Quick Win: Your First Animation in Procreate

1. hello and welcome: In this short and beginner friendly class, I'm going to show you how to create your first simple animation in Procreate, and we are doing it by bringing a super cute, bouncing mushroom to life. Hi, I'm Nici. I'm a Procreate artist with a big love for colors and playful designs and making art fun and approachable for everyone. You will learn how to set up the animation tool in Procreate. How to sketch and plan your frames. How to create smooth bouncy movement, and how to export your animation so you can share it with the world. This class is perfect if you are brand new to animation, or if you've been curious about trying Procreate's animation assist for the first time. By the end, you will have a fun, animated loop and a whole new skill to play with. So grab your iPad and your pencil, and let's get started. 2. planning: Let's make a proper planning for our animation. At the beginning, there is a simple mushroom. You can make it in the shape you prefer. I will draw a mushroom with a slim cap and longer, but you can also make it smaller, the cap and thicker. Do it in your preferred way. The first movement before the mushroom jumps to the high, it should get some momentum, like a person that jumps up, goes down the knees at first. Let's make the stem a bit thicker at the bottom, and also the cap a bit broader and go down a bit and the next station is the same, but extremer than the one before. Make the stem a bit broader and also the cap, but shorter. Next station, the mushroom jumps up and it gets a bit stretched. And the next station, the mushroom jumps even higher. Before on the last station, the mushroom goes down again and the cap goes a bit broader again because there is maybe some wind that goes under the cap and blows it up again. And at the end, there is the loop and the whole animation starts from the beginning. You can find this reference sheet under the resources tab, so you can use it for your reference. 3. animation flow: First, let's create a new canvas and I do this dimension because I would like to post it later on Instagram as a reel. But you can choose whatever size you like. I would like to turn on the reference and import here our sketch of the bouncy mushroom. Okay. Let's shift it to the side and make it a bit smaller. It's only a rough reference for our sketch. Let's turn on the animation assist next, turn it on. At the bottom, this little timeline pops up. Every time you add a new layer, another frame appears here, sidewise, if you add a frame down here, another layer appears in the layers menu. Let's start with the sketching. Go to the first layer. For that, I'd like to choose the 6B pencil, but feel free to use whatever brush you like, and I choose a pure black. I'd like to concentrate the whole illustration at the middle of the canvas. Later, when you post it on Instagram, you have a nice preview in your feet. First, I'd like to draw a little straight line to act as a guide for the mushrooms. When you go to the next frame down here, this little line vanishes a bit, but we want it to stay visible no matter on which other frame we are. There is a background option that we can activate. It's only possible for the very first frame and means that it always stays visible, independent from the animation. Now let's sketch a mushroom. Make it playful, make it in your style. I'd like to have it a bit slim but long, but you can also make it a bit more heavy or thicker or however you like it. I tend to make my sketches too big, so I'd like to reduce the size of this a bit, shift it to the middle of the canvas. I'd like to shift also this guideline. Now we have it centered in the middle of the canvas. Now let's sketch this bouncing mushrooms. We need another frame for every movement the mushroom makes. When you go to the next frame, the opacity of the mushroom reduces a bit and you can set this here under settings. Onion skin opacity, I have it at 60% and I go up a bit with this so you can see it better on screen. It's good to see the mushroom from the frame before, so you can see your movement better, and now we can draw the second mushroom that goes a bit down. Make it thicker at the bottom. Also this middle part, I don't know how you call this. I don't even know it in German. And the cap is also a bit compressed and I make it a bit curvy down here to give it a bit more energy. You can click down here between the frames so you can see if the movement is like you wanted it. Let's go to the next frame and draw the next mushroom. Again, try out if you like the movement. You can also click here play. It's really fast now and this is because the frames per second is at 15 and I'd like to reduce it. The lower this number gets, the slower is the animation. You can play around with these numbers to get the speed you would like to have. Let's sketch the rest. And don't forget to go up with your sketch from this line to imitate the jump. Okay, I think you've got it, so I speed the rest of the sketching phase up for you. I'd like to draw this fifth mushroom a bit different from the original sketch. So I'd like to turn the cap a bit like Marilyn's dress. Let's check the animation. Click Play. Oh, I like it, but I think we have to do some twists. So the cap here, I don't like this edge. I make it a bit rounder. We have a lot of frames now and it's sometimes difficult to see the difference between the lot of onion skins. So from time to time, I try to reduce the number of onion skins to have a nicer overview of the animation. Let's do the last one. I also twist the cap here and make it a bit wonky. Okay, let's check it out. Hm. Something is wrong. I think my stem is too long. Okay, let's correct that. Okay, it's better now. Let's check it once again. Oh, I like it. Meet me in the next video to illustrate the mushrooms. 4. illustration: We don't need the reference anymore, so let's turn it off here. You know every time we add a new layer, another frame pops up down here in the timeline. But you can group two layers together and the whole group turns to one frame. This helps us to use more colors and textures. For now, I'd like to go to the settings and turn off the onion skin frames, go down to zero. We only can see this frame in that we are working at the moment. In the group, the sketch should be on top. The very top and I reduce the opacity, it's always on top and we can illustrate underneath. Let's add other layers and group them with all the mushroom frames. And for the last frame, it's the same. We also create the group with another layer in it. This group is going to be my background layer and we play with some textured background here. Let's start with the background. I have provided you with two separate color palettes and I use the second one. I choose this light blue for my background color, and then I go to this background layer to the very bottom group, and here I create some textures with the darker blue. For that, I choose this grunge brush under textures. My size for this brush is 62% and I go slightly over the middle of the canvas to get this grungy texture. Then I create another layer over this and turn it to multiply. In the brushes library, I go back to the sketching section and choose this artist's crayon and make some more textures down here underneath our guided line from the sketch and we don't need this line anymore, this sketch, so you can turn it off or delete it. It's up to you. We don't need it anymore. We are done with the background, and now let's go to this first mushrooms frame and illustrate it. I use for that under inking, the studio pen, and I outline the stem and this middle part and the cap on three separate layers. Then later we can create other layers over them and add some textures with a clipping mask. I choose this cream color for the stem and the middle part and play around with some shadows in between. I'm starting with the stem, so I create another layer over it and activate the clipping mask. Then I turn it to multiply because I use the same color than the stem has and with multiply mode, you can see the texture. Let's try out this artist's crayon for the shadow. I turn off the sketch. We don't need it anymore. Then let's create another shadow directly under the cap. I create another layer, make it multiply and clipping mask and add the shadow here. I don't like this crayon for the shadows. I choose the medium nozzle brush under spray paints for the shadows. And also on the stem, I clear this layer and make it with my favorite medium nozzle brush. I add some stripes. And finally, I add some shadow on the cap. Okay, the first one is done, and it's the same for all the others. So I show you a quick time lapse of my process, and I'm sure you can do it by yourself. 5. final twists: I played around with the underside of the cap and found out that the Add mode seems to be the best for that. And I take this and reduce the opacity to 80%. And also for this mushroom. And I also make some twists on how high the mushroom is jumping. And finally, I take this flicks brush and make some more textures on the background. And with the light pen under luminance, I create a little stripe on the edge of the cap to add a bit of magic. Okay. And that's my final animation. 6. share and care: Thank you so much for watching my class. Please share your animation in the gallery and also if you like on social media. Please tag me in that case, so I can see it and share it with my community. To export your animation, please go to share and Animated gif. And to share in the gallery, you should choose web ready and to share on Instagram or any social media, you should export it as Animated MP4. I hope you had fun and if there is something you need from me or have any questions, please post them under the discussion section. And if you liked this class, please give me a kind review. That's golden. See you next time. Bye.