on the layer and it's going to bring up this threshold bar rate appearances. Slide to adjust. All I got to do is move my finger up and down, and it's going to adjust the opacity of the layer. This is why I love Procreate. It's so easy, these gestures are so intuitive and fun to use. Now, the second way, again, if I duplicate the layer, I can just hit N, and then there's an opacity bar which I can visually see to adjust. So if you can't remember the shortcuts with your fingers, you can always just remember by opening up the tab right there. Now if I just have those couple layers of opacity, it creates a strobing effect which can look like Halloween scary. But I'm going for more of a flickering candle effect and I know what a candle looks like because I went to YouTube. I could also light a candle and observe how the candle moves. It's not constantly on or off. It gets brighter, stays brighter for a couple of seconds or a couple of split seconds and then goes dark and then comes bright and goes dark. So what I can do, is I can tap on this frame down here on the timeline, and I can say, you know what, I want you to hold that brightest color for four frames. Cool. That's creating a much better, more random flickering effect. Now I just want to add even more so it feels a little bit more natural. Let's see how this plays. Yeah, we're really getting somewhere with this. I'm just going to add a few more frames at different rates and then play around and see if there's little pauses that I want to make. And there you go, that's a really, really easy way to add some animation. There's a practice file in the project section that you can download for yourself if you want to do with this pumpkin illustration. I also want to encourage you take a look at your own illustrations. Is there any illustration that you could easily add this technique to? For example, that ice cream animation also uses this technique, the little dashed highlights down here, the visibility is just being turned on and off. If you have a portrait, maybe you could add them blushing by bringing more red to their cheeks. Stars in the skies, you can make them blink on and off so that they shimmer and sparkle in the sky. This could work really well if you have a candle in your illustration or any other light sources. You could do moonlights streaming in from a window, the glow from a fireplace, similar to the light glowing on the ground in front of the pumpkins. 12. Size and Scale Changes with Bubbles: Another way of adding motion to your illustrations is to change the size of something. This example actually uses size changes and position changes, but let's take a closer look at those size changes. In this potion, the bubbles are progressively getting bigger as they move upwards, so as I tap through each frame, you can see that. In this potion, the bubbles are progressively getting smaller as they get higher up and I'm adding more bubbles as the majority of the bubbles reach the top, I'm adding a few on the bottom. This is a really easy change to make because I'm not redrawing these bubbles, I'm actually just taking them, making a selection and then either growing them bigger or making them smaller, really easy change to make. Other examples of changing the size of something, if you have stars, changing the size of the star is just a little bit that could add some really easy motion. If you've got a person who's surprised, maybe you can draw their eyes getting bigger. 13. Exercise 5: Using Liquify: Animating smoke and steam is one of my favorite things to do. Now, I could actually redraw every frame of this smoke, but Procreate has a really cool tool called Liquefy, and it makes it super easy to do and it's super fun to use. First things first, I want to show you how this file setup. So everything right here, is on its own layer and it's set as the background and then all of these items right here; the smoke is on its own layer; the teapot is on its own layer; and the shadow underneath of it is on its own layer. So I'll duplicate the group with the teapot and I'm going to make sure that I am on the layer that has the smoke that I want to animate and I'm going to isolate this so that you can see how this tool works first. So I'm going to just show just the smoke. I'm going to hit the Wand icon up here, and I'm going to hit Liquefy. This is going to open up all of our settings for the Liquefy tool. There's two settings in particular that I want to pay attention to. The first is the mode which you can switch down here on the very far left and the second is your brush size. If your brush size is really far down, you may want to boost it up. But watch what happens when I use pinch. When I use pinch, it brings everything on that layer closer to wherever I had set my pen down. So if I go all the way down like this, everything is just going to shrink inwards to wherever my pen is. How cool is that? I can undo all of this back to the way my layer looked when I first opened the Liquefy tool by just hitting the reset button here. If I try Expand, so I tapped on Pinch. If I tap on there, it's going to give me other options of things that I can do with this Liquefy tool. So I can use Expand and it does exactly the opposite. It just pushes all of those pixels out, which looks so cool. There's also an option to Twirl left or Twirl right. That is super fun. You can imagine looking down in a cup of coffee and watching the foam swirl around, super fun. Push, just literally pushes whatever you've drawn in a different direction. I'll reset at the beginning there. Crystals, is not so great for smoke. Let me show you what it does but you can see how it splatters out. I can imagine this working really well for ice or something frozen. But for now, I'm going to use Expand and actually let's go ahead and put all of our layers back up and I'm going to zoom in. Because I want to make sure that I can see what happened in the smoke before this one. So I'll go back to my Liquefy tool, and I want to make this smaller than the smoke that came before it. So not a ton, just a little bit smaller. So if I zoom in, I can see here's the onion skin layer, that's the old smoke, and this is the new smoke. Another fun thing that I could do, would be to mess with the reflections in the teapot. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to tap on the teapot and I'm going to use my Smudge tool. I'm just going to use an Oil Pastel. You can use whatever you want and I'm just going to smudge around some of these reflections. If the smoke was drifting around the pot might reflect that a little bit differently. I'll even go ahead and push around the shadow underneath of the teapots. So maybe I'll smudge it outwards for this frame and I'll add another frame. Duplicate that whole group. Go back to my smoke and this time I'm going to make the smoke go significantly larger. So I'm going to use the Expand tool and by the way, if you see me making small adjustments, I'm just undoing and redoing a single move within the Liquefy tool just by using my shortcuts of using two-finger taps and three-finger taps to undo and redo. I'll do the same thing with the teapot, I'll add some smudges again, and if I play this, how cool is that? Then the smoke is really moving around. Liquefy is such an easy and fun tool to use. It's great for doing things like smoke or fog or steam, even flames are great with it. I've seen people use it to animate hair blowing in the wind. It's just a really fun and easy tool to use. 14. Exercise 6: Masking and Erasing: For some illustrations, the easiest way to animate them is with an erasing technique which makes something look like it's appearing or disappearing. What I want to do is how the rainbows jump out from this way and then disappear from this way so that they're moving in that direction. I could in theory, just come in here and erase this part of the rainbow but then I need to duplicate this layer so that I have the original and then shift the layers around and the timeline. I actually have a better solution for this and that is to create masks. A mask is basically an eraser, but way better because you can basically erase and change your mind and erase and change your mind as much as you want to. Think of masks as windows. If you want it dark in a room, you use a blackout curtain. Black keeps things hidden. If you want to see through a window, you'd use a sheer white curtain. White shows whatever is on a layer. For example, as I draw on my layer mask, black, it covers up the rainbow and as I draw white on my layer mask, it's going to bring it back. To create a mask tap on the layer that you want to use it on and choose mask from the menu. I want to start with neither of the rainbows showing, I'm going to fill my layer mask with black and there's a big difference. If I come over here and draw black, that doesn't look very good and it's not on the layer mask. I need to make sure that the blue, the darkest blue of these selected layers, is on the layer mask. Now that the darkest blues there, I can come in here and.. My rainbows are gone. I will duplicate this layer and start revealing the rainbow. I'm going to switch to white, and I'm going to draw with white to reveal the first parts of my rainbow and I'll duplicate. Make sure I'm on the layer mask, not the layer and continue to fill my rainbow in. Duplicate that layer, and keep going until I get my full rainbows. This rainbow is fully on there and this rainbow is not fully on. It's still got a little ways before it reaches that end of the cloud but I want to start removing this other half of the rainbow. Let's play this so far. This rainbow is jumping to the left and this rainbow is jumping to the right. I want to start erasing from this half of the upper rainbow and finish revealing that side of the rainbow and start removing, concealing this side of this rainbow. Right now it hardly looks like I'm doing anything and that is because the opacity of my onion skin layers is turned up really high and I'm going to lower that a little bit and that will make it really easy to see how far I've erased. Now I've fully erased on my rainbow, let's play the animation. Super cool. Let's look at more examples where I use masking. This is also an animation where I wanted to use a masking technique. Instead of actually an erasing techniques, the spoon moves up and down a little bit when it's moving side to side and it would have been more complicated to erase and redraw those parts of the spoon. Instead, I just masked out the parts I didn't want to show on each frame and this was a lot easier for me to do then if I erased and redrew or duplicated a lot of layers. I'm just hiding the lower portion of that spoon. If we take a look, let's turn the onion skin down, will turn the onion skins off so that it's easier to see. If I turn the mask off, you'll see that the spoon is actually all the way down here and when I turn it back on, I just drew in black where I wanted to conceal it. Its kind of sloped on here so it looks like it's dipping into the tea and same thing here, but the mask is different on different sections. So masking can be a very useful technique. 15. Animation Type 3: ReDrawn: The third kind of animation we can make is the kind that you actually have to physically redraw. But this doesn't have to be super complicated either, we can keep it simple. Let's go over a couple of examples. 16. Exercise 7: Simple Blinking Eyes: It's even easier to have a character blink their eyes than it is to have them move their eyes, because all this is going to require is drawing the eye shadow. If you've already drawn the character with their eyes open, now all you have to do is basically scribble over that. So I have Fridah herself on her own layer. I have her earrings on their own layer, see they're by themselves, and I have each of these branches on their own layers as well. So I will duplicate that full group. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to draw her eyes shutting. So I'm going to grab the color by holding my finger and eye dropper in it. Then I'm just going to draw her eyes half shut. Real simple. Okay, so I drew her eyes, now I'm just going to animate these leaves blowing in the wind, and because I'm going to say the wind goes this way, I want these leaves all to be tilting in the same direction. I'm going to do the same thing to her earrings. So on this guy, I'm just going to rotate, I'm going to grab this little green dot up here, and I'm going to rotate it and make sure that it still is sitting in that corner. First of all, because I don't want the cut-off portion of the leaves to be shown, but also because the leaves are probably attached to a tree right here, so they would probably swing like this. I'm making sure that I'm rotating it, but I want it to stay like it would be rotating from that point. So if I go to this other leaf, I don't want to make it go this direction,because then the wind is coming from both directions. I want to make this tilt in that direction since these are swinging that way, I'm going to have these swing that way. I'm going to do the same thing with the earrings, the earrings are on the same layer and I could tilt them, but I'm actually going to show you another tool and I'm going to use the warp tool. So this is in a transform and I'm going to go to warp and I'm going to tap advanced mesh. If I just pull in these little blue dots, it moves the earrings and it distorts them. It warps them in a different direction. I'm going to do the same thing over here. So it's not moving it as a whole thing. It's warping it from wherever I have grabbed it and it's keeping the center of the earring right up there because I'm not moving that part. So let's just check that part out. That's looking good, so I'm going to tap and I'm going to duplicate that layer and I am going to finish drawing her eyes closed all the way. So it's going to come all the way down, and I'm going to move the leaves again the same way since I used the warp tool last, that's what it's going to jump into but I want to use free form for moving the leaves. Actually, I'm not sure how far I should move these leaves. I'm going to turn on my onion skin layer so I can see where my leaves were in the last frame. That gives me an idea to keep the motion even and I'll do the same thing over here. This helps me see, I can see where the last leaves were and I'm moving them enough so that it actually looks different. This also will help me with the earrings as I'm coming down here, I'm going to pop back into the advanced mesh. If I hit play, she is both blinking her eyes and the earrings and the leaves are blowing in the wind and this is working again because I'm on ping-pong. If I was on loop, it would like pop her eyes would like pop back open and the leaves would jump back to the other side and the earrings would jump back to their original position. So this illustration, again works very well with the ping-pong animation. 17. Exercise 8: Wiggly Lettering: This wiggle is a fun technique for really simple lettering or simple icons or illustrations. These should be things that are easy for you to redraw because you're literally going to redraw them multiple times. I'd avoid this technique with lettering that's much more intricate or complex illustrations. On the flip side, if you have something really simple, this can make it way more interesting than it would be as a static image. For this exercise, I want you to pick a short phrase, I'd recommend five words or less. Once you've lettered your phrase, we'll create a new layer and basically trace the same phrase on that new layer. Actually do not want this to be perfect because if it's perfect, it is going to ruin the wiggle effect. It needs to have slight imperfections. I like this phrase because I have a tendency to be a perfectionist. I don't like messes, I like things neat and clean and orderly, but if you have kids or roommates or partners, that's just not always an option. And a mess is really an indication that a good time was had. I think it's true in my art as well. I want everything to be perfect, but when things look rough and messy, they're often a lot more interesting to look at. This is a reminder to me that a mess is more fun and that it's okay if things are messy. I Should embrace the mess. I totally encourage you to do a phrase that has some personal meaning to you. Here's a shortcut, If I hold onto this eyedropper, it's going to pull up the last color I used. Since the last color I used with this blue, I can just eyedropper it and use it from there. That saves me a little bit of time. Unfortunately, the last color I used was yellow so It's just going to go between yellow and blue so I do need to go and re-grab that red for this top layer. All right, let's see how it plays. That looks super fun. Of course I can adjust the frames per second to get like really super fast wiggles or slower just as we go. I can make it like crazy fast or I can make it really slow. I think in this case with three frames, eight feels about right for me in this particular case. Choose a phrase, letter it, and redraw it a couple of times and play it in your animation. 18. Exporting and Sharing to Instagram: We're ready to share our glorious animations with the world. Go to the "Wrench icon" and go to the share tab and you get three options to share your animations. Which file type you use is going to depend on a couple of things. One, how the quality and color of the animation looks and two, the file size. File size is really an important thing. For example, gifts are the ideal format for sharing in your skill share project in part because they play automatically and they load really quickly, but the maximum file size for an image and skill share is 8.4 megabytes. This one is 14.4. It's too large to share as a gift and a skill share project, there are a couple of ways that you can reduce the size. There's the max resolution and the web breads ready resolution. The web ready resolution will shrink your image down quite a bit. Now this one is 210 kilobytes, which is significantly smaller, but it is a very small gift, but let's say you want something in between these two sizes, not so big but not so small. Your second option is to create a smaller document and export that. I'm going to create a duplicated document, never re-size your original artwork. If you ever need this size of artwork, once you shrink it down, you can never go back. I always, when I'm doing this method, I always create a new document. The wrench icon, Canvas, crop and resize. Now from here I'll hit "Resample Canvas" and I'll just knock this down to like say seven inches by seven inches. Now when I go to export my gift, the file size is only 7.1 megabytes, which is perfect. Let's go over the settings for exporting gifts. Generally, I leave dithering and per frame color palette off. Gifts only allow 256 colors and dithering is a really clever way of using little dots placed right next to each other to create the illusion of a third color. Unfortunately, this dithering can become really apparent at small sizes. Let's take a look at the web ready version. The more I zoom in here, the more obvious these dots have colors are. It's not so noticeable in the large max resolution size, but if this gift gets shrunk down, it might become more noticeable. In general, I prefer to not use dithering, but if you have a super color heavy animation, it might be useful for you. The next thing we're going to look at is the per frame color palette. Now the frame color palette is also about reducing colors. So you can tell procreate ''hey, I want you to try and keep the colors consistent based on every single frame all mixed together or I want you to try and keep the colors consistent based on each individual frame of animation that we made in our timeline.'' Right now, I've got it on per frame color palette and if you look very closely, you'll notice that her skin's color tone, it's changing slightly. It's based, it's not saying, hey, I want everything to stay as consistent as possible. It is saying, "hey, I think this is the best way to reduce the color for this particular frame. I think this is the best way to reduce the color for this particular color frame," and you can also remove the background. Why would you want to use a transparent background in the first place? If you've seen gifts in Instagram stories, a lot of times they'll have a transparent background. They maybe be some lettering and it won't be like a square of white with the lettering behind it. That will be transparent, so transparent background. When you turn that on in the gift setting, it's going to turn on this alpha threshold. If you notice when it's turned all the way down, see how there's like these black marks around her neck. There's also some black marks around the leaves. The alpha threshold is going to help with determining what's transparent and what's not. If you turn that up super far, you'll notice that a lot of this turns transparent. Once you're ready, you're going to hit "Export" in that corner up there. This is going to take you to the dialog box where you can decide where you want to send your gift. You can save the image to your photos app. You can also scroll to the side over here and hit "More" and find other options, a lot more options. Personally, I prefer to save it to my images and then I can send it to as many places as I want. You could also airdrop it to your computer or your phone. The second way you can export your animation is with a PNG. Again, you can turn the transparent background on an off here. PNGs are great. You can get way better color and quality than gifts, but PNGs aren't accepted everywhere. The third option is an MP4 file, which is a video file. These are important for posting to Instagram. Unfortunately, you can't use PNGs or gifts on Instagram. Instagram will only let you post videos that are three seconds or longer, but our animation is only a few frames, which isn't even a full second. My favorite workaround is to use the screen recording built into your iPad. I'm going to turn on screen recording by sliding down in the upper right hand corner and this button right here is a screen record button. If you don't have the screen recording button here, like I do, go to your "Settings", "Control center", "Customized controls", and tap the green plus button next to the screen recording, back to our Canvas where we've started the screen recording. I've started the animation and I'm going to hit with four fingers and it's going to remove all of the interface and then if I use two fingers to snap, if I'm not fully on the screen, two fingers is enough, we'll put my animation in full screen on the center of the Canvas, I will wait for like 10 seconds, let it animate and then I'm going to slide down again and hit "Stop screen recording". Then I will go to my photos app and I will find the screen recording. Now, I don't want all of this stuff in here. What I'm going to do is I'm going to hit "Edit" in the upper right-hand corner and now I can trim out all the extra bits that I don't want in my animation. I was tilting this around, but I don't want that in there. That's where it just has it full screen on there. I also want to trim out the end here because I also have this moment where I stopped screen recording and I want to do that either. Now I've got this and I'm going to hit "Done". It's going to trim all of those parts of the video out. It's going to leave me with just this animation of her blinking. I was also recently reminded by Jennifer Nichols that you can also crop your videos in the photos app, which is genius. Now, I don't really want these gray bars on the side over here and so I'm going to go back to "Edit". On the left-hand side at the bottom of these options, there's a crop icon and I'm going to hit that. Now I can manually move the crop around. I can also rotate the image. If you wanted it to be a different direction, you could do that here. I also, there is in the upper right-hand corner a little button, a button with little squares in squares. This will give me preset sizes on the bottom of the screen down here. If you want to make sure that your images like perfectly square, you can make it perfectly square crop where if you want it to be 16 by 9, which is great for Instagram stories, you can do that as well. Once you've figured out exactly the crop that you want, you can hit "Done" in the right-hand corner. Now, you've got a long looping animation that you can easily post to Instagram. 19. Giveaway: Win a Free Year of Skillshare!: I want to do a giveaway and I want to see what you guys make. So I am going to give away a year of Skill Share Premium for free. To enter all you have to do is post a project in this class by December 23rd, 5:00 PM Pacific Standard Time. You do not have to post a completed GIF. You can post your hand-drawn sketches. You can post your work in progress. You can post a picture of the art that you want animate. You can post your work from the exercise files, whatever you want. You just need to post a project. I will announce the winners on December 26, in the Discussion tab of this class. If you have friends who would also love to join in the giveaway, there is a link for a two month free trial to Skill Share in the project description, you are welcome to share it with them if they do not have Skill Share so that they can enter too. 20. Final Notes: Before we dive into the class projects and resources, I just want to say a quick thank you. If you enjoy this class, please do me a favor, post a positive review. Post a project, even post a simple thank you in the comment section. Projects and positive reviews help raise this class in the Skillshare Algorithm so more people can find the class. If you have any questions, leave them in the community tab. Chances are if you have a question, somebody else has a question. Help all those shy people out, ask your questions there so that the shy people can just look in the community tab for the answers to their questions without having to actually ask a question. Don't forget that there's exercise files if you want to use them. You can use them as they are. You can re-color and change them up. I totally encourage you to just use these techniques on the art that you already have. If you're having trouble accessing these files from the Skillshare mobile app, try using a web browser and you should be able to download them from there. When you share your projects, don't forget to share a link to your Instagram or your portfolio, so anybody who's curious about your work can find more of you. If you would like feedback on your project, please let me know what feedback that you are looking for in the text of your project. I want to give you the most helpful feedback that I can, whatever is the feedback that you are actually looking for. Please let me know. I love seeing the behind the scenes of your projects. You can show us your sketches, your before and afters. The final product is often so much more interesting when you can see how somebody got there. If you're feeling stuck and you don't know how to draw, I have a class, how to draw, which can help you draw better. If you want to learn more about the awesome hidden gestures and tools that Procreate has, checkout my intro to Procreate class.