ToonSquid: Gingerbread Animation Project

1. Course Introduction and What You'll Create: Hi, I'm Jonah, and welcome to my class on creating a festive gingerbread scene using TunSquid. In this class, we're going to be looking at a few key animation techniques. First, we're going to look at using a reference image, and we'll take each element bit by bit and look at how to illustrate it using the brush tool. And walk through the different animation techniques. We'll explore frame by frame animation by adding a blinking animation to our tree. Then we'll look at keyframe animation by creating movement for the holly and the slight body movements for each gingerbread people. Show how we can use mixed types of animation, we're going to add a frame by frame wave to our gingerbread man. During this process, you'll get more and more tools that will help you as a creative. We will look at how to group our assets together to make things more organized and even name those groups. We'll even explore how to create symbols, which is a powerhouse tool within TunSquid allows you to create reusable animations and edit them directly while making our scene more organized. So grab your Apple pencil, your iPad, make sure you have TunSquid and let's get started. 2. Creating Your Project in ToonSquid: Let's create our gingerbread project. So to create our project, we're going to tap on the plus up here and name our project. And we're going to make sure we have key frame selected, and that it's 1920 by 108024 frames per second and tap on Create. Now our project is ready for us to get started. 3. Essential Gestures and Tips for ToonSquid: So throughout this class, we're going to utilizing several different gestures. These gestures just allow you to be a little more efficient in your drawing and the different tools within TunSquid. When I am animating with Tune Squid, I will hold it with both hands. My left hand helps me quickly select the different tools by just tapping on them. While my right hand, since I right handed, allows me to draw. Pick a color that's easy to see on screen. So if I'm working with frame by frame animation, these left and right arrows allow me to quickly tap and move between those frames. Another gesture is when we draw a shape like a circle, if we just hold or pan just a few moments, it becomes a circle. And if I just put my other finger or thumb, it allows me to make the circle more precise. And the same goes for triangles and squares. Now, whenever we make a mistake, we just take two fingers, we tap to undo, three fingers, taps to redo. And whenever we want to get closer to our drawing, we can pinch to zoom in and then close our fingers to zoom out. Now, this is a tricky little tool because sometimes you may pinch too far like this and now you want to get closer. If we do a quick pinch, now it brings it back. Now that we understand a little bit more how to work with TunSquid, let's move on to the next lesson. 4. Importing Your Drawing Guide: So with this class, I have also provided some useful materials that will help us throughout this whole class. And one of those materials is I've given you a drawing sheet, and this is how it looks. We're going to go to a library, and we're going to import from files, and from here, you're going to navigate to wherever your files is on your computer. And the picture we're bringing in is the picture that gives us the holly and the tree. By bringing these ins, this becomes a layer we can use to create our art on top of. The other drawing provided, if we go to library as well, is the gingerbread template. Now, you can import both, and by tapping on the timeline, we can take a look at that that both have been imported. So I do recommend that you have both available, and for now, we can touch on the I and the timeline and leave just the background as this will be the first thing we're going to focus on within our project. So once you have those in place, we can move on to the next lesson. 5. Setting Up Your Color Palette: Now let's make sure we have our color palettes. I'm going to tap on the color circle and then tap on palettes. Here I already have it. You want to first click the plus to create a new palette, tap on the three dots, import and navigate to the same the files from the class, and then we'll import the palette. Now since I already have this, I'm going to touch the three dots and do delete. Now, to make sure we stay on our palette, we can click on one and say set us current this way, and if you're like me and you have different projects going on, it'll make sure I do not select right away any other color palettes. So once we have that in place, we're ready to start. 6. Drawing the Christmas Tree: So we're going to focus on the tree here. I'm going to pinch the zoom in to see the tree better. And since this is our sketch layer, I want to make sure I open up the timeline, and I'm just going to tap and choose new layer and close my timeline. By doing this, I now will be on my timeline, and for additional step, I'm going to tap to highlight that track with my drawing here, and then I'm going to Ohricy make sure I'm on animation layer. And just dim it down just a little bit. There we go. And now back to layer four, close the timeline, and now we can get started. With our colors, I have created a specific row here with the greens, the blue, the white, and the black. These greens are our tree colors and the darker green being our outline and the lighter greens being the fill. Now, you could choose either this really light green or the slightly darker green. I'll leave that to you. So to get started with our tree, we're just going to follow the lines. And our pen we're selecting is rough ink, and my brush size is around usually in roughly the 80s. We're just going to follow the line. You don't have to be precise by being precise. You want it to be just a little bit outside the line, and now I'm going to close it off. And now I'm going to close it off like this. I can tap on the bucket tool and fill it inside as well. By doing this, it does save me one more step. However, I want to go through the edges as you can see, because this is a erraticize brush. It leaves pixels like this available, so we're just going to fill in those pixels by just retracing over the spots. And as you see, I'm using my fingers to turn the canvas. I I set them down and I turn my hand like this, I can turn the canvas with me and just fill in those spots. Next, so fell in those spots, make it just a little more darker, and this is a bit interpretive because I like this illustrative look that I leave it not so perfect. And just go along that edge there. Like so nice. I can use the layers to separate out by tapping and choosing layer and I can put my outline on a new layer. This is just an art choice. By doing this, I can fine tune my outline without destroying or affecting what I just did for the baseline. I'm just going to go over it with the darker here I don't have to follow all the edges. I'm just going to leave that top not done, and I'm just carefully going along the edge and tip I'm just tilting the pen to help go from thick to thin. I don't like that, so I'm tapped on do. So I constantly turn the canvas to get myself a better angle, and that is looking really good. So from here using the Tim layers tool, we're going to tap and use group. And this is a neat little trick. By putting in things in groups again, I'm just helping myself be organized. I'm going to tap on layer two, and then to select the next one below, just slide I pin over like this, tap and push, tap and push. Now they're both selected. Now I'm going to press and hold, bring it into that group, and drop. And to make sure I touch the Earl. Now I've got this first piece of the tree done. I'm going to click to hide, create a new layer, and repeat. Now, there is one trick to this. Since we're using groups, I'm going to tap and choose groups, choose a group, and now add a layer. What this does is by creating the group first, the layer is within the group, and this is a great feature. So from here, it's up to me if I want to go back to maybe fill first or my outline first, and I'll leave that to you as an artist, how you want to approach that. But I usually start with my fill color first. So I'm going to go through, do my fill color like that. Follow along, close it off, Bucket tool, fill, and then clean up. Clean up by going over the lines again. There we go. Nice. Layer tool, add the next layer. Outline. And now outline. Technically, you can outline on the same layer as your fill color if you really want. Choice is yours. Again, I'm okay with it not being perfect. Look at that. It's looking really nice. And so now I can close that group, do the same thing, create a new group, tap, create a new layer. Now, one thing I want to keep in mind is how these layers or how these groups, the order of the group layers. I want to pay attention to the order of the groups. Right now, I put this group at the very bottom, which means it's going to be underneath. And since this is going to be the top of my tree, I actually want it to be on top. So I'm going to tap and bring it to the top like that, and now hide the other group. Move right on, house my fill color and trace the lines again. Now, how I make the color a little thicker or my pin with thicker is I'm just pressing down just a little bit more again, because there's going to be a star here. I'm okay with that top. Soon press, fill, tap tap to brush. Clean up. Like so. New layer, choose my line. Now go over with my line. Follow through like that. That line went really went really wild with that line. There we go. Follow it up. I think I'm going to close it off just to make sure. But I'm not liking how it's closed off, so I'm just going to go over it one more time, going over it one more time, and there we go. Just to see it in full view, I'm just going to show the parts of the tree, and there is my tree. The only thing I'm missing now is the trunk, so I'll quickly add that at a group. This time I'm okay with it at the very bottom because it's going to be the bottom underneath the tree. That's what's at our trunk. So for this, I believe I used this light brown. Again, you could choose between those browns, but you want lights inside a light. Fill with a darker outline. Here we go. Darker outline, and I'm just going up and underneath that tree. If it gets too hard to see, we can always hide those layers. There we go. And make sure we're on the correct layer. Yes. Fill brush. And just clean it up. Like, so following the shape. There we go it looks nice. New layer. Now we're going to do the darker, see if that's dark enough. Oh, that doesn't look dark enough. Did I pick the color correctly? So we will go a little maybe this darker tone there. Try now. Since I drew on that, I'm going to tap and clear. There we go. And now that's a darker. I like that. Okay. It's a little darker. And now let's show our layers. Pinch the zoom out. And that looks good. I like my tree. Awesome. So now that we have our tree ready, we're ready to move on to the next steps. 7. Organizing with Group Layers: On this lesson, we're going to review how to put layers into a group and TunSQuid recently released an update that actually makes this process easier than what I'm demonstrating throughout this class. So the new way to create a group within TunSquid is to first select the two layers you want. I just tapped on my first layer, and then I'm just going to tap and swipe on the second layer, so they're both highlighted. Next, I'm going to tap on the plus and then choose groups. This is now a much easier way. To rename this group, we're going to rename tap on the folder icon and then rename and we can call this top tree part. Now, throughout the rest of lessons, you're on notice, I did not name the groups. For this animation, it's okay if the groups are not named, but it does help the organization to name them so that whenever you come back to the animation, you can remember the different things you did for building your animation. Be sure to use this new approach to creating groups for the remaining of the class. 8. Creating the Background: For this next step, we are going to do our background now. The way we're going to do that is we're going to open the timeline and we're going to go to our background color settings and we're going to choose a blue. Now I could go with happened to my previous blue, so I can go with a blue like that or a lighter blue. We can go with this blue. Dn this color code, which is incredible is right here B one, E A, F two. If you're wanting this shade of blue, you can also plug that in. Now my blue is in place and next, I want to create a new layer and go back to palettes and choose my white. With this, we're going to do the snow. For the snow, we're going to choose a different brush. We're going to go to painting, and we're going to use some clouds. The clouds brush. Now I can go really big. I'm going to be around 300. That way, as I go through, it creates the type of fluff look. And just slightly go over. And this kind of makes it look like someone put, like, fluff on the ground first, or it could look like snow. And with that, I could now what that.Oly thing I'm wondering about is how dark is this blue, so I'm going to go back to here and blue. Now, there's one other feature we have here is we can do infinite background. So with infinite background, it doesn't allow us to draw outside of our canvas, unfortunately, because if I do fluff out here, it still stops at the canvas, but it just allows it so that if you didn't want this big, dark gray background background, you can actually enable that as well. I think I'm going to go back to the blue. It's just nice and light. There we go. And I can always tap in my color palette if I want to keep that around. Ast step is we're going to hide now that layer. The scene in Walla. We now have a nice festive background to start ending our gingerbread people. 9. Adding the Star: So now let's decorate our tree. So I'm gonna just pinch to zoom in to our tree here. I'm gonna go pick whatever yellows, maybe this lighter yellow here and go closer to our tree, and I can tie the top part of our tree here and Ooh, make sure I'm on the brush tool. And rough ink. There we go. And now just trace the star and then clean up the lines. There we go. Now we're going to switch over to our darker yellow here, which is this one, and just go over the lines a little more in detail. Maybe a little smaller there. There we go. Don't forget to adjust your brush size as you work on the different parts as well. Now outline the star. And you probably notice I'm doing a very smooth continuous brush. You can do it. One line at a time if you want. And now let's show our top part of our tree. That looks really good. 10. Adding the Baubles: Now with our star dm, let's do the baubles. So we're going to go to our we're going to create a new layer. Choose our color. And the baubles are going to be using these colors here, so I'm going to start with the red. And as you notice in my pencil sketch drawing that I provided, I didn't really sketch where you want to put your bobbles. So with your bobbles, they are totally up to you what you do. So I'm just making slight circle motions like this. I'm just thinking, how would I decorate this tree? So I'm just picking different spots. So how many bubbles your tree has is up to you. Now I'm going to switch to let's make a blue. Maybe there's a blue one here. Maybe there's one here. Then change it up with the yellow. There we go. Bobbles. Now, for added touch, we can definitely create one more layer here. And using our white, we can actually go over each bobble and just gently make a highlight light reflection here. Look how good our tree looks. 11. Drawing the String Lights: Right, so for this next part, we're going to just work out where our lights are going to go on this tree. So I'm going to create a new group for this one and add a layer to the group. And this will be my Christmas lights. Now, to do this, I like to at least sketch out where the Christmas lights are going to go, so I'm just going to pick a gray just to kind of sketch out where I want them. And I'm just picturing myself. Just picturing where would someone most likely hang lights on the tree, and this doesn't have to be exact. Okay, maybe in this area here and maybe in this area here. Nice. Now we're going to add a new layer, and we're gonna have some fun, how we want our pattern to be. And so I'm thinking, I'm just going to follow this pattern of yellow, green, blue, red, so we're just going to create little circles. Green blue. And. So now that we have our colors on our Christmas tree, I can always touch my finger down on a color that I want to quickly switch to. It's already available on my palette and do the same thing. So touch, move it to the next color. Like, so, Tsh. And as you can see, this actually makes it a lot easier and quicker. Grab a red. Yeah, spreads close to yellow, one here, one here, and then a blue, like that, and a green. And there we are. Go to our layers, and it's up to you if you want to hide the string. You can leave it or not have it. I'll leave that to you and how you want to do that. If you decide to leave it, the only suggestion I would have is maybe going over it with the dark green, like a darker green. And I can show that real quick. We'll just create a new layer. And based off of everything we learn, I can just gently go across. Oh, of course, I pick the green that fits the tree. So we could go with the outlying color. And then drop up below. Definitely need to clean up that last one. A, okay? Okay. Is it real? Back to the brush. And now, just kind of follow the lights I have there. And that still looks just as nice. So now you've seen different ways to decorate your tree, go ahead, have some fun with decorating your tree. Now we're ready for the next lesson. 12. Drawing the Holly Decoration: So now let's do the holly and we're going to create a new layer for this holly. Move right on over. Create a new layer. Now, to practice, you always create a group first. And then a layer. Then that way, you know everything is nested within a group. And since this is our holly, it's gonna be roughly the same color as a tree, so I'm just going to go to this middle tone. I can make these lighter. Again, very interpretive and just trace over. And since I'm maybe a little bigger just color over. Following the lines as a guide. You can always go a little bit outside the lines on this and then connect them. Now, you might be thinking, Paul, do I have to connect them? Yeah, I just helps. If you don't, then you can hand color it in with the brush tool as well as I've demonstrated throughout this class, and now we're and just clean up. Here we go refine the lines. Now, for here, I could go on and make a new layer or I can just trace it over with a darker line like this. The reason I usually keep things in separate layers is in case I need to maybe tidy up one part of the outline or redo it. Or, we'll put this one on the same layer. And now the line in the middle. Look at that nice holly leaf. Now we're going to add another layer. You probably notice why did it do that? Well, the group should be selected first and then a layer. That's what happened there, and the group has to be expanded. Now, like the trick with the tree, if I press down, I can grab that color that I want right away. And I'm just going to start there race the lines like this. So I'm going to take this one part leaf at a time. You probably notice I'm not really using my secondary and to switch brushes. It just depends. Alright, so now we can switch. Again, I can press and grab. Now, if I want to make sure I want to make sure I actually grab that color because sometimes with the brushes, it actually creates various colors. Like, in this case, green, and I may be grabbing actually the wrong color green, but on the outlines, it's not a solid. So the color picker is not going to be a sacre. Okay. Maybe I'll just go over that one more time. And then the leaf is going to go in that direction. Nice. So we've got the leaves. Wonderful. So now we're going to do a new layer, and we're going to go for a maybe this mid red here. And if it's too hard to see, we can always hide our leaves. And then in pinch the zoom in and color the berries. Now, this step is totally up to you, but you can technically pause between each berry and go through and do the outline first before you color the mull in. Like that. Now, right now, I have not separated out these layers, so this is going to be extra challenging. What can happen is we can have a bleed through like that. If that happens, I'm just going to finish coloring it in and then go over with the outline in a moment. I actually don't like how that's turning out. And now, the next one. Holy leaves usually have around three, three berries. And I'm okay erasing that part of the line for now. This is a good moment where why I usually put my outlines on another layer. But I'd say, okay. So now we're gonna switch to the dark red here and just carefully connect there. Go over the other one. And then the last one. You can totally do what you did for the bubbles with the white, and then just add a bit of white there. And now. There is our holly. That looks really good. I can close that group. And my scene is looking really good. 13. Creating the Gingerbread Man Body: Okay, so on this next lesson, we are going to start working on our first gingerbread person. So I'm going to open my timeline here, and I'm gonna tap the eye to show my gingerbread person, and that's okay that the rest of the background disappeared on this. We're gonna close the timeline. Now I'm going to pinch to zoom in. And go to create a new layer and make sure this layer is on the top. For now, I'm going to tap and rename. This is another way to reorganize. This is another way to organize your timelines. And now, with that selected, we can work on gingerbread person. So we're going to go and pick a brown. I'm going to go for this light brown and make sure I'm on the right brush, which is rough ink. And now, I'm just going to start filling in the gingerbread person. Colors here. Now, I want to be thinking about my layers. Right now, I'm going to work on just the head and this will play a key part in making sure our animation is set up fully. For now, I am going to purposely just go down to where the head is to do that, I'm actually going to come across and close it off and this does help depending on how much I want to animate the head. I'm going to tap the fill, fill that in. And just fix clean that up, and now create a layer for the outline, choose a darker brown. I think I'm going to go with this brown, let's see how that looks. Now trace the outline. Just a little bit like that. Nice. Group these, tap the first one, tap this spe bring it in and then tab the group, and we're going to rename it. Head. Put this together, we will be able to add the other pieces like the face layer. So now I'm just going to follow through, and we're going to use the new approach I've been trying to demonstrate, which is creating group first then layers. And since this is below the head because I'm working from the top down, this will be the body, so I can even tap now and label it body, just think ahead, tap, add the layer, and go back. Now again, new approach, I can always press and grab that color. And it helps, I can tap and hide the head for now. And hide the layers. The body goes up in here. Why is it not? This. I didn't see the brush working at first. Again, it's okay to come up underneath the head a bit and follow the body down to the lakes. The lakes are not going to be separate. I'm just picturing it like a cookie where the legs are going to bend with the body in a certain way. Have to fill clean up. Create time I want to actually specifically pick that color in now. Line actually might be too thick. I realized that, so I'm going to bring it down just a little bit back around 84 pixels and there we go. That's more like it. I'm just going to take this quick second and fix that. Clear the head. Same pixel width, brush width, I should say, for the head because this is a C I see. Now, we're going to create our group and this will be since the gingerbread person is facing us. I'm gonna re in this right arm because it's towards the right side of the screen. You could be more specific that the right arm is body right. But for me, this help my brain. So now we're gonna tap and grab that fill color. And again, I can hide these other parts and actually that right arms going to be below the body. This will make sense when we start. Animani and I must have accidentally tapped. Let's just bring that up. Through and I just want around the arm like this. Again, this is setting us up for when we animate fill and fill it in. Yeah, there's a strange thing every now and then when you fill, it doesn't actually fill on the entire space. I'm not sure why. But I have noticed that. Do that. Create new layer, choose the dark brown, bring it back down to about Okay. 80 pixels. That's okay. That we go a little bit like that. I'm making the line a little thinner, tapers. Technically, I could duplicate this. But I'm thinking it's like a cookie, and I'm going to hand do make left arm without making it exact. Srolet and drag it down. There we go. Tough color. Now we're just going to follow that arm again. Last time, round it off. To fill. Once you get more comfortable with the tools within tune squad definitely will move a little faster, create a new layer. To are darker brown. Now we're just going to taper in. Apri it in. There we go. Nice. So let's show the rest of the body. That looks really good. Now we have our gingerbread person's body. 14. Drawing the Face: Right now let's create base for gingerbread person. We're going to go to the head layer here, create a new layer. Now, let's go with here. There is this brown gray but we'll go with gray just Cool sir. Make our eyes, create a new layer. The reason I am putting the eyes, so I can even name that layer actually. Eyes is in case I want to do a blink animation down later on, I can do so. For the mouth, I'm thinking it'll be a frosty mouth. Now, I could make the eyes white as well. I will do a frosty mouth. C smile. That looks good, and it's up to you, but you can definitely create some rosy cheeks. Maybe we'll use red for this. And there is our face. 15. Adding the Frosting Details: So next, let's do the frosting squiggles along the legs and the hands. This part is going to take a few layers for sure. To make sure to help with this, we will go to the body layer and create a new layer and make sure we're on our white. For this, we're going to go down to the feet and I could make this a little thinner, which I may, I'm watching it and it's around 40 pixels. And thick and thin. Uses a bit of a squiggle, like that. This is an trick here, we're going to move this down below the outline and toggle mask that ensures that it's not somehow outside the body. Now we're going to go to the left arm. This time, I'm going to select the Koki part and this should be the left arm and I'm going to turn my canvas just to help me with this. Like that. Again, toggle mask. Right arm, cookie layer, the arm, then just wag Nice. Now we're done frosting layers for the gingerbread person. 16. Adding Gingerbread Man Accessories: Alright, so now let's add the bow tie and the gum drops. Now, to help with the bow tie, we can hide the body and the head and the arms. However, I want to make sure I'm at least going to put this on the body layer here. So the trick with this is not going to like the fact that we hid this layer. So we're going to need to create the layer on top. And so there we go. Now, this is just a rough idea of a bow tie, so you can definitely make it different, and we can choose our green. So I want to see how it is with this light green. And I'm just going to fill it in. Like, so. There is a bow tie. And so now we want to drag that into that layer to make sure you can always drop it and then drag it and we can rename it. Bow Tie. Of course. Now we can create a new layer and think about the gum drops. Now, I like red and green gum drops. You could certainly use other colors, but we'll stick to what's in the color palette. And so we can go darker green on this one. So I'm thinking the green gum drops on the bottom. And we're going to stay on the same layer. And again, a lighter red or the other gum drop. Now there's a knee trick. We want to make it look like the sugar on these gum drops. Regular chalk. Let's try that. There we go. Regular chalk. I just lightly tap just to make it look like there's a sugar on that and same thing, we can even name this tap gum props. Open the body layer and drop it in. Then, we forgot one step with the bow tie that we're going to fix real quick. Let's hide the head for one moment and go with a darker green. That's right. I'm still on that. Back to our regular brush and That works. We have one side problem and that is the head is actually where the bow tie is, I may need to actually in this instance, just bring it completely above. There we go. Now we've completed our gingerbread person. The last step is just to put it all into the same group. This way it'll make animating a little easier. I'm just going to select the layers, tapping on the one and then touch and swipe the others so, drop it into the group. The name look at that scene. Look at that. This looks really good. 17. Creating the Gingerbread Girl: So let's create our second gingerbread person. Now, there's two different ways you can definitely do this. However both will be about the same. We're going to go to our layers, and we're going to tap on our gingerbread person here and we're going to duplicate. Close the layers and make sure we're on Transform tool and then just click and drag it over. And for this, you can definitely create the rest of your project with just two gingerbread men. However, I'm going to walk through and how to change out this gingerbread person to wear maybe a dress and bowtie. So for this, we're going to go into the layers here, and I'm just going to tap it swipe over to delete the bow tie, and we'll leave it at that. Now, I could get rid of the gum drops as well. It's a bit subjective. So with the body, I need to think about where the head is, which is here and here's the body, and I'm picturing how the dress would be. I'm just going to create a new layer here and choose. Let's go to my palettes here and we're going to choose A. I think this red here in the middle and our brush tool. Make sure we're on our inking rough ink. Zoom in and just rough out a type address. And both sides like that, and maybe it has a little bit of flow like so make sure our lines are a little more solid. And hide the head layer, and then just bring it up underneath where the head would be and just close it off. Awesome. Now the fill tool and just fill it and then go through and clean it up. I'm on a eraser. There we go. Nice and clean. Now we'll go to our darker red for the outline. That's looking really good. Then we'll create a new layer and this will be for the white collar. Actually, for this, I want to see where the head is. I like that. A type of dress collar, we'll see if we can fill it in. Hopefully I closed off my that's not filling in. That's okay. We can fill it in. You can fill it in by hand. Let's create a new layer and this will be the frosting layer for the dress. We're just going to follow the type of curve lines we created here. And bring it down. Toggle masses and make sure it's stayed within the dress. Now we'll create our group tap and then select these other ones, drag it in, tap to rename. Now for this next step for the bow tie, this can be on the head, so I'm going to just create a new layer, pick the same base red as the dress, and I'm picturing the bow ties up here, so I'm just going to start with a type of circle, make a circle like that. I just fill it in. This bow tie is very similar to the one we created for the other gingerbread person, and so we're going to go with the darker red and just go over an outline like that. Over the different parts of the bow tie. Then I can make my brush size smaller just to add a bit of lines in here. Frosting dots and I can make the brush a little bigger for this one, frosting dot here and here, for added, one more step, we're going to go back to the head, and we're going to create actually, I want to be inside the head layer this time above where we drew the head and we're going to create a hairline frosting layer. Maybe make our brush size smaller. I'm looking at maybe around somewhere in the 60s make it curly like that and then tap. We'll see how to a mask. Oh, because we made it too complicated, we're going to drop it down. There we go. Nice. Now we have completed our second gingerbread person. 18. Animating Blinking Tree Lights: So our scene right now looks really good. And we're ready to move on to creating the different areas to animate. So the first area I'm looking at is to make our lights blink, and there's a really neat technique for this that we're going to look at. So we're going to open our timeline here, and with our layer four, I actually want to tap and rename and let's call this our tree. There we go. And we're going to tap one more time and tell it to create a symbol. Now that we've created our symbol, we can get right into animating. So by opening the layers, I want to tap where this link is and go into Edit Clip. So the neat thing about symbols is it creates reusable animation assets for your project, and it helps isolate things like this. So I want to make sure I can repeat or create a tap repeat, light blink, and have control over it and change it without altering my entire project. So that's a power of symbols. And so we're going to do that. So I'm just pinching the zooming out in my timeline, and I actually want to There we go. And I'm zooming enough to where I start seeing the frame, so I see the one, two, and so frame is essentially Alright. So how we're going to do this is we're going to click the plus and add a new layer. So now I'm going to create the glow. So first, I want an empty drawing, so I'm going to tap and add a drawing and make sure it's tap that handlebar and extend it to two frames. And the first two frames, the lights are not lit up. Or they can be lit up. But once you learn this technique, you can always change it up. So we're going to hide the time lame for a second, and I'm just going to zoom in to a set of lights. So I'm thinking about how I want the lights to be patterned. So if I want all the lights lit in these frames, then this is how I'd approach it. So I'm going to zoom in and tap and press to get the color. And the special pen brush we're going to use is we're going to go to painting. And down to airbrush and the glow. I absolutely love globe because it allows us to create a glow. Now that I've used my yellow color, if I just go over paint over my light a little bit, you can start seeing the glow. Now the advantage of this is now I can go through and light up every yellow light. I'm just going to keep the color consistent. As in this frame, I'm picturing that all the lights are lighting up. The more I press down on my pen, the brighter it seems to get. Now we're going to do the same for the green and it's okay to completely draw over the original lights as this is a glow. And since I'm down here already, I'm going to just going to do the same for the red. I'm not liking that red. For the red, we're going to do something different. We're going to actually go with our lighter red. Let's see how that looks. We're going to go back. There we go. That's exactly what I want. If you don't see the glow, you may have to press down a little bit more. The reason for the lighter red in this case is the red is light up, and so it's not going to be darker, it's going to be lighter, there we go. And then for the blue, while the other colors are actually working in both also. Now we're using this back and forth arrow for frames you can see that there's lights are off and they're in there. Awesome. So now the thing is we're animating our project is 24 frames per second. 24 frames makes 1 second. All 24 of these pictures are going to be shown in 1 second, is how we need to think. So with that in mind, we may need to actually make this blink sequence a little longer to make it work within 1 second, so otherwise the lights will blink very fast. With that in mind, we can actually extend. It as up four frames. Which is actually doubling up the frames, Theo. I actually like that so far. Now, depending on my pattern, what I can do is if I tap this first set of frames, I can tap on it and choose copy. And the reason is I'm going to paste. And this is, again, an empty cell layer. We're going to lower that. Maybe in this case, since all the lights were lit, maybe I want to alternate the color. With this, I'm just going to go through and alternate the colors. And what I'm looking for for this light sequence is that it's lighting it up. So I'm just using the back arrows for the frames to see. So there it is, fully lid, or I can press play. That's looking really nice. Open up again, copy, paste, decorate another empty cell. So since I did the yellow blue, I'll just do green and red. Keeping in mind that I need to choose the lighter red to make that work. I like that. With this pattern we've created, we can definitely change it up. I technically have one more set of four frames I can use another set of four frames. Maybe it goes back to this first set of four. And then turns off. Because it's going to loop, the thing is the moment we choose no lights, it's actually going to be playing it for eight frames because it's going to play through these four, back to the beginning for another four. If that's what you like, then sure or does it blink again. Now let's see how this looks in a main scene. We're going to tap where it says scene one to come back to our main scene and it's going to play through. Nice. The reason it stops because it's now down to the 5 seconds and it loop through. What's the symbols is we can always go back in and change the sequence if we're not 100% happy and I just realized maybe for me, I'm going to actually delete that and leave it blank. That way, there's a little more of a stop between the light sequence. There we go. Now we've created a symbol for our tree. From here, go ahead and challenge yourself. What blinking light sequence are you going to create with your tree? 19. Animating the Holly Movement: Next, we're going to animate our mistletoe or holly. To do that, we're going to make sure we're on the transform tool and open our timeline and select the holly. Now with our holly, we're going to take the same approach that we did with our tree. We're going to tap on the layer, rename, and I'm going to call it a holly, tap one more time and choose create symbol, go through and edit clip, just to separate our animations a bit. By default, because it pulled in the five second loop from the main timeline. We're going to do this about 2 seconds. So for this, we're going to actually utilize keyframes to create a slow movement for a holly. Now, with our tree, we were using frame by frame animation. For this, we're going to use keyframes just to create a more linear type of movement. So I'm going to zoom in. So the idea is by 1 second, this has already tilted. Or turn. So I want to use this handlebar right here in the middle, which allows me to change the rotation. And the pivot point is dead center, which is perfectly fine. So by just pressing and turning my pen like this, I can think about which direction the holly is going to turn. So maybe it turns towards the left and then it's going to come back down. So to come back down, I actually want to tap on this first keyframe, copy, go to the last keyframe. Press a little harder and do paste. Turn on loop and see how that loops. Now, because this is two second, I may actually want to zoom out and extend this back to 5 seconds so that it's a little slower. I can stretch this out by tapping and dragging the keyframe to the very end. And maybe more about halfway 2-3 seconds. Now, this is an extreme turn from here, I can definitely think about changing it up. Maybe between 1.5 seconds roughly, it turns one way and then maybe around 3.5 seconds, it turns the other way. I'm going to turn it the opposite direction, maybe like that. Now go to the beginning and see how this looks. That still feels a bit extreme. I can actually turn it less. I'm watching how many degrees I'm turning it. So maybe around five degrees one way. If I want to refine this more, I could always go to the properties and change it right here where the degrees for turn is that one's 7.6. But I'm okay with the variances. We'll see how that looks within 5 seconds. Now, you could explore the ESN where it has a slight more build. We'll try that. Now, it does look mechanical with this approach, but my thought is this, let's go back to our main theme. The idea so far that I'm creating with my scene is that this is like a store front window where they have animatronics. With the animatronics, you have something like the Holy slowly turning and with the Christmas lights blinking. Let's see how this looks on our main seam. I can turn on loop just to see how it loops. I like that. It's nice and smooth. There we go. We've animated our holly. 20. Rigging the Gingerbread Girl for Animation: So now let's set up and rig our gingerbread people so they can be animated. So the first gingerbread person, I just want to make sure I'm on my gingerbread people's layer and that I'm at the very beginning of my animation just so I don't accidentally animate anywhere else, and we're looking at our groups here. With this first gingerbread person, we're going to go to properties here and effects. For this animation, we're going to use bones and keyframes to control this character. There's a few neat ways we're going to do this. While we're building bones, we're going to also learn how to work with bone bindings just to refine how we are building this. With my gingerbread person selected. Going to hide the layers, go closer. And I'm just going to start the first bone near the bottom of the dress and move up. Now, if you have a hard time seeing the bones that you're creating, we can actually go up to actions settings. Actually, Make sure we're under tools. And we can choose the selected color and the main color. So right now, I have a light blue. So here I could go with a light gray and a dark gray. That way, I can see it easier. It is not uncommon to constantly change these colors depending on your project, and that's something to get used to. So with that in place, let's make sure. Now we're going to draw our second bone towards the head. I'm just going to I accidentally created a bone out in the middle of nowhere. This will be for the head. What I want to do is tap on this main bone, and now I realize that the colors I chose is not help me know when I've actually selected the bone, so I'm going to make the bone selection maybe a more vibrant color. I'm going to go with this blue here. There we go. That way, I know when I've selected it. I want to use the main body bone for making sure all these other bones are the Chala selected again. Every time my hand touches the screen. So now, when I build this arm bone, it is actually going to be the child of this main bone, selected again, and now that will be a child. To make sure we're going to go to properties here, and we have edit bone hierarchy. So if I tap on that, I could see I have bone tool, bone two, which did not it is not child. So see here is bone one, and then three and four is child, but this one is not, so I actually need to drag that down. And now all these are children. So the next step is to bone bind, and this is going to be a bit tricky, but there's a neat way of doing this. Right now, if I use the bone transform tool and I move the character around like this, it is actually going to warp whatever binded to and what we want to do is bind it more specifically. I actually just want this bone to move the arm. We're going to tap once, choose edit bone binding, and then select that arm. However, let's go to properties. And now to bone bindings. However, what happened here is if I go through, this is the right arm. I actually want to tap on the main group. So when we have a multi layer setup like this, it's going to bind to whatever layer it figures we selected. But by making sure we're selecting the group, we now will actually we now are completely controlling all those different layers, which is what we want. So now we're going to select this other one. Tap again, edit bone binding, and now we'll go to our properties, edit bone bindings, and this is the right arm. We're just selecting the top option there and go back then just test it a little bit. Yes. Awesome. Now, if we tilt the head, that works. Until the body like that. Now, again, if you want it to be more specific just to the head, we can actually tap on that, Edit bone binding. Go to Edit bone bindings, select the head layer. Now this bone will only control that layer like that. Oh no, our bow is not being controlled. Well, how do we fix that? Same option. We can actually go do our bone bindings, and I should have named that layer bow just to make sure but no, the bone head. And I'm not 100% happy with that, so I can tap on this and reset bone binding and leave it the way it is. I'm okay with it slightly warping the body. One more thing we could try to look at under properties is the strength of the bone. So if I lessen this just a little bit, it will reduce how much it is warping the layer down below as well. This is one of those however you want to approach it. The more strength we have, the more it's going to control the rest of the layers. I'm thinking that for this animation, this character is only going to move their head slightly to the left, slightly to the right, and I'm okay with how that's working. And there we go. We've now sat up and rigged our first gingerbread person. 21. Animating the Gingerbread Girl's Movement: So to follow our flow, we actually will need to turn this gingerbread person into a symbol. That way, we can still follow that practice of using symbols where we can. And so the challenge to that is we need to actually copy this layer, create a new layer down here, tap in the enthy spot and do paste. Go back to our main layer and remove them from that layer. Now we can rename this layer. Two and tap and create symbol. Now, I'm okay with the fact that when I tap and go to edit clip, it's going to maintain those 5 seconds, pinch the Zoom out, and we are going to still use keyframes for this specific gingerbread person. So to animate this, I'm picturing that this is a type of animatronic gingerbread person on a sore display. And so that's why I'm visioning. So I'm going to go to the bones layer and make sure I'm on the bone transform tool. And I'm thinking about how the movement's going to be. So maybe about 1-2 seconds, it's going to make slight movement, so maybe the head turns slightly to the right or the left, and then the arm comes up, and the other goes down. Maybe between the necks, the rhyme comes up just slightly and then copy this last frame, press, and hold, paste, and then put it on a loop and see how that works. So it looks jarring because there's one thing I forgot to do, and that is reset the arms. So to fix this, we're just going to go through each bone and do a copy based. And now play through. And I like how the head jars a little bit because it gives it that animatronic type of feel that everything is a bit mechanical. Now, let's see it in our main scene. Press play. I love it. Now we've animated our first gingerbread person. 22. Creating a Frame-by-Frame Wave Animation: All right. Now let's look at our next ginger by person. I have already created them as a symbol, and so we're going to go into that symbol to get started, and we're going to just pinch the Zoom out. So to get started, we're going to create two different types of poses for this ginger by person that we're going to recall into our main scene. For this first sequence, we're going to look at where we are our frames, up to 119 should be around 120. Zoom in. Make sure read 120 frames. And then tap and extend. There we go. The reason for this is this is going to be a looped idle animation that we'll animate here in a moment. So we're going to create set marker, and we're going to go 1-120, sometimes you have to type it twice, and we're going to make it loop and then do idle. So this is just the general, the body slightly moves, and then we're going to duplicate tap and press, duplicate drawing, which put it a few frames in for some reason. That's smaller and then from here, we're not going to create a loop animation because this will be the hand wave. Let's first look at the hand wave. I'm going to zoom in and for the wave we're going to use instead of keyframes, we're going to use frame by frame animation. To prep for this, I'm going to actually go into my gingerbread person, copy the arm, the left arm I want to animate, create a new layer, drag it down, so it's below, and then paste that layer and make sure it's two frames. Go back to the main one and hide it. The reason for this is this will still appear behind the gingerbread body and that's what we need. Now I want to think through my key poses. I have my first arm here and I'm thinking that it's going to wave upwards, so that's just going to happen over a few frames. I want to create my key poses first, key positions. Maybe on frame two, and frame three is where I actually want it to be midway and then these two frames is where it's midway, skip two, and then it's completely raised. So a few ways I can do that is I can just for now, add an empty drawing here, and I'm just going to duplicate empty drawing, empty drawing, Matures two, and empty drawing. Zoom. So we have two, four, six, 810. Within ten frames, we're going to change our position. Midway here is maybe this is where the arm is midway to accomplish this, I actually want to create a type of smear frame. A smear frame usually happens within 1 second of the animation, which is not going to be two frames because that will actually be too long, it'll be dropped down to one frame. I want to exaggerate this. If the arm is midway, then I want to picture how that looks. I already selected the main gingerbread bodies color for my brush, and I want to make sure I'm on rough ink. Tool, hide the main gingerbread. I'm just going to turn off onion skin for a second, quickly clean it up. A smear frame is not meant to be perfect. It's just a moment within the animation. Usually around one frame. We are just hiding things, and now we're just doing the outline. I'm going to add little arm bumps because this arm is moving fast and it's going to look weird. That's okay. Little bits of outline like that. Then we'll do the frosting layer as well, because that would definitely smear. I'm not worried about using the mask on this because this is going to show up for one frame. I actually want to drop this down to one frame with the next frame, I actually want it to be more in the position of where I want it. I'm going to it's going to overshoot a little bit. We're just going through because this is a wave, just creating the different key poses for the wave. We can actually now split the top and delete it so that it only goes down to the wave. And I'm just scrubbing it just to see how it looks. And I'm okay with that. All right. So I just go through and then just quickly color in the different arm positions. Oops. Make sure I'm on the main arm and just fill it in. Y. And now we can create our little marker section here. It's going to go from one frame 121 to frame 131, and we'll call it wave. Nice. Back in our main scene, we forgot one more thing. Our character is hidden, so we need to go back, make sure they are seen and whenever we want the character to wave. So maybe about here, we're going to select that frame and go down to select for markers and choose wave. Now, the trick for this is we do need to see the key frames because here is where the wave ends, and we want to go back to idle. So wave Then just one frame after they go back to idle and maybe they wave one more time, slightly past that and back to idle. Now when we watch our animation from the very beginning, we'll see how it plays out. Now we can refine that wave. Challenge yourself and see what type of wave you'll create with your gingerbread person. 23. Exporting Your Animation: Now that we have created our gingerbread greeting scene, we can now export it. To export it, we're going to go up to actions. Well, make sure we pause it up to actions and press Export. And all the default settings will work perfectly fine. Your antiis may be high. You could always select it to best. We'll choose high because it makes it smaller. Make sure it's MP four. Export either save to files or save to video for your iPad and then you can upload it to the class. I look forward to seeing your finished creation. Thank you for joining me in this class and have fun. 24. Course Wrap-Up and Congratulations: Congratulations. Thank you for taking this class. I can't wait to see your final project. You can even share your work in progress as well and get feedback along the way. I appreciate you taking the time and I hope you have fun animating your characters.