Video:

Hi! my name is Iarlis and today I bring you a tutorial on how to make an illustration with movement.

 

This is a tutorial for beginners, starting with a little animation concept so you can bring your illustrations to life!

What we will do will be something similar to these commission examples <3

Examples:

Step 1: Sketch + Timeline Explanation

It's important to already mark the movement we'll be making in the illustration on the sketch. Obviously some do it on the fly, but when making a simple animation, we must mark the important points.

Example: eye movement, hair, clothes, etc!

Tip:

If this is your first time animating, I recommend you do simple movements: blinking, hair, scenery. Sometimes, less is more.

Timeline

Let's create the timeline. Activate it in "Window" -> Timeline.

We'll leave it as default.

1: This is the animation folder, it's a folder where we can put several layers to organize. It's like a normal folder but this one is exclusively for animation.

 

Why not use a normal folder? A normal folder is registered throughout the entire timeline. This means we cannot shorten or lengthen it.

 

2: This is the onion skin layer, most of you have probably heard of it. It serves to see the previous and subsequent drawing to guide us between frames.

 

3: This is the well-known animation cel. It appears as a layer within the animation folder and with its help, we can create the sequence.

Animated Sketch + Animation Concept

Now understanding a little about the timeline, we will proceed to classify the sketch. Let's sketch the animation.

 

A basic animation concept is that the more frames you have together (more drawings), the slower the movement. And the further apart the drawings are, the faster it is.

 

If you want to make a more complex animation with movement, I recommend you make the well-known key poses. But in this tutorial I will only focus on a simple animation.

 

Examples of animation practice I did at my university <3

If you are interested in complex animations, this official Clip Studio tip explains it in more detail

1)Normal folders can be used for organization (as in my case).

2) Animation folders are absolutely mandatory when animating as they allow us to move through the timeline.

 

For the animated sketch, I will only animate blinking, coffee smoke, cell phone, and pupils.

The rest will be animated in After Effects

Step 2: Lineart and Color

The lineart and color step is the same as we do for an illustration. In a normal illustration, we use normal folders, and for animation lineart, we will use the animation folders I explained earlier.

 

To guide yourself with the animation color, use several animation folders. DO NOT do all the full color on a single layer because it will be difficult when moving to the next frame. Separate it by: Lineart, Base color, Shadow, Brightness.

To keep everything tidy when viewing so many animation folders, organize them with normal folders.

Hair: preparing the strands

For the hair, we are going to separate the strands: static BASE and then the divided strands. For the hair part, an animation folder is not necessary (I was going to do it in Clip Studio but decided to do it in After Effects to show you, that's why the animation folder is there).

It looks strange without hair, haha. The base hair will be what doesn't move.

So! We have to prepare everything to then pass it to After. We will do the hair as we usually do, but separating the strands to leave it prepared.

At this moment I am separating the strands into PART A and PART B, which would be the bangs, and subdividing the strands.

This helps me to have a better order and not get lost when exporting it as PNG and adding it to After Effects.

Step 3: Exporting to add to After Effects

We will export it like this. We will export the animation but hide the folders that we need to animate later in After Effects. In my case, these would be the hair strands and other small things like logos and symbols.

 

 

Animation export:

We will hide the folders we left to import them later into After Effects. The animation that we are not going to modify and that we made in Clip Studio will be exported as a movie.

I recommend that you always color the folders you will animate elsewhere. In this case, purple are the folders I'm going to animate in After Effects.

It would look like this before After Effects.

PNG Export for After Effects:

Remember the smoke I made at the beginning? That's an animation I'll add in After Effects, but how do we export it? We'll export it as an image sequence.

So the steps would be:

File -> Export Animation -> Image sequence

For the hair strands, we will respect the order. Do not export everything complete, but rather each strand with its respective name. It's tedious but it will help us when we import it.

AFTER EFFECTS

File import

RECOMMENDATION: watch the video to understand it better. I will try to explain it here.

 

For the hair, we must "anchor" it, so to speak

This way the hair will move but in place and not everywhere.

Okay, we have rotation, we'll keep it simple haha.

Activate the keyframe (the one next to rotation) and we'll move through the timeline and change the number. In my case, I'll put 7. And then at the end, we'll put 0 again to create the loop.

To export the animation, we must go to:

File -> Export -> Add to Adobe Encoder queue or processing queue.

We can export it as a PNG image sequence or H.264.

In my case, both ways because I want to improve certain details and add little things in Photoshop <3

Result:

So never limit yourselves <3 and I hope to see your beautiful animations!