Transcripts
1. Intro: Hi, everyone. My
name is Mike Ryan. As a Harmony
animator generalist, I have been animating for over 15 years with animation specializations
in character, Rig, Effects, compositor,
and background. I graduated from the UCF
Experimental animation Program under Professor
Modus Scott Hall. I have Workrif Harmony as an online animation
teacher here at Skillshare as a freelance
animator at Future Port 82. As an independent filmmaker, my film a midwinter Nighttream now playing in film festivals, and as a contracted
to the animator at Mighty Animation the second
best hospital in the galaxy, now play on Amazon Prime. In this animation class, I will give you a behind
the scenes look in how I inked and painted a bird
flying from start to finish. I'll teach you the
strategies, processes, and tips that goes into colorizing our
animated characters through inking and painting. First, I will show
you how to clean up your drawings by inking
over them as an overlay. Then we will create
different kinds of flame work based
on the amount of pressure we exert
on our brush to signify the depth and
perspective of the character. Next, we will paint the characters in with
the colors of our choice, including how to choose any gap. Next, we will paint
the character in with the colors
of our choice, including how to
close any gap that may prevent us from
painting those characters. After that, we will add tones and highlights
to our character. And finally, we will add a subtle blur
effect to our work. From the average show, it
was just starting off in the art form to the artist who already has
experience in the medium. This class is great for
beginners, hobbyist, and professionals in the
field because you can use all these skills to further your understanding of the
principles of animation. You can apply these skills
to multiple situations outside this class with animation made for
your demo wheels, social media, websites, and
short films of your very own. Okay. I encourage
all of you to share your work around here because
we're all on the same boat. By the end of this class, not only will you have a better understanding of
how animation is made, but you will be able to ink
and paint your own animation. Thank you so much
for dropping by, and I hope you enjoy the
class. See you soon.
2. Inking Your Character: Once that was done, I then did the motion troll
graph of the cube which then led me
to my pencil test of the bird flying through. And that was the
last I left you. So this I've done since then. This was the first pencil
test I made from my scene. There were in total 160
drawings in the sequence alone. I had the exposure
set for the drawings, alternating 2-1 because when I did them on twos
it was too slow. And when I exposed I
ones, that was too bad. So doing it by two by
one by two by one, alternating between
those two numbers. Gave me the right
balance that I needed, that it's not too fast. It's not too slow, that
the paced needs to go. So this shot runs at
24 frames per second, which would give me in total
10 seconds of animation, which mounts to 240 frames. Here is my clean dub animation
now having been inked. When it comes to inking, I apply different amounts of pressure on certain
parts of the body. The more pressure I
apply to the drawing, the darker or thicker
the line will be. The less pressure I
apply to the drawing, the lighter or thinner
the line will be, I do this because It creates a sense of
death to the drawing, a sense of perspective. So certain parts of
the body will appear darker than other parts of
the body will appear lighter. That would suggest something is in front of something else. And we learn that from drawing. When you're drawing still
lives or objects or people, you apply a certain amount
of pressure on the pencil. So that way, it would suggest something the foreground and something the background. And it just gives the drawing an extra kick that makes
it stand out more. And so I did that for
all the drawings, and it could be tiresome
and laborsme to, but it's worth it because if you did the drawing with the same amount of
pressure everywhere, then the line work would
be exactly the same, and just doesn't
send out as much as it would if you applied
it differently. You get different kinds of line work from that,
which I like more. I like applying
different amounts of pressure because it gives me different kinds of line work, which then makes
the drawing send out at least for me, at least. I go to lie, it takes a long time to ink
all these drawings. It takes a lot of time effort and patience
to go through it. But in the end, once you see everything cleaned
up, it's worth it.
3. Painting Your Character: Here's the painted
version of the animation. Just like a king, I painted all 160 drawings
of the sequence. And the way it
works on tune boom is I have the inking
done as an overlay. An overlaying is a layer that's
placed over your drawing. So think of it like in
photoshop, you have a layer, you create a new layer on top
of it and you can draw over it without affecting the
original layer. It's like that. So after I finished the inking, I then went to the color
art layer from my painting, which is beneath the
overlay and the line layer. So I would copy all 160 drawings and paste them into
the color art layer. That way, the inking can remain a separate layer the painting
can be its own layer. So that way I can have them
for archival purposes. So if I make a
mistake, doctor or, I still have the
original drawings opposite side that
I can go to still. And from there, I then begin
painting all 160 drawings. And just like before, it does take a lot of time
effort and patience, but once you get through it, you will love the
result at the end. So sometimes when you're
inking and painting, you might have different
ways of going about it. Like, for me, I go
back and forth, if I would either work on a certain part of the
body. Let's say the beak. Now I do the beak, you know, for twin drawings before I go on to another
section of the body, or I might do the entire
body at the same time. Now I'll do that
for twin drawings before doing something else. It depends on how you feel
because sometimes you may feel like I want to do the whole
body at the same time. I just want to do a certain part to make you feel like
you're going faster. Or you might feel
like, you know, I don't feel like I'm
accomplishing I don't feel like I'm doing enough focusing on
one piece of the character. I can do everything
at the same time. So you might want
to do that too. I personally do it
both ways based on how I'm feeling at the
moment, and I think that works. Okay. Sometimes when you paint the paint may
fill in the shape, that might suggest that the
line work is not complete, that there may be
a hole or a gap. When that happens, I just go to the closed gap tool and
that resolves that issue. Then you'll be able to
paint the entire shape.
4. Creating the Tones: The final piece of our class is us working on the highlights
and tones of our animation. What that means is whenever light hits a
character or object, it creates shadows
and highlights, shadows as in how dark the object or
character will appear. And the lights that
shines on the subject. The first part we should do is the tone
because the tone is actually the easiest part of
the situation, if you will. With the tone, we're going
to go into the node network, which is in that node window off the side in your
tune boom program. We're going to get
it from the library, the tone element and drop it in connected with the drawing layer
we're going to create. In our new drawing layer, create a rectangle and fill in the rectangle with
any color you can think of. It doesn't matter
really. It could be red, blue, purple, anything.
It doesn't matter. Once you do that, make sure that it covers the entire character. Now, in order to see that, we're going to have to view our work through the
camera view window, the camera view window
allows us to see the animation in pre resolution
and full resolution. So make sure in that window that the rectangle covers the
entire character to be safe, make sure that covers the
entire camera view because your character will be changing in perspective in shape
from small to big. So having the rectangle cover the entire camera
view makes sense then, Once you have that done, head over to the no
network window there, you can change the
settings of your tone from the intensity
to the opacity. That way you can have control over the shade of
your character or object. Make sure in your timeline that your drawing covers 240 frames. That way, your character will always be in that shade
because if you don't, you're going to have frames
where the shade is not shown, and then that will be bad. So don't do that. Okay. Okay.
5. Animating the Highlights: With the tone out of the way, we can now focus
on the highlight. Now, the high light involves animating because
with each frame, we have to draw out
what parts of the body, the light would be
hitting the character. With this part, you can play around with it because there are many examples online of the light hitting characters or objects in different ways. So play around with it, see what works best for you, and then go with that. This section will require us to be playing around with
the light because we need to find out for ourselves Where would the light work best on the character, how it should look like
and how it's going to look like when it's in motion because that can make
a difference too. You have to take
that into account. It helps me to find examples
online because there are many examples of light hitting subjects
in different ways. So that always is
a good reminder. So it will be a trial
and error process for you focus on one area that the light should be only to find out I don't think
it's going to work, and then you erase
that. That's fine. It's good to go through that
process because that way, we can know where parts work
and where parts don't work. Once you are done
animating the highlights, head over to the
node network window and play around the settings, there you can play around
with your opacity, the intensity, and the
sharpness of your high light. If your scene needs to have
a sharp lighting effect, then make sure that the
blur is turned off. If your scene needs a blur
effect to the lighting, then play around
the blur settings. Choose whatever setting
works best for you, depending on what you're looking
for in your scene. Okay.
6. Creating the Blur: With the highlights and
tones out of the way, we now have one
final thing to do. We want to give our animation a simple slight blur effect. Now, this is a personal
preference, but for me, I like to add a slight
blur to animation because that's what the
old school animation had. Since everything was
done analog back then, there was a blur to it, so
it was never too sharp. And as a result, there was a warmth to
the war that you saw. Today, with everything
being done digital, you tend to have everything
done super sharp. The problem with that is
that with the sharpness, there's a cltness that
unintentionally comes from that that
feels less organic, less natural and consequently, a lack of warmth to the work. This is for a perfect example. This is like the comparison between vinyl records and CDs. When you play a vinyl
record on the player, you can feel and hear the warmth of the music of
the sound that the player is producing on the vinyl as a result of the needle
dropping on the vinyl. You don't get that same
kind of form when you play the same kind of music on the CD player because on the CD, the music has been digitized. So there is a difference
between the two. And that's why I like to add a slight word to my
animation because for me, it given more of a
natural quality to it. Last for as, let's
take a look at all the work we've accomplished
in these few classes. I'm getting to end, we have the six pieces showing the
progression for animation.
7. Conclusion: Hi, welcome back. Now that
you have finished the class, let us do a quick
recap of what we learned before we dive
into the class project. First, I showed you
how to clean up your drawings by inking
over them as an overlay. Then we created
different kinds of flying work based
on the amount of pressure we exerted
under our brush to signify the death and
perspective of the character. Following that, we page the character in with the
colors of our choice, including how to close
out any gap that may forbs completing
the painting. After that, we added tones and highlights
to our character. And finally, we added a subtle
blur effect to our work. Our project for this class will be divided up into
several assignments. There is no rush in
completing these tasks. They will take
time and patience, so no pressure at all. Work on this project on
your own pace and leisure. Once you finish your animation, please post all your animation to the class project gallery. For your first assignment, post your inked animation of your scene in the
class project gallery. For Assignment two, post your painted animation of your scene in the
class project gallery. For Assignment three, post your toned animation of your scene in the
class project gallery. Assignment four, post your
highlighted animation of your scene in the
class project gallery. Assignment five, post
your blurred animation of your scene in the
class project gallery. I promise you that'll be the
last time you're hearing me say in the class
project gallery. We're required to, Well,
That's it for now. Thank you so much
for dropping by. I really appreciate it. I hope I was able to
make this class fun, open, and informative
for all of you. Thank you again, and.
See you later. Okay.
Mike Ryan, Traditional Animator
