Hello everyone! Thanks for stopping by here. In this tutorial, I would like show you how easy it is to create animated stickers on Clip Studio Paint.

After some thinking, I decided to use one of the most trending topics: the coronavirus. Although more classic themes such as greetings or everyday dialogues are excellent, I think that creating stickers on nowaday topics would give creators an edge when it comes to selling their stickers in the market.

Step 1: Designing our character

The first step will be to design our main character: the virus. Try to create something cute, warped, rather than realistic. You can use the symmetric ruler to speed up the design process. When you have enough designs, choose the ones you like the most and contrast your opinion with your family or friends. I thought that the virus in the middle was the best, but people told me that they would never install a sticker as ugly as that. After listening to various opinions, I decided to use the character in the upper left corner. Do you think I did well?

Step 2: Decide the sticker contents

Now that we have our main character, we can sketch the concept of each sticker and the text it will carry. The same as your character design, it's a good idea to show your stickers to people trustworthy—especially those who have no qualms about telling you the truth.

Step 3: Prepare the canvas

Once we have the sketches, we will create a new file. Adjust the canvas size and animation parameters to those required by the application in which you intend to register your stickers later. Use the same color as the application background for the paper color. Remember that you can save your own presets, so you don't have to adjust them every time.

Step 4: Setup your layers and folders

This is one of the most accessible settings to create an animated sticker. I have created a background animation folder that will contain the non-moving parts of the animation; and a separate folder that I named "moving," where I will place the moving parts of the animation. Notice how I already placed the initial sketch of the sticker on the background folder. I put it into a normal folder which represents a single cel and prepared two layers, one for the linework and another one for the color.

 

Step 5: Create your animation

When you paint new cels, you can enable the onion skin. This allows you to see at a lower opacity the previous and the next cel for reference. You can change the onion skin settings in the Animation > Show animation cels > Onion skin settings menu.

You can see the results after painting each frame and coloring all cels above. It didn't take more than a few minutes.

I normally disable anti-aliasing from the linework at first, so that the paintbucket tools work flawesly. However, before exporting I apply a Blur > Smoothing filter. To export the animation, click on File > export Animation and select the format you want to use (e.g. APNG)

Using the same technique you can quickly create other stickers.

Bonus: using motion tween in your animations

You can also create motion tweening in Clip Studio using keyframes.

I prepared one animation folder containing the non-moving parts. In this case a boy inside a tyrannosaurus dress. On a separate animation folder, I created the virus animation where it runs away from the "scary" tyrannosaurus. Finally, on top of that I added a Camera 2D layer that allows specifying where the virus will appear on the final animation. To preview the final animation make sure you enable "Render 2D camera" in the Animation > Playback settings menu.

Bonus: using the layer mask to animate

Another quick method to create animated stickers consists of using layer masks.

As you can see in the image, there is a static image that I duplicated for each cel and then added a layer mask to each of them. The animation is created by changing the mask contents.

Bonus: using vectors to animate

You can use vector tools and transform tools such as mesh transformation to animate your stickers.

For example, here we are using the transform tool to rotate and reposition the bottle of 70% alcohol for disinfectant use.

By the way, you may want to use the light table functionality if you need to rotate or transform a reference layer and trace on top of it.

Vector tools such as connect, pinch or the control point tool are very useful to reshape your linework frame-by-frame.

Conclusions

In this tutorial I showed you 4 simple techniques to create animated stickers for your favourite chat application in no time:

 

• Static background and moving parts

• The motion tweeting using the Camera 2D functionality

• Animating through layer masks

• Animating using vector and transform tools

 

I hope it was helpful to you. Thanks for reading this tutorial.

 

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