Toon Boom Harmony for Beginners: Create Your First 2D Character Animation

1. Introduction: You ever wanted to create your own Toti animation, but wasn't sure how to get from a drawing to something that actually moves? Welcome to the Toon Boom Harmony for beginners course. My name is Lydia Rogers and I am an animation artist for over eight years. I've experience working in digital art and animation. I work with the same timing, drawing, and animation principles that we've learned throughout the course. I'll guide you through the process step by step so you can understand not just what buttons to press, but why we make certain decisions in animation. We're going to start right at the beginning, so you don't need any previous tune Boom harmony experience to follow. We'll set up our project and get familiar with the Harmony interface. Then we'll to the fundamentals of animation itself. You'll learn how frames, exposure, and keyframes work and we'll look at the two most important concepts of animation, timing and spacing. Will be putting those fundamentals in practice straightaway by creating a bouncing all animation. From there, we'll move on to our main project, creating a hand drawn character animation. You'll design a simple character that's practical to animate, plan an action, draw your keyframes, and then use breakdowns and in betweens to turn those poses and smooth movement. We'll also clean up the drawings, add color, and refine the animation until everything feels consistent. Finally, we'll add some finishing. Learn how to use simple camera movement, import, and sync audio and export your finished animation. By the end of the course. You won't just know your way around Toon Boom Harmony. You understand the basic workflow behind creating a hand-drawn animation, open up Harmony and let's get started. 2. Welcome & What You'll Create: Today, we are going to go over what we are going to learn for this course. We are going to make two animations, one bouncing ball and one simple action for character animation. You'll be able to navigate Toon Boom Harmony, animate, use cameras, colors, and basic tools. Next, here are the animation previews that we will be learning, our simple bouncing ball and our simple character animation. What is Toon Boom Harmony? It is a professional two D animation software that you can use for cartoons, TV, animation, shows, films, and games. It combines drawing and animation, also rigging and composition tools that multiple variety of ways to animate and create. It is used for TV shows, newbies, games, animation studios, school projects. It is a industry standard, but also can be used for fun. For this course, we are going to go over the animation workflow. We are going to first start with concept of animation, bouncing ball or character. We are going to do the keyframes in betweens cleanup, line art, as well as color, and then we're going to export at some audio possibly and camera movements. Let's get started. 3. Creating Your First Harmony Project: Hello, and welcome to creating your first Harmony project. First, I'm going to open up our Harmony dialogue box here. Double click on it. Awesome. Once I have this open, firstly, I'm going to name it my first Harmony. And wherever you'd like to save it, go ahead and browse and your file folders. Wherever you select it will be where you save. Alright, now that I have the dialog box open, I'm going to name it my first Harmony. Click Browse to look at your file folders to see where you save it. We're going to have everything else default, the camera size, width height, and frame rate. Once I have all that gone, I'm going to create scene, it's going to take a little bit for me, so fast forward to that. Alright now that I have Harmony open, I'm going to start setting up a project. Go to this plus button and press the color card. The color card is going to be your background color. If there's no color card, it'll be a transparent. If you want to change the color, double click on the player. And press the color button, go to multiple color wheels. I'd like to set it to gray for the easier on the eyes and then close that. Now we have our color card. Now that I have my color layer, I'm going to go over to drawing, double click on the word drawing and rename it to line for future reference. You can name it anything you like. Now that I have everything set up for a project, I'm going to save. If you see up here right next to your project name, there is an asterix, that means that it is unsaved. Once I press the save button right here, save, the asterix disappear. That's how I know you work Thank you for joining me in lesson number two. Lesson number three, we're going to understand how to use toolbars, timelines, and get set up for a project. I see you then. 4. Understanding the Harmony Interface: All right, understanding the Harmony interface. I got our Harmony file set up here. I'm going to give you a tour of where everything is. First, we have our drawing view, which is anything you draw into the square drawing view. The whole canvas is large, zoom in and out indefinitely, and you can drawee like our camera view is where the camera sees animation. So I'm going to press this button here that's a square or rectangle, and that blocks out where the camera sees. So that line I drew down here, you don't see it because the camera doesn't see it. And click it. I'll be right there. Down here is our timeline where our layers go and our animation frames and exposures will be, as well as some tools above that for that timeline. Next here is our tool bar where we have all the tools need to set up for animation or make animation over to the right, we have our node view, which is a quick little navigation tool you can use to organize our layers and insert special effects for animation. Mainly, I use it to help organize layers when things are pretty crazy. Let's insert another layer another animation layer called color. All right. Now I have color line and color card, and they are all here on the node over here to navigate hold space to move around. And you can see color layer is right on top of everything. If I hold and drag this, I move the layer from top to bottom, and it'll move from top to bottom here on your timeline. Click it and I can hold it back. I can put the color in front of the line and I can put the line from the color. When you have a lot of layers, this will help visualize where everything is. Thank you for joining me. And the next lesson will learn about drawing and coloring. 5. Drawing & Coloring in Harmony: Drawing and coloring in harmony. First, we're going to start off with our brush tool. This red tool here with the brush is the brush tool, and the one below is the pencil tool. There's a difference betweens the two of them. Alright. Firstly, let's start with our brush tool. Here is the brush tool versus the pencil tool. There is a difference. Pencil. Both have very similar settings. So over here, tool settings, we have the size. We can drag and drop this size or we can use the presets, solid brush, you can also go down to different textures like a fine pencil. It's lighter than a brush, or we can go to a chisel marker. Any of these options really worked. Hard shading. These are all options for brushes. Same with pencil. You can also use the standard pencil or you can use blobs, or you can use Taper, there's a bunch of different brushes. Next is our EeraserTol. On the time line, we click this eraser button here and then you'll have your tools right here. I pick the large eraser to get rid of large areas and I will start erasing this line. If you have a syntague pen like this with an eraser end, you can always flip over your tool and you can erase with the back. It'll automatic. So it already set it up for you. Otherwise, you go to the tool here and then erase manually. Next is our selection tool. The black arrow here, I double click that and I use the Select. We have select by Color cutter. These are all different settings. The first one is the select major. If I circle here, I select the whole line. I can rotate it, I can stretch it, squash it, can make it bigger, smaller, all sorts of things. Next one is cutter. Use this to cut part of the line. I take this and I can cut it off from this. Now it's a separate thing. It doesn't take the whole thing, it selects parts of it. Below it is our contour editor. This one edits the lines that you draw. I'm going to zoom in, press my contour editor, and I'm going to drag a line over it. You see all these different dots, I can drag in contour the line or I can adjust the line if it's something to be skinnier or thicker in some areas. You can do this too with this one, it'll be very small, so you have to zoom all the in. But I can thicken this line. Similar for this one. Very handy for animation. Next, we have the center line editor. This one edits the center of the line. Next is the contour tool, and this is where the brush and pencil differ the most. The brush, when I use the contour, has all the dots. I can edit on the outside of the line. In pencil, I drag this over and it is the center of the line. So what that means is that when I edit this line, I can edit the outside I tried some angles. For this one, I can edit the line itself, not the thickness or thinness. I'm going to select all this and delete it, so I can show you an example of how we can use contour editing and coloring in the end. I'm going to take a solid brush, plain brush, I'm going to make a circle and then I'm going to take another brush and make another circle. This one has a much more textured line. Same with pencil. When working with Bush and Pencil tool, we got a reminder that they are vector, so I zoom in, I press the letter K, which means I can see the line outline for Brush tool, and I can see the outline for pencil tool. On Brush tool, the blue lines are all the way connected, which means that's a fully closed circle. In pencil, you have these yellow dots right here, which means that the circle is not connected. There's a big gap. I can fix that by taking this, dragging it so that the lines intersect so that it is a closed circle. That comes very handy when coloring because otherwise the color would spill out and there wouldn't be anywhere to go. Now that you know how to use your brush and pencil tool, let's go over how to color it. I'm going to go over to my color tab and you can see all these default colors here, got red, green. If you want to change the colors, double click the color icon. And I'll change it to a yellow or something, yellow orange. Now your red, red, you can rename it to yellow is yellow. I take the color and I use the paint bucket tool. The thing about the paint bucket tool is that it works on one layer. If I go into a different layer, there's nothing for the paint bucket tool to use or to color. So it's going to work on the same layer as the line. Going to click brush right in the middle here. I'm going to click that and we'll click this and this. Now, they're all filled in with yellow. If you see right here, zooming into this right here, you can see that the color didn't fill all the way to the texture. That's something important when you're thinking about using a brush and pencil tool is that for animation, the brush tool uses the contour lines. So the color is going to this line right here, which is past the texture, which means that you can see the texture and the color is fully colored. Over here, I look at my contour and the color goes to this line. I can expand that a little bit, but it'll edit the line as well. So it's not ideal for animation. But if you're using it for anything else, just keep that in mind that the texture won't work out as well as with a pencil. Now that we know how to use the basic tools, I will see you in Chapter two, where we learn how to use the animation tools. I'll see you then. 6. Understanding Frames, Exposures & Keyframes: All right, understanding frames, exposures and keyframes. Firstly, we are going to talk about frames. Welcome to lesson number five. Understanding exposures and keyframes. Now in harmony, creating frames are something important you have to remember. If I'm drawing this circle, and I'm going to copy and paste this frame to make a duplicate. I press Control C, Control V. That circle is going to be in this location right here. So if I take this frame and I move it to the other side of the canvas, the first frame will also move. I go back to my first frame. They're in the same place. So that won't work. In order to move your second frame, without moving the first one, you'll have to create a duplicate of that layer. To make a duplicate of that frame without moving the first one, you're going to use this button right here. For this one, I'm going to press a five to extend that frame. I'm going to click the second one right here, press this. This line means that this frame right here is now separate from the frame that you just duplicated. I'm going to get rid of this one. Now I have two separate two frames. If I move the second one over here, it will now move from point A to point B. Whenever you're animating, if you ever copy and paste the same frame, just make sure you make a duplicate of it so that it won't move the first frame initially. Now that you made one frame to extend it, you're going to press the F five button, which will extend that frame to ten on your timeline. Let's talk about keyframes. Keyframes are the positions that the animation or the subject of the animation is going to move in the most important parts. Let's say I want this circle to travel from point A to point B. I'm going to copy this copy and paste this frame. And I'm going to press the plus button and extend the exposure, press this button to duplicate it, press the minus button to subtract that, and now I have a new frame that's different from the first one. I'm going to select the second frame and move it all the way over here. Now the first one is going from point A to point B. Those are the key spots it's going to end up. To make the animation make more sense, we're going to put one more circle in between. I'm going to do the same technique plus and I'm going to take this and move it to the middle. Now you have three circles moving from point A to point B. Now to see all those pictures in action, you're going to want to turn on the onion layers. Onion layers, make sure you see before and after versions of your animation so you know what's going from point A to point B. All right. Now, let's expose these first frames. So now that it is they're all extended to things. And so we're going to look at the playback controls, the play buttons right here. You're if you want to loop the animation, you're going to make sure you select this button that loops it. This first play button is to play it on the screen. The second play button is going to render your animation. This helps when you have effet or anything you apply to it that you can't see without rending the entire animation. But for quick playback, we use the first button just a playback. Thank you for joining me on how to learn how to use keyframes and make frames exposures. I will see you in the next lesson where we learn about the principles of animation. 7. Understanding Timing & Spacing: Alright. Welcome to lesson number six. We're going to go over the 12 principles of animation. I have this hand dandy quick guide of how all of them look and act. Firstly, we have squash and stretch. When you squash and stretch an object, it gives the illusion of weight. Timing and motion is when fewer drawings makes the action look snappier and more drawings makes the action slower and looks smoother. Anticipation is the wind up before an action. Staging is where the object is, making it presentable in a way that's clear to the audience. Next, we have followed through and overlapping action. The looser parts of the body will continue to move out to the character stops, and eventually catches up. Think like hair, tail, just like in the animation. Straight ahead and post to pose action is when you straight ahead animate, you go frame by frame one, two, three, four, five, and when you keyframe, you're planning out the full movement before it happens. Slow in and out is when the slow in and out is when more drawings at the beginning and end of the sequence to show acceleration or deceleration in the action. Arcs give the animation better flow and more organic movement. Finally, we have exaggeration that makes actions more extreme and increase excitement. Secondary action is another action that's happening in the scene that completes the main action. Sold drawing is to make sure you understand the three dimensional form when creating objects or characters. A appeal is giving them the character personality to make them feel real and interesting. Now that we've gone over the 12 principles of animation, the ones we're going to use for our next project are squash and stretch, timing and motion, pose to pose action, slow in and slow out. I will see you in the next lesson where we plan out our first project. 8. Project 1: Animating a Bouncing Ball: Mm. Hello. We're going to plan our first project a bouncing ball. So first to set up everything, I have three layers. I have a layer that I called floor, timeline layer, and then the bouncing ball animation. First, make a layer called floor. Take your pencil tool, hold Shift and drag the line. Shift makes the line straight. So we want the floor straight so we know our balls bouncing on an even surface. Next, make a layer called timeline. This is how we are going to plan our keyframes and in betweens when we animate. All right, on the timeline layer, I'm going to draw one straight line going all the way down right about here. I'm going to draw indens from here here at the end to T that line off. This is our point A and this is our point B where our balls going to bounce. Draw one more line right in the middle between the two, cutting into half, and that's where our second keyframe is going to go. Let's go to our bouncing ball layer, and we are going to use the circle tool to simplify things. All right. I'm going to click and drag to make a circle, hold shift so that it remains the same circle, perfect rounded circle. I'm going to select that circle and put that bullet point in the middle where that line is. That is our first ball. First keyframe. I'm going to duplicate that layer and then make sure that I make that frame a different drawing from the first one, select that circle, click Hold Shift and drag it all the way to the bottom of where that timeline is. So now we have this keyframe and this keyframe. I'm going to go to the first keyframe and duplicate that as well, and then I'm going to select that, drag it to the middle. So now we have three keyframes to easily navigate the keyframes through your keyboard, you're going to go to the arrow buttons that look like this and this on your keyboard and you press those and it'll navigate flip through your keyframes pretty easily. I already have my onion skin on so I can see all three of my keyframes. Right now, all three of these are in a sequence going down to bottom. I'm going to use the plus button to extend these frames to four. This one, all three of these frames extend to four. I'm going to press the plus button to extend all these frames to be four frames long. Now we're going to enter our squash and stretch. I'm going to the third frame, and I'm going to press this button here to duplicate that. So now there's exposed to two frames. Take the last frame, select that circle, and we're going to squash and stretch it a little bit so that it remains where it should be kind of guestimate. So this last frame is when it squashes. You want to stretch this middle frame. I know how it works. So now you have a squash circle. I'm going to the middle frame, duplicating that again and take the second one to last going to select shift, drag it down right in between, and then I'm going to stretch that circle to make it look like it's going fast. Okay, let's go right between that. Okay, now when I play back the animation, your ball is going to squash and stretch. For our animation, we're going to do some in betweens. Let's go back to our timing chart, and let's add line right here, right here. We're going to slow that descent, and then we're going to do the same on the other side. Half, half that we're going to slow our accent from our ball bounce. So it's going to slowly drop, bounce, slowly go back up, and bounce again. Let's go back to our ball animation. And let's go to the bottom of our timeline. We're going to look at this line right here. So now that we have our keyframes, we're going to do our in between. We're going to take this current frame right here, which is on this line, we're going to duplicate that select the tool and drag it down to the next line in the time chart right here. Now we have our ball still falling and it's going to hit the ground, squash and then go right back up. Once the ball hits the ground, we're going to do the same stretch ball, copy and paste that this over here, duplicate that to make sure it's a new picture, and we're going to move that all the way to this mid line right here. This is where the ball is stretching back up to the sky. And then duplicate that as well and move the next frame to the one next to it. Then find a perfect salt circle, copy that and paste it next to it, make that a new frame, and take that and drag it all the way to to this line. Now that is the last frame for our in betweens. For the first frame, I'm going to subtract it to two frames. Let's play back and see how we did. The balls squash and stretch. Turn off our time line so we can see the ball better. Great. So now we have our ball all the way at the top, falling, stretching, squashing, and then bouncing back up, and then all the way back to the beginning. Now we got a rough keyframes in betweens. If we want to make this animation smoother, we would add more frames on the slow ins and outs. Let's go back to our time chart and add one more line at the top and one more line at the bottom here. Even slow out that incent into descent. Let's go back to our animation and let's add those frames in. We're going to add one at the top here to this line and then we're going to do the same at the very end. And make sure it's this frame before the last one. Now that we have our slow ends it slow, it's a little more. Let's see how it turned out. Now let's go back to animation, add those keyframes. I'm going to make another frame right after the first one, move that down to this line, and then do the same on the other end. And move this to the same line. Now, see how we did back in the play. Now the ball hovers a little more on the bounce. I see that's a pretty good bouncing ball. Alright, now that we have our bouncing ball, if you want to take it a step further, we can colour that ball. You're going to take our paint pucket tool and go frame by frame and paint the ball. There we go. And then turn off under and skin and then play it again. There's a good bouncing ball, I'd say. Thank you for joining me in lesson number seven. I'd have to set up your project for bouncing ball. Go ahead and do yours. I'll see you next time. 9. Designing a Simple Character for Animation: Hello, and welcome to designing a simple character for animation. I here, I have examples of South animation. We have Winnie the Pooh and Homer from Simpsons. These are classic examples of simplistic characters that you had used for animation. And when I be my simplest, let's break it down. I have two characters here. This is Jake the Dog from Adventure Time and Humongosurs from Ben ten. The difference between these two is Jake has a lot of simple circle shapes. Well, this guy has a lot of different details that you would not like to animate. Over and over again. The point is that we want to keep things simple so that we can draw these frames over and over again without spending too much time on one. I break down the shapes here, a lot of circles here, and then lots of things to keep track of here. So we don't want to do that. We want to keep things simple. All I have pulled up Jake the dog, which is our reference picture for today. He is made up of mainly circles, big circle, small circle. So this bean shape that we can manipulate into any pose we want. Right now, he's standing. This two eyeballs with his arms like that. If I wanted to make him pose differently, I'd do the same principle. The two beans, two circles to make that bean shape. G I say I want him to pose like this. He's waving to you. He can do many things with position. Let's see, he's lying flat down. And we want to make sure we want to keep these proportions very consistent. So how this is equal sizing right here. If I were to draw him taller, it would mess up with his even proportions. These are longer than this. These are pretty equidistant. I want to make sure we keep those proportions correct so that when we animate, he looks the same shape, it doesn't change too much. Now that we have a sketch of Jake, the dog, I can use make another layer to do some clean line art. I named this layer line with this sketch. Now, I take my pencil and make a new layered line, and I start to outline. If you need the layer below it to be a lighter opacity, you can click this button right here and then drag this over. It's a lot lighter so that when I can see the lines a lot better when I outline it. Okay. The line R is hard or so it's important to keep a low, steady pace. I just a smile. And if you need to fudge some lines a little bit, you can use your contour editor so you can make things rounder, a little cleaner. There we go. They're his Okay, so I got a pretty basic outline of my sketch underneath. So I turn off that sketch layer, I got this clean line art. There are some things you can probably fix, like gaps and and maybe some lines if I wanted to. But those are details for when. So there is your clean outline. You can adjust it with the contour tool or redace and readjust things. But for now, now you know how to use the pencil tool and sketch and over that sketch, clean line art. Thank you for joining me in creating this simple character. I will see you next time where we plan our animation. 10. Planning the Character Animation: Hello. So I'm doing throw animation today, and we're going to look at our diagram here that animates or illustrates a throwing action. We have our first keyframe and our last keyframe, which is the wind up and to the follow through. So from start to finish, the middle is where the middle action goes. So I'm going to start throwing the ball, throw the ball, and then let go of the ball. Alright let's start by drawing the c keyframe. Okay, one keyframe, and then press next button, turn on your unskin layer on and then draw that last pose right here. All right, you can use your select tool to adjust and move wherever you like. So now we have two keyframes. Wind up, throw. Wind up, throw. Now, let's draw one more in between for it's going to be the actual throwing action. So remember our arcs. We want to have this animation move smoothly. So we're going to have this head go slightly upwards because at the peak of their action. When we're connecting the footing, this is where the foot is going to land. So it's going to stay in the same area and the other foot is let go off the ground. All right, so now we have rough keyframes from wind up, throw acceleration to throw adjust size if you need to so now we have this basic keyframe movement. But when we play it back, it'll be fast and so are the main poses, once you play it back, it's going to look here and snappy and jerky. But once we add in betweens, such as these actions in between the main actions, that's when you start getting the animation aspect. So I'm going to add a frame in between the first two and draw this pose right here, head roughly in the center, and body as well. Body roughly in the center and then the legs. That's where we step out in our arm. I So we got in between and then the throw. So now I'm going to do in between right after the throw right in between, and then have the arm Cascade right in the middle. Have this leg be planted on the ground. So with that, this leg moves up, it's a sense of balance and it's not sliding all around. Alright, so those are quick and dirty keyframes for our action. I will see you in the next video where we actually flesh out the character in their movement. I'll see you then. 11. Animating the Key Poses: Hello, and welcome to Lesson animating the keyframes. Well, we are going to draw. Our keyframes, I'm going to use Jake and throwing. Yeah, I'm going to start with the first pose. I All right, now I have that first frame sketched out. I'm going to go the next frame, turn my onion skin on. I'm going to have him wind up to this first key hose. It's going to throw the mug. Now Jake is winding up. I can probably exaggerate this a little more bend down a little more. So this is our anticipation, our wind up to being thrown. Wind up. And then I'm going to draw the throw part. Okay, now we have end pose. M just a size a bit. We keep the proportions pretty similar. You can overlap in them his head matches his body. I really exaggerate. Right now, we got three key poses starting, stand, wind up, toss. Now let's do our in between frame for that. Okay, now I got the in between frame. I adjust things a little bit. Okay, so it looks like he's throwing it. Okay, so now we got our keyframes. So now that we got our keyframes. We're gonna do one last frame where he follows after he throws it, and he settles. So he's gonna settle into this pose a bit. After he does it add his other arm back here, so it's clear where his other arm is. And then when his arm settles, Sarms gonna go past his tail. All right. Let us spend all these exposures to three so we can play back the keyframes. If you need it slower, you can always extend it to. Extend to, like, let's say, seven. We need the slowness to see all your little details. Just get rid of that, so it's less distracting. Alright, so now we got Jake throwing mug. And then settling. Thank you for joining me where we made our keyframes. I will see you next time in Lesson 11 where we do a breakdowns and in betweens. 12. Adding Breakdowns & In-Betweens: Welcome back. We're going to do our in betweens and our breakdowns. I have our keyframes that we made in the previous lesson right here. Jake is throwing his mug. We are going to start with having all these frames exposed to four, so it's even number. I'm going to press this button here to make a new frame right after the first frame, and this will be in between first and second frame. If you're like me and you like a little more transparency onion skins, you can go to Windows onion skin and it'll pop up a window maybe off screen right here and I'll show you this is the opacity slider. You slide up for more opacity, the slide down for less opacity. I can see them betweens I turned it down and I just click out of it. There we go. Now let's do our in betweens. We're winding up to do this bending down action. We're going to draw Jake's head right in between where this action is happening. And check we go to draw this leg right in between here, right in middle bending. Pick this leg up. Potentially move it a little more this way. Curve this arm this direction where the other armors going. And my previous frame is red, and my next frame is green, so I want from red to green. Space needs to be a little bigger. So let's flip through the frames to see if that looks correct. I'd say potentially this arm needs to be a little longer because we're going to follow this here to here arc, and his arm needs to be a little longer so that it connects better to the arc. Let's extend it right there. So now his arm swings a little better. I feel like I need to pix the mug. It's a little off centered. There we go. Then I can even, honestly, take this and angle it. So it's more like he's flicking his wrist. Fix this one, too. There we go. Now, we got our wind up and our next in between. Alright, our next in betweens is going to refer to the char right here between this one and this one. It's gonna be this position right here. The wind up. It's a draw right in between. Our mug is going to be up here. Face is gonna be right in the middle. He's turning his whole body. I'm going to angle his jowls a little bit he's he's twisting his body really fast, which means his loose jowls are going to lag behind a little bit. And his ear are gonna pop out. I want his leg to almost contact the ground he's about to step into this footing area. And then his other foot. See, this is where I need to fix the spacing a bit because it's a little hard to fit in in between. I So it's kind of he's hopping a little bit. Let's give him a little hop, see how that looks. Sometimes I play it back to see if it works. I know. It looks a little weird because he's kind of slipping on his own foot here. Perhaps I need to keep his foot on the ground a little bit, or It's a bit of an odd pose. Here we go. Okay, so when you're doing actions, keeping the feet grounded makes the movement look a lot more grounded. So if the feet slipping everywhere, the movement is a little wrong because, like, you're slipping on ice. So now that I have this position, his foot is still planted on the ground, and he's hopping from 1 ft to the other and landing. There we go. Okay, so now we have a little bit. So in betweens of these two frames, we will also be doing this keyframe between this position and this position. So it's where he's most where he's at his peak throw. So he's the most exaggerated. His leg is going to be right in the air right between all this. Tail two. Okay. Ear is going to fly in the same direction. If you want to give him more of a whip action because your arms bending backwards and whipping. You can go simple because he's like this to this to this, or you can go like this and then and then see which will work better. I think we're going to go straight up. Okay, and then let's see where Jake's other arm is. Can get better silhouette. Alright, now that we got that in between. Let's see how it looks. There we go. Next in between, we're going to make a new frame here and turn on our keyframes. He's winding up and throwing. This is his furthest point, but we're going to push him a little farther so it's like he's leaning forward as he is throwing. So we're gonna make a frame here. And instead of in between between the green and red, we're going to go further outside the red. He's leaning forward after throwing it so far, including his leg. Can bend his leg a little further down here to show that he's still moving. Me connected back here a bit. He's bending his knee rather than moving his whole leg. Then his arm is gonna go all the way down here. Just let go of the cub. And his arms back here is going to go up a little bit, too. See his face is kind of hidden behind his arm a bit. Let's make sure we get the mug in there too. Okay. Reminder to save your work. Okay, and last in betweens when we're settling the action. So it's pretty similar disposition. Just gonna keep him up a little more. He's finally settled after throwing his mug. It's been a hepatitis here, too. I But, okay, we have our keys and breakdowns in betweens. Now we got a rough animation. Make sure all the volumes and everything he has his ears, eyes, mouth, everything right here, the legs to be in front. Just checking up on those things before the final preview. Everything's kind of the same shy. This eye is a little bigger than the other eyes. We'll shrink it down a bit. If you want to prolong the throw so that you can actually see how everything is starting and finishing, you can extend the beginning and end so that the animation will actually stop once it throws. You actually see how it looks. A Alright, so this is part of timing and spacing. So everything is now on twos. So it's a consistent exposure. If you want to kind of exaggerate some bits without adding any extra frames in the middle, you can prolong this frame, for example, you're like, winding up, and then you can do one, expose one frame. And then once he throws and bends down, you can expand by one frame, and it changes the timing slightly. So now it's a little bit more weight and expectations to it. So it's something you can do potentially to improve the timing and spacing so that everything is super fast, maybe want to make these shorter so that the motions in between are faster and snappier can subtract some frames there too. So now the wind up is a little snappier. And potentially, if you want to make the throws faster, too, we could subtract these middle frames. Play around with the timing however, your animation looks the best, you think. I'll go this, for example. Alright, thank you for joining me for in betweens and exposures. Next, we'll learn how to clean up that animation and then finish coloring it. And then I'll see you then. 13. Cleaning Up & Refining the Animation: Hello. I'm going to clean and refine our animation. So I have here the empty keyframes. I'm going to take my pen tool. I'm going to use you can use any line you want. You can use use a charcoal pen if you wanted to. I'm going to use just the standard pen. Tedious. So first things first for the line art, you want to make sure you're on the linear layer. This is the color layer. We'll be using that later. The line art layer. We are going to make a line and then press K. You have the strokes available. Down here is a handy button that you can toggle. You want to make sure this button is toggled because that helps you close the gaps. This circle doesn't have the gaps closed. You can see by the yellow dots, but if I go close enough, you can see that there's a gap, but it automatically closed for me. So it's a certain distance where that's useful. All right. Let's start. I'm going to start with the nose. You can see my lines are connected. I'm going to turn it off because it's a little detracting. I'm going to use my select tool. Angle things. I'm going to fill on that because that is a solid nose. D line and I'm going to use my contour tools to help guide these lines where I want them to be. The handy thing is that when you have vector lines, you can erase them using the T and cutting tool. So I make a big circle for the eye right here, adjust it with my. My contour tool. And I can cut these lines off. Do the same with the other eye. Use my select tool, move things around when I need to take your time into step two. Don't need to rush anything, especially it's gonna look clear, but you also don't need to spend too much time on one frame because if you imagine one frames going to go by 0.5 seconds. So you're not even going to see all the details or mistakes that you've ever made. I Okay, so now that I have a basic outline of my keyframe. I go ahead and connect it to the rusty animation. Now that I have my basic keyframe, I'm going to connect it to the rusty animation. I went ahead and did the other keyframes as well, clean it up. But what you're going to want to focus on is consistency, consistency, size, and the circle of the eyes. I want to make sure that's correct. I want to make sure that the feet are planted. Make sure that everything is consistent cleaned and consistently paste out. All right. Now to color. For coloring, we're on our line layer. We want to pick the select tool, press this button. I'll apply to all frames. I want to highlight the entire thing, which will highlight the entire animation, and we want to press this button here, convert to color art layer. What that does is that takes that line that we have right here. And converts to color layer, which means now we're able to see the line strokes for the color so that now we can color on a separate layer without worrying about using the same layer. Another thing, same thing, highlight the entire animation. Go to drawing, cleanup, close gaps. We want to make these are the gaps that prevent the paint bucket tool from filling because it's vectors. So anything that we missed, we're going to close gaps for that animation. So now, in our color layer, we can start coloring. Turn off apply off frames. You can pick the paint bucket tool. We're going to start with Jake's regular color. I'm going to just paint bucket all the spots that are yellow, move to the next frame, paint all those spots too. Next frame. On this layer, there's something that we miss. I'm going to press the K button to see where we missed. I think it's down here. Yep. So now we can go back to drag a line there, close that gap, and then we can paint bucket the yellow again. So that's why we close the gaps in case there's something we missed. That's how you fix it. I'm going to keep coloring each frame All right, now we got Jake's base color. I'm going to go back around, pick the white color for his eyes. Che select paint unpainted, which means if I paint over this character, it won't replace the yellow with white. So paint what is not painted. And then finally, I'm going to paint the mug. Okay, now we have our fully colored animation fully cleaned and colored animation. Let's play it back. Very nice. Thank you for joining me in cleaning and coloring. I will see you next time when we add some final touches. Alright. Bye bye. 14. Adding Simple Camera Movement: All right. Welcome to lesson number 13. We're going to add some simple camera move into our animation. Firstly, let us make a camera layer. So click the layer, press the plus button camera layer. And now you have a camera down here. Once I make my camera layer, I'm going to find it in my node view. I'm going to insert a parent peg. Parent peg is a remote control that links it directly to the camera. So when everything you edit on this layer, it edits the camera. So we're going to go on the camera layer. We're going to make a keyframe, a keyframe for the camera, this button right here. Now we have a keyframe. The red line is the camera view. We're going to want to make sure that this little stick figure is yellow, and the cameras yellow so that when we move the camera, it'll actually move. So, from point A to point B, this is point A and B, after the animation is done, I want the camera to be let's say, I want the camera to slide over this way just a little bit. So what that does is automatically it scrolls for me. And when I play it back, the camera moves. So I'll probably want to move this keyframe a little higher so that it moves when the movements start when the character starts throwing, so but we don't want it to be too fast. So the shorter the distance between the camera, Pegs There we go. So let's short distance. Let's go back this way a bit. So that is less distracting from the animation. So now we got simple camera movement. If we wanted to add anything else or zoom in, we could, for example, I can make another keyframe here, take this, and then zoom in crazy like that. That'll automatically do crazy stuff. Wow. Zoom, bow. So that will make it kind of crazy. I'm going to click this button, which presents the camera, so Watch. So that's fun. You can do that, too, if you wanted to. For now, I'm going to undo that because that's a little too much for this animation. But you can do a lozoom like that. That is the basics of the camera movement, and I'll see you next time. We go to add some audio to it. 15. Adding & Syncing Audio: Hello, and welcome back syncing audio. To insert an audio to animation, we're going to go file, import, sound, navigate your file system to find wherever it is, Minds in Download right now. I'm going to add the sound effect for throwing. Open it. It is going to open right above the very top of the timeline. If it's not already checked so make sure these two buttons are checked on so that you can actually hear the sound. If you can't hear it, then that's probably why. I'm going to play the sound. Right now, it's not where I want it to be, but now that we have the audio, I'm going to click and drag, highlight the section, and I'm going to drag it to where I want it to be. When he throws it, probably going to be a little further down. Let's try that. There we go. You can add more audio if you wanted to. If you add another audio, it'll be on a different layer. So let's import the second audio be the same one. You'll have another layer of audio. So it'll be a different layer. You can add a layer if you wanted to or music. But for now, that's how you import a sound. Thank you for joining me in importing audio sounds into your animation. Next, we will be exporting everything. See you then. 16. Exporting Your Finished Animation: Hello, and welcome to Lesson number 15. We're going to export our finished animation. First, have your animation up. I'm going to go to File Export Movie. Right here, we have video formats, QuickTime, MP four, Windows Media, we're doing MP four. We're going to browse where I want to save this. I'm just going to save it under my downloads. And you can name it or name it appropriately as well, save that under my downloads. Right here, you can export all the frames that you have available or export certain frames. So my animation is only 34 frames long, so I'm going to go to one to 34. The resolution can be changed. We're going to do the default with and for the color space, we're going to do the default as well. We're going to press Okay, and it's going to export. Alrighty. And I'm going to go to my file and pull that final animation up, see if it worked. Looks like it did. There we go. Alright, now that you have exported your animation, now it's time to start your project. Can't wait to see how it all turns out. Thank you for joining me. 17. Class Project: Create Your Own Character Animation: Now it's time to take everything you've learned and create a short character animation of your own. You don't need to create a complicated character or a long scene. In fact, keeping things more simple will give you more time to focus on the movement itself. Start by designing character as practical to animate. Next, choose one clear action or your character. This action doesn't need to be complex. What's important is that it gives you a chance to practice the animation process that we've used throughout the course. Before drawing every frame, plan your movement. Start with the main key poses that communicate the action clearly. Then add your breakdowns and in betweens. Use onion skin to help maintain consistent proportions of smoother movement. Pay attention to timing and spacing as you work. Once you're happy with the movement, clean up your drawings and add color. You can also add simple camera movement or sound effect if it suits your animation. Finally, exploit your finished animation and share in the project gallery. Don't worry about making every drawing perfect. Animation is about creating believable movement across a sequence of drawings. The best way to improve is to simply keep animating. Have fun with your character, and I'm looking forward to see what you create. 18. Congratulations! What's Next?: Congratulations. You reached the end of the course and created your first animations in Toon Boom Harmony. If there's one thing I'd like to encourage you to do after this course, it's to keep your next few animations simple. Tying out a bouncing ball with a different weight. Animated character reacting to something. Create a walk, a jump, or a simple gesture. Each short exercise gives you an opportunity to improve your timing, spacing, drawing consistency, and understanding of movement. If you haven't already, make sure to complete your class project and share your finished character animation in the project gallery. Love to see how you taken the workflow from the course and apply it to your own character and movement. If you enjoyed the course, please consider leaving a review. Your feedback helps us improve and create better courses for future students. Thank you so much for joining and animating along with me. Happy animating.