Hello! In this article we will learn how to make animated EMOTES in Clip Studio PAINT, so that you can upload them to the social network that you use, be it Discord, Twitch, Instagram or TikTok.

What we will do:

We will learn to make 3 types of animated emotes, which are the following:

Emote 1

Emote 2

Emote 3

Therefore, I want to invite you to see my tutorial called:

How to make animated EMOTES in Clip Studio PAINT (TUTORIAL)

Remember to activate the subtitles in your language, you will surely find it :)

What do you think about the video? We saw step by step and in detail how to make animated emotes in Clip Studio PAINT.

Step by step of the animated emote process

Now we will see through images the process to create our animated emotes, just as we saw in the video tutorial, but we will focus only on one, since the process is the same in the 3 animated emotes.

1. Project Creation

We open Clip Studio PAINT and go to: File - New.

In this new Project window we choose: Illustration and in the name of the file we change the name to whatever we want.

 

In Preset we choose Square (1668 x 1668 px) Resolution: 72

Finally, it is very important to activate: Create Animated Illustration.

Frames per second at: 8 fps.

 

And we leave everything as is as you can see in the following image.

Once the project is created we must activate the timeline, to do this we go to the menu:

Window - Timeline

Then we go to the layers panel and delete the animation folder that is created by default next to the project.

2. Animation Sketch

Next we create a new raster layer.

Name: Sketch

Before continuing, it is very important that we save our project, to do this we are going to:

File - Save As. And we choose the folder where we want the project to be.

And we draw the sketch of our animation, in this case, it will be the character with excited eyes, very excited about something in particular, almost crying.

3. Animation

Let's go to the timeline to create a new animation folder, named: Animation.

We're going to go to the layers panel and create a new layers folder, inside the newly created animation folder.

Inside this layers folder we will create different types of layers.

 

- Color Line (Raster Layer - Snap to Layer Below)

- Line (Vector Layer)

- Shading (Raster Layer)

- Base (Raster Layer)

 

 

We select the Line layer and on the timeline we activate: Specify Cels.

We choose drawing 1

Finally we select the Sketch layer and lower the opacity to 25%.

We are going to animate only the eyes, since it will be the only thing that will have movement.

For this I recommend using the Pen tool.

And we will draw the eyes on the line layer.

And we make the first drawing of the eyes animation.

Now in the timeline we go to frame 2 to create a new animation cel.

As you can see, we created this new animation cel respecting all the layers and their names. It is an option that I love and saves us a lot of time.

We activate the onion skin to be able to see the previous drawing and guide us to make this new drawing.

Achieving the following result:

Once we have finished we are going to edit the duration of the animation, leaving it at 2 frames.

We do this by taking the blue bracket on the timeline.

Now under the eyes animation we create a new layers folder.

Name: Body. And we will create the same layers that we created for the eyes animation.

 

- Color Line (Raster Layer - Snap to Layer Below)

- Line (Vector Layer)

- Shading (Raster Layer)

- Base (Raster Layer)

 

 

And on the line layer we draw the border line of the character's body.

At the moment we have the following result:

Animation Line

4. Animation Color

Next we are going to paint our animation, first, we select the Fill tool. In Sub Tool: Refer to other layers.

To have the colors of our character I am going to import an image, since it is a character that I have used for other animations.

 

To do this we are going to activate the Subview tool. In Window - Subview.

At the bottom we have options to import an image from our equipment, it will depend on whether you are working from a computer or, as is my case, from an iPad Pro.

Don't forget to activate the Eyedropper tool in the Subview window, so when you move the cursor over the image we can select the color, while in the work area we can paint with the fill tool, without having to change tools.

 

It is something very useful!

To paint we will start with the body area, to do this we deactivate the eyes animation for a moment and select the Base layer from the body layers folder, to be able to paint with just one click.

Using the subview tool, taking the colors of our character, we were able to paint the body.

To paint the border line we select the Color Line layer and paint the entire work area.

 

But thanks to the option that we activated previously called: Adjust to lower layer. This will only affect the character's line.

Now we will paint the shadow, the first thing we are going to do is select the Shading layer and in the blending modes, we change from Normal to Multiply.

With the same colors as the base layer we are going to paint the shadows, this time with the Pen tool.

Now we will paint the animation of the eyes, to do this we deactivate the body layer and make the eyes animation folder visible.

But first, by double clicking on the paper layer we are going to change the white background color. So that the colors are not confused when painting the eyes. It always happens to me that I forget to paint the white area of the eyes when the work area is white by default.

A gray tone is enough, remember that it is only to guide us, since the final animation will be transparent.

And we paint the same as we did with the body, with the fill tool and the Pen tool.

And we do the same with the second drawing of the eyes animation.

Once we have finished, we make the body layer visible again, to have our animation complete.

And at the moment we have the following animation:

Animation Color

5. Edge Effect

Finally we will add an effect, to do this we create a new layers folder above all the layers.

Name: Emote 1 (or whatever you want)

And we take the eyes and body animation layer by putting them inside this new layers folder called Emote 1.

Selecting the Emote 1 folder in Layer Properties we activate: Border Effect.

We increase its value to 15. Making a white border visible around the entire outline of our character.

And we obtain the following result:

Animation with border effect

6. Export your Animation

Finally we will export our animation, to do this we go to File - Export Animation - Animated Gif.

We can give a name to our animation file

In this new window we will leave everything by default, in my case I will let the size be 560 x 560 px. If you want it to be bigger, you can change the value, for me it is enough.

 

But it is very important that you activate: Make the background transparent.

 

This is one of the new Clip Studio PAINT options. Personally, I love it!

After clicking OK and exporting our animation, Clip Studio will give us information about the exported file.

Animated Emote

7. Upload Animated Emotes to Giphy

Why do I upload the animated emote to Giphy? Because I don't have a Discord or Twitch account, but that doesn't stop me from creating my own animated emotes to use and share on other social networks, and that's where Giphy will help us a lot.

 

We go to Giphy and click on the button: Create a new GIF or Sticker.

Then on the button: Select GIF or video from the device.

We look for the animations and activate the button: Use.

In this new view we are going to add a link and labels, these are very important for when users from all over the world use our animations.

 

I always recommend entering your username and searching for words related to your animation, in my case for example they could be the tags: kawai, emote, cry, eyes, anime, chibi, reaction, etc.

 

Once we have finished, we click on the button: Upload to Giphy.

And ready! We have uploaded our animated emote to Giphy.

If we click on it to look at it we can see that it has a message at the bottom, this tells us that it is being analyzed by the Giphy platform, we must wait a few hours.

While we upload the other animations we made in the tutorial, obtaining a total of 3 new animated emotes.

And after a few hours we look at our animations again, if the message appears: Available on Giphy it is because your animated emotes can now be used by you as well as by anyone around the world.

8. Animated Emotes on Instagram

Below you can see how I use my animated emotes for my Instagram Stories (you can also use them for Instagram Reels or TikTok videos)

 

When creating an Instagram Story we select Sticker - Gif, and write our username (it's easier to find) and in my case, I have all these animated Stickers/Emotes.

 

Other people can use them by writing the words we use on the labels.

I choose one and we can use it in our Instagram Stories.

9. Farewell

I hope this article has inspired you so that you can create your own animated emotes, as you can see, you can use them on the social network you want.

 

See you in the next TIP!