ToonSquid: Cut-Out Paper Garden Animation

1. Class Introduction : I am really excited to introduce you to my next class here, which I call a cutout garden animation. And what's great about this project, it is both tactile and digital. You'll walk through the process of sketching out your different assets for your scene. And then inking them in, using construction paper to cut out the pieces, capturing them, using different type of green screen approaches, and bringing them into TunSquid to create your final animation. I can't wait to see your creative take on this project. As I chose tulips for my garden, I welcome your creative differences or your different flowers you may make. So the supplies for this class will be a sketch pad, drawing tools, strappy pen, some construction paper, and card stock, and, of course, tune squid. So let's gather our supplies together, and let's create our cutout flower, animation. 2. Sketching Our Scene: So our first step is planning it out. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to sketch. So I'm thinking that along down here and I'm using a light pencil markings would be my ground. And for now, I'll just use just lightly draw what would be grass blades. This is just a concept. Doesn't mean my grass blades look like this and sketching it, it does make it look like fire. For now, I'm just going to mark that as that will be the grass. Then up here, I'm just going to draw a sun. And then think out, I like fluffy, what I call cotton. It looks like cotton balls in the sky. I heard someone say it's called cotton candy. So maybe some clouds that will animate across the sky. I just want to draw one more just to illustrate this. And then our tulips. For our tulips, we're just going to draw a stem, and I like drawing the first petal, which is usually facing towards the audience, and then the curve parts like that and the leaves. And initially, I'm thinking maybe three or four tulips and for my sketch, it's not perfect. It's just building the idea. Probably use four different colors. There maybe one more. Another way tulip can be drawn is this curved more curve there. Like that. And to add elements to my scene, I'm thinking there could be some rocks and because tulips push themselves out of the ground, some dirt mounds from where the tulips have pushed themselves out. And maybe another rock here. And for aesthetics, you can definitely do a rock with like it's in dirt's a little bit of bumps. I'm going to label this rocks and label these tulips. Oops, I don't know why. Tulips. And that is looking really good. And now that I've planned out what my scene looks like, I can move on to the next step of creating the different assets to build a scene. So go ahead, take time, plan out your scene. You can definitely share it to me on the class for any feedback and have fun. 3. Sketching the Clouds: So for our garden scene animation, we're gonna draw out our different elements we're going to use within this animation. And so the first thing I'm going to sketch out is some clouds. Now, I have a sketch pad here, just a regular pencil and some additional tools in case I need it. So with our spring flower, I like to make the clouds look like cotton ball, so I just do, like, curved lines. And a flat bottom like that. And this create another one? Maybe a big fluffy cloud. Clouds are so different. So maybe this one kind of goes here and then close it off like that. And maybe one that is a complete cotton ball like this, some curved lines. This time, I'm bringing the mumps all the way around, so more like that. You'll want a few options. So this way as we decorate our scene and make a better plan. As we lay these in the scenes, we want to create some life. Let's create maybe one more. I like that. So notice between each and one of my drawings, I'm allowing space. And the reason is I'm thinking ahead to when I want to ink in. So there you go. And you can continue to add more clouds. You can come up with different shaped ones. I like to make these curvy fluffy clouds. It's the number one thing I love to see in the sky is the fluffy cotton cotton candy clouds. I've heard it said that they're like cotton candy in the sky. I'm going to create one more and just changing just a little bit, and there you go. Go ahead, plan out your clouds and you can share it with me for feedback. 4. Sketching the Sun: So now I'm going to think about my son that's in the sky, and there's a really neat technique I like, for my son, I usually make a circle. That will be the center of the sun. And don't worry about your circles not perfect. This is the whole point of art. And so this will be the center part of that circle. And I'm going to make one more big circle here. All the way around. There we go. It's not as a perfect circle, and that's okay. So what I actually want to do is I can use ruler for this is I'm going to plan out where I want to cut into this. It will become like sun rays. So just to sketch what that would look like. I would look like cut so we cut a little bit into the circle. So to demonstrate, I'm going to just draw cut lines. I'm going to press a little hard, and then maybe light and then hard again on my line, and it's okay to erase and maybe something like this. There's a hard line to the middle, maybe a little bit like that. Again, I'm not going for perfection. Just thinking about how the sun rays are going to burst from the middle there and maybe make this one little add another cut line here. And something like that. There is another way to create the sun rays bursting out, and we'll explore that when we go to preparing our art and cutting it out. So another way we could make the sun is if you just don't want a circle in the sky, I'm going to lightly draw my circle again. And just add the usual spikes. Now, the challenge with a spiky son, I may need to make those actually bigger spikes. So before I move forward, I'm going to draw my son again. But this time, make it bigger triangles as that will be more cut friendly. And with this approach, you definitely want big triangles. Some slightly short ones, another big one, short one, big one. Like that. Thinking about how it's going to be cut out to make the different pieces of our animation. So keep practicing and drawing out how your sum will look. You're more than welcome to share it with me in the classroom and Have fun. 5. Drawing the Grass: Alright, so let's plan out our grass. And so for the grass, this is going to be a full with grass piece once we're done. And so to do that, we're just going to work start from the side here and just create grass blades that look like this. And it will look like you're painting flames. It almost looks like that. And you can do a little bit of extreme loops, but keep in mind this will need to be cut out later. So I'm just thinking about grass is usually curvy and I'm leaving gaps like that. And looking at this, I probably made it too many sharp pieces here. Some of these would be very difficult to very difficult to deal with and cut. Now, I am creating this connector edge here so that if I had to create another set of grass, I can actually flip it, and then that way, it looks a little more seamless. And I can do the same thing over here is instead of it starting with a loop, I can kind of create a connected piece. Now, they don't line up, that's okay. But again, I'm giving myself two options for how I could repeat a grass background. So go ahead, create your grass background, and I'm going to label this where the sky would be grass. 6. Drawing the Tulip: So we're going to work out how to prepare our tulip to be animated. With a cutout animation, you want to think about the different parts of the flower. When a tulip blooms, it usually is closed like this and it opens up, opens up like that. This would be the front petals and it just opens up like that. Thinking about that, I want to think about the different parts so I can animate it. So first, the tulip can often be seen with pedal like this where it's an egg shape to animate, we want to think about the pieces. We're going to have a side pedal here, and what it'll do is it'll come behind this one. That way, when it animates it will fold out that way. If I want, I could even put a darker piece in between that is underneath it all. Depends how complicated I want to make it. So in the end, it looks something like this. But now let's create the individual pieces. So again, I'm going to create a now, I could do this several different ways. I'm going to just lightly draw two circles, one big, one small, and draw around them like a triangle. Since I already know the shape, I'm going to draw it again. It's a little triangle. Not so little though. There's our metal petal and we will now I'll draw the side petal. Again, these are the ones that will open up this way and I can use the same shape for all three parts of the petal head, the flowers head. But just for variation, I'm going to create one more for the other side. That's slightly different. Now, there's one other approach we can take which is using a T cup approach. So that is making a curve line coming down, going up and making a curved line, Tecup and then bring in a curve line like this and meet in the middle. Now it's cool is kettle animation is you can switch out images as you go. So depending how you do it, and we can create and I'll draw one more version. There's one more version here. Doing the T cup approach again. Bring it in. Then do that metal metal pedal like that. Now I want to draw myself a reference to remind myself so it can look raise. The idea is the flower will look something like this once it's fully open. I could do the curved version because sometimes those petals droop a little bit. Just to tell myself, I could also do darker petals over here that you see and I'm just going to do a slight shading to remind myself something like that for my reference. Perfect. With this practice, it will help me for when I'm ready to create my official in art. I'm going to do a big version of the petal here as well. And I'm just going to label it petal to remind myself what it is. Now I've given myself a lot of different options for animating this flower. Now, I chose the tulip because it is something that's local to my area. And if you have another flower that's available in your area that you want to animate, take the same extra size, break it apart so that the different petals are shown. But at the same time, if you notice, I'm keeping this flower fairly simple. I may not even do the shading petals because I know the more I add, the more I have to animate. So keep that in mind, and please share to the class on what you create. 7. Inking in the Clouds: Alright, now we're at the next step of inking in our clouds. So I already tore out a page from my sketchbook here that I'm going to use to retrace my images lightly. And to prepare to ink the lines, I found this really thin cardboard material, so that way, it won't bleed through when I use my sharpie. And for the sharpie, I use a fine point sharpie. And if I want thick lines, I have the style of fine point sharpie. Alright, so to trace, I'm just going to place this on top of my previous image, and it may be hard to see in the camera, but I can actually see my lines, and so I'm just going to carefully trace over knowing that it is not going to be perfect. Continue through. I want all my clouds to be available so that I have choices in my animation project. So the reason for doing this is so that I have my original art still available, and this is just a way of transferring, and I did change that cloud just a bit in this process. Now, another process would be using a light table, which would definitely make this a little easier if I wanted to have it near perfect copy. O. So there we go. So now I have this and for my cardboard that I'm putting underneath is several reasons. Usually the texture of sketchbooks has a bumpy surface. So if we try to so if we try to trace, it's going to cause an issue. And so here, I'm going to use this fine point sharpie and just go over the lines again very carefully, knowing it's going to change a little bit. Like that. Now, for thick line, I do have this fine point. So for this fluffy cloud, let's try that. And the key is not to press down really hard. And be careful sometimes depending on the sharp product. It might still be a little wet so you may need to give it a moment. So looking at these two, this is more of a style preference. Do you want thick lines or thin lines? And they're both going to be able to be seen in camera during the animation, and we do get the added benefit of turning it over to animate. And I'm completely okay that you're going to see these thick lines during the animation. So I'm just going to quickly go through and use my Fine point. And now, looking at this, I actually do want to for the quick decision making here, I'm going to go with the rest of with this with my thicker fine point. See, we get a little bit rubbed off on the head there. So actually I'm gonna go from left to right to reduce that. There we go. Now, I can go over I'm just going to go over this last one with the thick marker that way I have consistency. Carefully following the lines a little bit more this time. Nice. That's looking good. So again, wait a few minutes and then once the Sharpies had time to settle, you can lightly go through and erase pencil markings. I would focus on pencil markings that are inside here is a pencil marking within the cloud because that will show on camera. Having said that, this is a total artistic choice. This is meant to be handmade cutout animation. So you can leave flaws like that, the pencil markings, and it will just add a unique touch to the animation. So I'll leave that to you to decide. And now our clouds are ready for us to look at the next step. 8. Choosing Construction Paper Colors: So now our next step is picking out our colors for our construction paper. I need to think about how it's going to be utilized in the scene. With the grass, I'm going to utilize two sheets of green paper. And that will also be used for stems and leaves, two sheets of blue. This way, both the grass and the sky will actually extend beyond the camera, although it will be all put together within ton squid and black. This is just so if I need to create any outlines for the assets in the scene, just to make them pop. So I have to add on hand. And for flower colors, for our tulips, I'm picking out a purple. You can certainly use other colors for your flower. Purples will be my main color for this. White for the clouds. Here's my dirt color with the brown. And for the sun, I'm thinking of using contrast colors of a dark yellow and more of a cream color, thinking out on how to make the sun pop a little bit in the animation. So I may not actually use a contrast color. I just want them available in case I do. Now, with my colors available, let's move forward and build our assets for our animation. 9. Cutting Out the Grass: Alright, so now I'm ready to cut out my template for the grass so I can use it for the construction peeper. So what I want to do here is just fall along the lines. Now, I can definitely use it upside down or just lay it on top. There's artistic freedom in this decision. So here we go. We're just going to Okay. So now that I've cut it out, as you can see, there's going to be imperfections in my cuts. And I'm actually thinking, I'm just going to trace it with my sharpie here, and I'm going to go tall grass that way. I have room, and I'm just going to carefully follow the lines on my cut out here. So this last little bit where it gets close to the edge, I'm just going to draw the line all the way to the top, and there we go. That looks pretty good. So I'm just going to go through and clean up the spots where maybe the lines didn't connect well, so just clean up here, here. Looks good. And now for the last step, I'm going to cut now along the grass line. There we go. I completed cutting out my grass. So if you see the side with the lines, then you can turn it around. And this is how we will bring it into Tunsquid to create our grass background. So go ahead, cut out and prepare the rest of your animation assets. I love to see your progress, so be sure to share your animation assets when they're ready. 10. Cutting Our Outline Assets: So for certain dirt elements, I'm going to use black and cut out a type of outline shape. And the best way I have found to do this is we're going to use black construction paper, and so I'm going to cut out one of my pieces here, and it's okay. It's not perfect. Here we go. And I have a white crayon. So with a white crayon, I'm just going to line it up to the bottom of the construction paper that way. I'm utilizing not having much paper waste here. And I just outline the shape, and now I can cut that out once I'm ready, go over the outline of the shape, and there we go. So now I can move on to cutting these pieces out and having them ready for the animation. 11. Capturing Our Assets: To get ready to photograph in our assets, I have two card stock papers here, a very light blue and a light green, as well as a legal, just plain white paper. And so I switch between these options depending on what I'm going about to photograph. So, for example, let's take a look at how I would photograph the clouds. I'm going to lay out the clouds on my blue background here. So with my iPad here, I'm going to just take a picture of each element. So I'm just centering it doesn't even have to be center frame and just take a picture like that. Or I can pull the iPad all the way back. And take a picture of all the elements in one shot. And so this is how that picture looks. So go ahead and photograph your assets. 12. Importing & Selecting Our Assets: So now let's bring it into Tune squid. We're going to create our project by tapping this plus up here, and we'll just name our project. I'm just going to call it cutout animation. Make sure I'm 1920 by 1012 frames per second, and let's create. So the first step I want to do is bring in one of my assets to cut out and get prepared. So I'm going to go up to Library, and here we're going to tap plus Import from photos. So since I took these photos on my device, I'm going to tap on Import from photos, and I'm going to pick one of the assets. So I've gone ahead and I picked out my clouds just for an example. Let's pick this cloud here that is independent and on its own. So a neat thing with tune Squid is we can actually cut this out. So the way we can do that is by using the selection tool, and we have the ability to draw, so I'm going to tap this little arrow up here. So to free hand, I'm going to tap on a lips and choose freehand, and now I'm just going to trace my cloud. It does not have to be perfect for this. Like so and connect it. And now I want to copy, tap on my layer, and choose paste above. So once we've done that, now you see that our asset is independent, and I can tap and rename this layer. So now I can even do that with the rest of my assets. I can carefully cut and create additional layers with each of these pieces. So let me show you how to do it with this. Let's repeat those steps. We go to select, make sure it's on free hand. With it on add, I'm just going to draw over the Clau like so. Copy, paste, and continue along. Now that you know more than one way to build your animation assets, go ahead and prepare your Cloud assets and share your progress on the classroom. 13. Removing the Background with Chroma Key: So now that I have my Cloud assets in Tune Squid, I'm going to show you how we can remove the background. So we're going to use what's called chroma key or another term you may hear is called green screen. Because I use a blue color, it is like a green screen, which is why I was purposely picking a strong color, so it's easier to remove. So tune square by going to the layers here, I'm going to go to Cloud one and tap on properties, go to Effex and find Chroma key. Now, by default, Chroma key is set a green, and so to change that, we're going to use the color picker down here, so I tapped on picker and then move it around. Until the background disappears like that. Now, as much as it looks like the background is solid, because of the textured background, there's actually different shades of blue leaving a bit of artifacts here. So to fix the artifacts, I can increase the threshold just a bit, so it starts cutting it away. Somewhere around there it looks about correct. Now if I want to apply to all of these, I can just tap, copy, go to the next cloud, tap, paste, tap, paste. By using Chromic key, now our assets are fully ready to be used in our animation projects. So go through the rest of your assets and use the Chromic key to remove the backgrounds and post results on the classroom. 14. Refining Assets with the Erase Tool: Besides the Chroma key, we can also use the race tool. So here I have selected the Race tool and I'm going to use dynamic size. And my brush size is around 20 as close as I can get. So one of the benefits is the fact that once we import images, they're considered a rat sized image, which is why we see this icon here. So with the Erase tool, I am going to erase this blue background that way I can have a little bit more to work with. Because as we start to layer pieces, it gets harder to line them up for the animation. So this is kind of like cutting it out. And then I can zoom in a bit more. I don't need that visible, and I can always drop that down make it a little more fine tuned. Like so. Now I can definitely go as clean as I want. With the erase tool, we can now clean up our assets to prepare them for animation. 15. Organizing Assets with Layers & Groups: Now that I have cut out all my pieces into my scene, we're going to take a look at organizing my assets using groups and layers. So here in the timeline, I've made sure each of my assets are already been renamed, like here in have sun, and that contains the layers for the sun pieces, and I've already put it in a group. So with my tulip layer, I'm going to look at all the different pieces. And here I have the tulip flour and several layers, and they're not even renamed, which is okay for an elm. So what I want to do is create a group, so I'm just going to tap and swipe each of the petals. And I do have different variations so I can experiment during the animation, tap the plus and choose a group. From here, I can call it flour, and with it in a group, I can move it higher up the hierarchy so that the flow will show on top, or I can have it show behind the different elements in this group. Now, something to keep note is right now, I have the FX enabled, which you can tell by the FX down here is highlighted. So anytime it's turned off, you will see the blue background for all the elements, and that's okay because it's enabling the chroma key effect. So now within the flower here, I want to go to the petals and arrange them so they stack. So I just want to move each one to the same rough position. So maybe we'll actually start with this here and move this to the same area as that, so that way they're roughly align, and then I can hide them as I align them. So now I want to move this petal into the same spot. And along with that, I can use the rotate handle here to rotate. As I'm positioning it. And I can always tap enable pivot editing and move the pivot to where I want to be able to actually rotate it. And as you do that, it does move the handle a bit. So now the new rotate handles up here because I move the pivot there. Tap to turn off pivot editing. Now let's move these into place. Same area. Now anytime I want to change the order of the layers, I just tap and drag it above. That way is seen on top. Enable the FX to see how that looks. Now it looks like I've layered these pieces of my elements on a white background for the scene, and that's the whole point with the style of animation. Now go ahead and create your groups, line up all your different assets. Be sure to name them. Now I typically just name the group. I don't worry too much about the layers within the group, but if I wanted to, I can rename them, for example, petal and same for Stem, see how Stem one, two, and three. This is to indicate how I want to animate the different stages of the stem growing. So have fun, build your different elements and share your results on the class. 16. Assembling Our Garden Scene: So now that I have all my assets put on their different groups in the timeline and within the layers for each of those assets, as well, it's time to create the layout for our scene. So the first thing I want to do is library, and import my dirt and make sure it's on the right layer here, right behind the grass. Actually, the dirt will be above the grass, and we're just going to drag it down below to the lower part of the screen, and it's okay to stretch it out a little bit like that. And then with the grass, we're just going to line it. Just move it along and put it towards the edge. Then duplicate, flip horizontally. And then line it up close to the middle. And for this, we can actually pinch the zoom in and line it up. Right, about there. For the dirt, this should be at the bottom of the flour. So I'm just going to put it near the bottom of flour. And because it's behind the flour, I actually want to bring down the flour to be on the same level like that and make sure the dirt is actually above a layer because the stem of the flower will actually be behind the dirt. And for these two, I actually want to put them into a group down here. Rename tip. That way, it's easier to position wherever I want, and I can even scale it down like that. Now, because of the different layers in here, I can definitely go through the layers and hide any thing I don't want visible for now. Maybe it plays a key part in the animation later. And then make sure that the flower is aligned to the top like that. And then for the sun, it is actually technically in front of the grass. So again, with our hierarchy, we actually want to bring that behind the grass along with our clouds, but making sure our clouds are actually above the sun because usually the sun hides behind the clouds. And one more piece we're missing here is I'm going to go to my library view, and I do already have my blue construction paper imported. And so I'm going to just drag it so it's at the very back, rename it to Sky. This is looking exactly how a cutout animation should. Very homemade feeling. Now it's your turn. Go and build your scene and share it with me. 17. Touching Up Outlines: Due to the process of hand drawing and inking these in along the way, once it came in, I can notice there's things like the petals are not as defined because I didn't outline them or maybe I turned that piece over. And the wonderful thing about tunsquid is because these are radicize, we can actually find tune or any we need to. So I'm going to use my transform tool and gs keep tapping till I touch that petal, which is right here and to make sure I'm going to make sure it's, that is the one we want. Now there's a few ways I can do this. I could just duplicate and flip it over like that, and that would do that. But for the purpose of this walk through, there's another way. So for this way, I'm actually going to use the color picker. And we're going to use the brush, the fine tip because that's exactly the type of marker I used. And with this, I can just carefully go along the edges of the flour. Now, as you notice, this is going to stand out a lot. So actually, what I want to do is create a new layer. And again, this is another way to do it. We can make it smaller. Is less obvious and just go along the edge. That's actually a little too small, so maybe a little bigger about there and just carefully trace or flower petal. And so to make it not so dark, I actually want to go into settings and just offset the pastic just a little bit. I'm looking at how the other ped markings are in around there. It looks about right. So if I tap the ex, it actually blends in. So now I can do the same for other acids, so maybe the stem or anything else I want to touch up, I could use that same process. 18. Adding Depth with Drop Shadows: One more thing we can do if you want to add depth to your animation set here is, for example, with the clouds and make sure we can put the clouds into a group. And what's neat here is we can go to a fax, and there is now we can do it to the group layer, which is what we're going to do, and there is going to be a dropshado effect. So the dropshad allows us to make it look like it's more of a pop out animation so you can either soften it and change the offset. And this can become a neat effect to show when clouds are moving. So I can change the Y and so it's a neat little effect just to create more of a pop out to our animation. I'll leave it to you if you decide to go this avenue. That's another touch to make our animation look like it was homemade, and we just took a picture of it. 19. Animating the Tulip Frame by Frame: So in this next step, I'm going to work on animating the tula. I'm going to make sure I'm on the first frame here. So the approach I'm going to take is very similar to frame by frame animation, and as this will play out to the style for this animation. So what I want to do is I want to hold drawings for at least three frames. So I'm going to move over to the third frame here and make sure my tulip layer in the timeline is highlighted. I'm going to tap extend and do the same for the dirt extend. So now I have a default standard for every time I duplicate this drawing, it's going to be three frames. So now I just want to duplicate the dirt and duplicate the tulip. What a tap and set a marker. And I'm just going to put the number one to tell me this is the first stage of the flower growth. So although it's dirt, this would be step we. And by selecting the tulip, I'm going to go up to the tulip layer and find the stem layer here and turn it on. Now, if your isn't showing the short one like this, then you want to make sure I have it set up so I have a short stem, a medium stem, and the full length stem. So for this first step, I just want that stem to show right there. And I've done the same for the flower buds as well. There's three different stages. Actually, it's more like four different stages for the bud. I just want to make sure I'm hiding down to the flower bud. There we go. I'm in a different order. There we go. That aligns with what's the stage for the flower. Now, for this part, I can also show this leaf. Specifically this tall leaf and I can just move it down and even resize it, maybe not that much. Sometimes you have to pinch to zoom to get it just right, and there we go. Now I can just do the same thing, duplicate and duplicate. For this, I can now change out the dirt mount because the flowers going to grow a little bit bigger to stem two and I already position one of the flower buds at this level. So the only thing I want to change here is the leaf, kind of bring it up like this. And since I've resized it, I could just scale it again just a little bit. Now right now it's on uniform, so I actually do want it on free form. There we go. And maybe it's branching out like that. Now, I realize that right now you can see the blue screen paper, which is fine. I could just hide it like that. Right now, that looks pretty good. I'm going at this one, since that's the first, I'm going to say that this is drawing number three and then duplicate and duplicate. For this, I'm picturing the stem is taller, so I'm going to go to the third stage of the stem growth, and this is where it's going to stay for the remainder of the animation and then find the bud that I placed at that same position, and along with that, I'm picturing that this leaf down here now is probably at full length and kind of like that, and the other leaf has appeared. I could go back and do the same thing for the small leaf that it's kind of showing up here and then grows big. That's up to you if you add that to your animation. So next, how about show a bit of the flower. So with the flower, what I can do here is making sure that I have free form enabled. And so for this, I actually want to drop this layer down underneath the bud and then size down, turn on blue screen, so it's the green screen effect again. And I'm just positioning it just inside of where the flower is budding and we'll just continue duplicating the drawing. And now all I'm doing is going to just change out that top bud to be more open, resize the flower a bit to match what's happening there. I could definitely go through and maybe this leaf now is leaning out more like that, and maybe this leaf is rotated like that. Little bit of details just makes it look more alive. Now we are on, I'm going to set this to five. I'm marking every third major change. Now I'm duplicating. With this, the bud is going to be completely open now, so I'm just going to hide those leaves. And with this flower, I'm just going to actually first going to check the properties. I see I can just quickly tell it to scale Y by one and scale X by one, bringing it back to its full length. Now, I could have fun there because right now the flowers like that, and this could be a quick sprout change, so I'm going to actually duplicate and I want to run with that for a moment because I think that's going to look really cool. Make sure that both the X and Y is one now. And for that, I actually want to drop that down to the previous drawing, this one to two frame. Give that pop effect. And if I want to make this look more like a squash and stretch moment, I can stretch a little bit, and then pop. And now our flowers fully bloom. From here, I can tap and create my loop, my timeline, and view how this grows. But I'm really liking how the flower bounces. So there we go. We animated our tulip sprouting and blooming. 20. Duplicating & Recoloring the Tulip: Now we're going to look at the next step in our flower animation, and that is to duplicate our tula and change the color. So going with tune Squid here, I'm just going to go to the top of the group and tap duplicate and then tap and drag to offset this by at least three frames. Now with the selected, I'm going now tap and drag it to a different spot on the scene, and one more step I'm going to do is go through and then select extend. Same thing here, select, extend. That way, our background now we'll peer and make sure we tap all the different eyes to show our background. Right now, I have made some changes so that the dirt mound doesn't show up till the plant sprouts and there we can see the offset tulip. Along with that I'm going to extend the loop. This other tulip, I'm going to select the group here and just scale it down just a little bit, which kind of makes it look like it's more in the background. With this, we're going to go to when the flower folly blooms, and I do notice that the other flowers disappearing, and that can be fixed later. So with this, tulip fully bloom, I actually want to expand the group, select that tulip layer, hide the timeline, and now select the flour group within that layer. And I don't need to see onion skin for this. Here we go. What we're going to use is called effects, so I'm going to tap on the effects, and it's going to be the adjustments. So with the adjustments, we can change the hue saturation brightness in contrast. And I find because of this purple construction paper, bring up the brightness a little bit, and then start changing the hue. Which allows me to see the different colors I can get by just increasing the brightness. So I'm just looking for rain about here, looks like there's almost a yellow, and then adjust the saturation to bring in that yellow a little bit more. Try again. Probably around there and then increase the contrast one more time. With a little more tweaks, it now looks yellow. And to see it with our other tulip, we're going to expand that out of the group, extend those drawings because the flowers already bloom and now look at our scene. It has more tulips. So we're going to try this one more time, duplicate the group. Now, this time this one could grow at the same time as the other tulip or offset the frames. It'll be up to you how you want to do that. And so the same step here, going to the last flower and then changing the color, look through the hue selection and see, now I've got blue. What's going to happen is because throughout the animation, we're going to go from purple to blue. So when you come across this, tap on the adjustments and do a copy and then go back through each of those drawings, find the flower layer, tap and paste. I'm just going to go through and quickly do that. And then make sure I do that as well for the yellow tulip. And once I'm happy with that, I think the only thing I would like to do is now select this layer and then maybe place this tulip more over here. So altogether, it looks like this. Now, I have it on a loop, which I don't have to do so I can turn off the loop icon, make sure. So again, for anytime we see the flowers stop playing for the different layers, you can just go into that layer and extend the last remaining drawings to display longer. And sometimes you do need to extend the group layer as well to fully show it off. That's looking really good. Work with your tulips or the flowers if you're choosing, try out the adjustments layer and share with me your results. 21. Animating the Clouds & Shadow: Now the next step in the scene will be the clouds. So with the clouds here, I have this layer. And what I want to do is animate the clouds slowly moving across the screen. And so to start that, I'm just going to move it a little bit to the right side of the screen, tap the keyframe here. Make sure I can see that fully. Then tap the position layer and add a keyframe, go towards the end of the animation, which is frame 23 and then slightly move it to the left side like that. So the clouds move just a little bit. And this is okay for linear because clouds tend to move in more linear motion. And the next thing I want to actually adjust is the drop shadow. The drop shadow, as I'm going to just imagine there's a light source here. On the left, I'm picturing that the shadow behind the clouds is going to move as well. So to do that, I'm going to open up properties here, make sure I've drop shuttle selected here under the timeline. I actually want to make sure I tab to highlight the offset and add a keyframe here. And then by the time it comes here, I just want to the position goes horizontal, Y position goes vertigal I just want to move it a little bit towards the positive a little bit more. So it's around 13, so maybe maybe around 20 and then preview. It will be subtle because it is a short animation, but it adds more life to it. There we go. We animated our clouds. 22. Organizing Layers & Polishing the Scene: Next step, we're just going to optimize our scene layout just a little bit just to help with the staging. The first thing I want to look at is the clouds are still behind everything. And because you have a drop shadow, I actually want to bring them up to the top the tulips. I already have put in a group which allows me to quickly use the transform tool and just maybe bring them down a little bit more. I just realized one of the clouds is way down there for some reason, so I'm going to go back to my cloud layer and then figure out which clouds just needs to be moved up here or I can delete it. Now my flowers are in a better spot. So I'm just taking a look at this, just watching how everything looks, and I feel that's a better proportion in terms of where the clouds and the flowers are in my scene, which looks really good. 23. Finishing Your Garden: Personalize, Camera & Export: So now it's time to talk about our final steps to this project, which is adding your own personal touch, adding a camera, and exporting our project. Here, I'm going to show you what I added to my project. I added this ladybug now that walks to the flowers. And to prepare this for export, just to make sure everything in my scene is within frame, I'm going to tap on the plus and add a camera layer. When I zoom out, I see the outline of the camera. Again, just gives me the ability to see how in frame everything is. So if anything's not where I want it, I can just move it into position, line things up a little better. Then once I'm all happy, now I want to look at exporting. To export the project, you go up to actions, tap on Export. Be sure to name your project. I keep things to the default settings, with the only change being my anti aliasing being at best, so that way I get the high quality picture. Once I'm ready, I just tap Export, follow the next steps, and save it to my iPad. And with that, our project is now complete. 24. Congratulations & Project Complete: Good job. You did it. You worked through an old, traditional cutout animation in the process to create a cutout animation from sketching out our garden and creating our stencils and then using construction paper to create our assets and then animating it within TonSquid. And what a fun project it has been. It's been an absolute joy to create this for you. And I would love to see what you have done with it. And don't forget to follow me here as well as visit me while Berry and Birch and thank you for having me along your artists journey.