Text and Animated GIF on Procreate iPad: From Start to Finish

1. Trailer: Hi there, my name is Esther Nerioshi. I am a surface pattern designer, illustrator and the lettering artist. This class is all about working with text and making animated GIF on your iPad. We're going to learn some basic typography concepts for you to get started. I'm going to walk with you step-by-step on how to use the type tools in the program then we're going to jump into a quick and easy animation about snowy April. By end of this class, you will have your own animated GIF made from scratch on your iPad. I'll see you in classes. My mom's name is Esther Nerioshi. She's teaching you how to make words on iPad. I love you. Hello. She's teaching you how to make words on iPad. I love you. Hello. 2. Colors: Let's talk about colors. I know that many of you have the superpower to work out a color palette while you're working and you can choose color on the fly and the decisions just come natural to you. But for the rest of us lets start with a pallet. Since we're going to create a snowy scene, I have four shades of blue for you to choose from, and there's some warm colors and some mutual colors as well. By no means that you have to stick with these colors or I am going to stick with these colors, but I feel like it's a good jumping off point for us to work from. I will make this file available for you to download under our class. Once you have it open in your procreate, you can sample the color and make it a pallet. To sample a color, you can short press to square icon over here on the left or on the right depends on how you configure your user interface. You see this little circle that you drag around to sample colors. Say that I'm happy with this one. I'm going to open up my palette and just click on the dot over here, and it'll save that color. You keep doing that until you have all 12 colors. Whenever you want to delete a color palette, you can just left swipe and then hit Delete. That's how you work with colors here. In our next video, I'm going to show you how to work with the text tool. We're going to go over every single little button that procreate has so far, so that you know how to use the text tool for your design. 3. Text Tool: All right. Let's start with a new documents. You can come over to the upper right hand corner to click the plus sign, and all the way at the bottom, you can create your own custom size. For our class, I'm going to go with 4000 pixels by 3000 pixels, and if you do work better with other units of measurements, by all means, you can just switch by clicking. I do want to recommend leaving the DPI to 300 and above, because that in case you want to print out one still frame of your work, you won't get pix-elated if it is 300 and above. But if you know for sure that your final media application is going to be screen, you can leave that number a little bit lower, maybe up until 72 DPI. Once you have that figured out, you can click Create. I like to always start by zooming out just tiny bit. You can do that by pinching so that I can see all my address, and I would like to give it a light color. Maybe this PG blush, pink. You can just drag and drop, and I want to create a new layer because we're going to work on the text. Next, I'm going to change to a different color. Whatever color that is active at the corner over here will be your text color. I'm going to click setting, then add, add text, and just type in whatever you want to say over here. On the upper right-hand corner, there's a button that says Edit style, that's what we need for editing our text. In front of us we have four columns. They are, font, style, design and attributes, and we're going to go through each button. On the left, you have a nice selection of different fonts that just comes with the program, and the second column, which sets style, will give you individual specific style under that font-family. For our class, I'm going to go with the default, but I do want to choose a bolder version of this because eventually we'll have tons of snowflakes lending on top of the type. We will want more space for the snow to land on, and on the third column, which is the design column, you can change size by just sliding to the right. You'll see that automatically the program create another line because we're running out of space under this bounding box, and you can fix that by dragging the blue handle to the right. Don't worry too much about the placement as of now because you can do that later as well, and right now let's just focus on how the text looks like. The second option and a third option are Kerning and tracking. They're kind of similar because they're both dealing with the space between the letters. The difference is that Kerning works more locally and tracking works more universally. For example, you want to create more space between R and I, you can just tap and bring the cursor there. Increase the spacing by just dragging the slider, and you can also do that by selecting a few of the letters. Just double-click and select, and you can define how many letters you want to select and then you can change the kerning between this local selection. If you double tap, it will also bring out this vertical orientation, which will allow your letters to align vertically. That's not what we need, so I'm going go back to the horizontal orientation. To show you how tracking works, you actually have to click outside of the box and then click back in. You see the cursor has disappeared, which allows you to change the spacing universally. Right now I'm going to increase the tracking of the word April. You will see all the space between each letter has increased. This works even if you have a big paragraph with a lot of letters. This will apply to all the text in the box, and the next option is leading. It is for multi-lined text, so apparently we have only one word here. I'm going to go back to the keyboard over here, and then just add another line. I'm going to spell out snow here. You can drag the box up so that the text will show edit style. Right now I'm going to decrease the leading and you will see the difference, and basically it adjust the space between each line. The next option is called Baseline. Basically it just moves the entire chunk up and down. Opacity is pretty obvious. It changes the opacity of the text, and the very last column is called attributes. At the very top, there are four options for text alignment. I figured it would be easier to show you visually what they mean than explaining with words. So this is flush left, this is centered. This is flash light, and the last option is justified. It will not affect us too much because we only have one word to work with, but these can be very helpful options if you are working with large paragraphs. The next option over here is U for underline and O for outline. The last option over here changes the cases of your words. If you have it turned on, it will all be all caps. If you have it off, it will just be all small letters. Once you are happy with what you have, you can, I'm just going to delete the word snow because we just need one word here for our project. Am going to click done. If you open up your layers, you will see this slanted A. Whenever you see that, it just shows you this layer is a text layer, which means that you can still add it, the style and alignment and everything we just covered. However, if you do something funky, like distort the, I'm just going to click out of this. If you want to distort the shape of this letter, lets say on a warp, just a tiny bit, and then you open your layer, you will see the A disappeared because the program sees this layer as the image layer. You can still undo that and bring back the layer. You will see the A comes back again. Whenever you want to re-add it, you just tab on the word and it will take you back to the edit panel. Yeah, that's all we need to know about text. For our project, I would like to create some kind of dimension to the word because I want the snow to be able to land on top of the letter, and it would be nice to have a 3D dimension to it instead of looking flat. I'm going to create a duplicate layer by swiping left and click duplicate, and I will just move the bottom layer, just a tad and give it a different color. I'm going create a clipping mask by creating a new layer above, and click on the thumbnail and clipping mask and give it a different color. Easy-peasy. Right now I want to finish drawing this 3D dimension. Basically, I need to bridge the gap between the two layers. I am going to speed up the video over here so you don't have to see me draw forever, but all the techniques that I show you here, have been covered in my class called, A gazillion ways to letter. You're welcome to check it out. However, if lettering is not your thing, I totally get it. I'm going to keep this file available for you to download. You're welcome to just skip ahead and learn the animation portion of the class. Whatever works best for you, go for it. 4. Adding Accent: In this video, we're going to finish drawing the stationery layer of the project. Since the focus of this class is on text and animated GIF, I would not spend ton of screen time on detailed lettering. I did add a little bit of texture on the letters, as well as the background behind the scene. But they are totally optional for completing the animation. If you come over to the layers panel, we have two layers at the moment. We have the background layer as well as the word APRIL on top. The goal of this video is to draw some foundational snow on top of the word APRIL. It doesn't have to be crazy, just very thin layer to set up the mood and get us ready for animation. We're going to do that by starting a new layer and switch out the color to white for our snow. In terms of brushes, I found this ink bleed under inking. That is really close to the visual effect I'm looking for. You see that this created nice fluffy address that is very close to real life snow. You can play with the setting jitter to control how fluffy you want your snow to be. Again, it's under the folder inking and the brush itself is called ink bleed. Once you have it done, you can start drawing. This is maybe like the first hour of snow. It's not super crazy and just very thin. It's hard to control the edges or the edges go with this fluffy pen. Don't worry too much about it because you can fix the edges with the eraser.[SOFT SOUND] Imagine our light source comes from above, so naturally we will have a shadow on the lower portion of the snow. We just want a alpha lock the snow layer, we just worked on. Then maybe select a barrier light blue to give it a shadow. [SOFT SOUND] I'm going to merge this layer down with the APRIL layer to simplify the animation process. Again, we have two layers. We have this APRIL with the snow on it and we have the background layer. In the next video, we're going to dive into the animation part of the process. 5. Animated GIF: In this video, we're going to make an animated GIF from start to finish, all in Procreate. First, you want to create a new layer on top of the word April, and then you want to switch up the color to white because we're going to make a bunch of snowballs. You want to make sure that you have a fluffy brush. I'd say just crank up the jitter because the size of the snowball is going to increase. So we want the fluffiness also increase as well. It just more fun and realistic that way. Then just go ahead and draw snow. You want to make sure that the size of your snow varies, so that it gives depth to your scene, so that it doesn't look super flat. Ideally, you can also create a couple of layers of snow. One is for foreground that moves a little faster, the other stays in the background that moves a little bit slower. But as far as an animated GIF goes, one layer would suffice. Also try not to avoid drawing on top of the word, so that it looks natural. Just fill the space with tons of snow. Try not to draw a half snow like this because when you move the frame down later for the animation, you don't want the half snow. It will not look realistic at all. This is a pretty good starting place. Now you want to create a Alpha Lock to give it a shadow, just to make it more fun, and I want to use the same light blue. Make sure your light source is consistent. In our case, the light source comes from the top so that it makes sense that the shadow is at the bottom. But if you choose a light source that is not coming from the top, you want to pay attention to where your shadow falls. It's not really science, you can be pretty loose about drawing the shadow over here. I think we have a pretty good snowing scene going on over here. I'm going to create a new layer so that I can make some notes to you without destroying the snowflake I just made. The goal of the animation is to create a snowing scene using four frames. If we look at the snowball over here, that is our first frame. By the second frame, it will probably move to here. The third frame, it will probably land somewhere around here. The last frame, it will be out of the visible frame over here, so that is our goal. At the moment, we have our first frame done already. Remember layer 4 is my note-taking layer. I'm going to delete that, and come over to the snow layer. I'm going to name it as Snow 1, so that I know it's the first frame of the snow. The next thing I want to do is to create a duplicate of this and then rename it as Snow 2. With both Snow 1 and Snow 2 visible, I'm going to select Snow 2 and move it down. I want to turn on the magnetics so that I know that I'm moving perfectly vertical. It will be helpful to have some reference snow. For instance, I'm looking at this particular snow for my reference, so that I can measure the visual distance between Snow 1 and Snow 2 layer. This seem about right in terms that I have moved my frame about a quarter down. Then I can turn off my Snow 1 layer. Because we have moved the Snow 2 layer down, we have created a bunch of space at the very top, and we want to fill the space with new snow and I want to unlock it. Click "Alpha Lock", and just start drawing the snow. You want to make the new snow pretty consistent as well in terms of style and density compared to the first one. This looks about right, and I want to Alpha Lock it over here so that I can draw the shadow on top of the new snow I just created. You can also use clipping mask to create a same effect. Now I want to duplicate off the Snow 2, and then rename it as Snow 3, and I want to move it down about a quarter of the height. Then I want to turn off the visibility of my Snow 2 and click on "Alpha Lock" to unlock it so that I can draw new things, namely, new snow on top of Snow 3 layer. The more frames you have for your animation, the shorter distance you have for your animation, the smoother your animation is going to appear. So maybe ideally we want six or seven frames. But just for the demonstration purpose, I'm going to keep it as four frames. Alpha Lock it again to add the shadow. Again, I'm going to duplicate Snow 3 layer and name it as Snow 4. That will be the last frame of our animation. With both Snow 3 and Snow 4 visible, I'm going to move Snow 4 down about a quarter of the height. Then I want to turn off the Snow 3 layer, turn off the Alpha Lock to create new snowballs. Then I want to Alpha Lock it to add the shadow. Our next step is to give each snow layer a background. Eventually we want to flatten them so that we have only four clear frames to animate. If we just animate right now, using setting, share, and animated GIF, Procreate is going to think every single layer is a animating frame, that's not what we want here. So we're going to merge the two layer of April and background into one background layer. We can merge down, and then create three duplicate, and then give each snow layer a background. Right now we have four pairings of snow and background. Now we have four pairings of snow and its background layer. Our goal here is to merge the snow layer with its background layer. But before we do that, we want to make sure we have all the layers visibility turned on so that it can merge properly. You can just click on the Snow Layer and click "Merge Down". Eventually you will have four layers here for animation. But before you go into the preview, you want to make sure the background color is turned off, so that the Procreate doesn't think the background-color is one animating layer. Now you can come over to Setting and share an animated GIF. Awesome, it works. Over here you can change the frames per second. You can make it super slow or super-fast, depends on what visual effect you are looking for. You can save it as full resolution as well as web ready, which is little less than full resolution. Unfortunately, at this point you will not be able to save it as a video which is required for Instagram post. But as far as GIF is concerned, you're all set. You should be able to preview your GIF on your camera roll if you save it locally on your iPad. If you do want to save your files as videos, you can batch export your image layers by coming over to Setting and then PNG files. You should be able to download your files on iPad or directly upload your files through file-sharing services you have, and then bring the frames to Photoshop or After Effects or any other third party softwares that does the same thing to convert the GIF or the images to video. 6. Variations: There are many exciting places where you can take your existing skill from this class to a new level. For example, this is a quick animation that I created just using the same principle but instead of creating snow, I made a bunch of chocolate chip cookies and this one is a just another variation of the snow that we worked on and you can change the background to like a sunset type of deal. So it's really up to you and I hope you are super inspired and want to create tons of animation because of this class. If you do, please share with me and I would love to see your project in the student gallery. 7. Overachievers: All right overachievers, I know you're out there. Let's do more things in this class. Our goal for this last little video is to create this shivering effect on our type. So first we want to open up our file, and remember we have four different layers over here at the end of the class and let's go back to our first layer right here, and then click on the adjustment and come over to liquify. We want to warp the type more accurately. We want to push this type a little bit so that it feels like the word April is shivering. But be very careful when you are drawing very close to the snow. You don't want the snow to change shape. At least you don't want it to look remotely oval.That will just make things not realistic. Be gentle with your touch and just draw around the snow, and essentially what we want to do the same thing for all the layers. That the type warps a little. Once everything start looping, it will look like the word April is shivering. That's our first layer and you want to hide the first layer once you are done, and come over to the next one and do the same thing. If you can you want to keep the pressure and the size of your brush consistent so that the effect is consistent as well. Once you're done with this layer, you can hide it and come to the next adjustment and liquify. This video is bonus for those who stayed on, you are heavily rewarded with a bonus video. I always enjoyed learning more things about a certain topic. I'm glad you're here, and coming to the last layer, adjustment and liquify. This feels about right. Now we have all the visibility turned on and except the background color. You can come over to setting share and animated GIF to see a quick animation. Thank you so much for taking the class. It has been a pure joy learning alongside with you. I hope to see you around Skillshare and Instagram until next time.