Emotes are very popular and accessible on almost all platforms and the best way to convey emotions in a personalized way. Making your own emotes isn’t that difficult, just draw what you want and save it at a smaller size, so you can use them everywhere. Animating them might seem like a difficult task, but it’s actually really easy even without having animated before! In this tutorial, I’ll teach a few easy and simple methods to bring life to your emotes.

I’ll introduce three simple ways:

 

- Using the transform tool

- Frame by frame animation

- Using liquify tool

 

All of these can easily be used together, too, to make the process easier and faster.

Ok, that's all good, but what if you already have emotes made, and you want to animate those directly? No problem! In all three methods, I’ll also mention how you could work with a pre-drawn emote directly!

 

 

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Introduction + Animating with Transform Tool

To keep this super easy, let’s directly begin the way you would for any illustration. Go to file>new, then just set the height and width, in a square ratio. Currently, the size of the canvas doesn’t matter.

Now, before we begin drawing, you need to already decide what part of the character you want moving. For example, you want to animate a simple hello. In that case, the only necessary moment will be of the hand.

To keep this super easy, let’s directly begin the way you would for any illustration. Go to file>new, then just set the height and width, in a square ratio. Currently, the size of the canvas doesn’t matter.

Now, before we begin drawing, you need to already decide what part of the character you want moving. For example, you want to animate a simple hello. In that case, the only necessary moment will be of the hand.

Once these elements are drawn seperately, you can place them into two different folders and save the file.

For the sake of simplicity, once the file is saved, you can go ahead and merge these layers. In my case, I decided to keep them, just in case I wanted to fix something separately, but I would recommend changing the bg to black and cleaning up, so you don’t have to work with folders when you begin animating.

 

There are some basic terms you need to know before we start:

 

- Frame Rate : You might know Frame rate more as “fps” or “frames per second”. This is what determines how many frames will be played in one second. While higher fps may signify a smoother animation, That isn’t necessarily the case, as you can get a good animation with your frame rate being between just 8–10 frames per second.

- Timeline: This will be a visual display of where your animation is occurring, that is, it will show where the frames are placed.

- Playback time: In CSP, playback time decides how many frames your animation will have.

Now we can really start animating!

In the top menu, you’ll find the “Window” tab, click “Timeline” in its drop down menu to view the timeline.

 

(In the next animations, we’ll directly open an animation file. For your introduction to animation, the best thing to do is avoid overwhelming yourself and approaching each step separately.)

In the timeline window, click the icon for “new animation folder,” this will add a folder in your layers window, we’ll be using that in a bit.

Next, click the “New Timeline”. This will open a new window with several options, let’s tackle these one by one.

Your “Timeline Name” can stay the default one. Since these are basic emotes, we won’t need more than one timeline. Further, Clip Studio Paint allows you to space out frames easily, so even if an element needs to move slower than the fps that you’re working on, it won’t be an issue.

For frame rate, let’s use “8 fps” for this animation.

For “playback time,” for now keep it at “10” frames, this can be changed later. Next to it, you’ll see a box, select “Frame number (from 1)” there. I’ll explain in detail what this means later.

For now, leave scene number and shot number as 1.

Division line can stay any number, I’ll show what these mean once we have the timeline made.

Now, just click “ok” and we’re ready for just a little more theory, bear with me. While some of these things can be skipped, there’s no harm in knowing what you’re working with. If it’s too information heavy for you, feel free to skim through or skip right ahead!

Timeline

In the timeline, you can move all the frames in one layer at once if you click the “edit timeline” button, next to the “new timeline” button.

You can also zoom in and out to view less or more frames at once.

The loop button will make sure that when you play your animation, it will keep restarting until you pause.

In the frames, you’ll notice a full line after “6”, this is just for reference, it will be at all multiples of 6, since that's the value we selected in the divider line.

Also, you’ll notice that the color changes after 8, this is because we are working at 8 fps, the color change indicates that one second is over, and the next one has begun. This color will keep alternating.

Finally, remember that you can move the blue line to change the playback time at any point in the process!

Here are some more options that I will come back to, reference this image to know where they’re placed!

My thumbnail size is set to “none” so that the timeline looks more clean. You can keep it according to your preference :)

I’ll also need you to go to “Show animation cels” and enable onion skin.

 

 

Animating Using The Transform Tool

Alright! Now that we have all that cleared up, let’s place the folder or layer into the animation folder we made earlier. Make a new separate folder for the hand as well. You can rename the folders as "hand" and “character” for convenience. The number after the colon shows how many layers are in the folder.

Once you move them inside, you’ll notice that the layers are no longer visible on the canvas. This is because they’re not placed in the timeline yet. To place them in the timeline, just go to the column that says “1” in the timeline, parallel to the “character” column and right click. This will show a menu.

Here, click on the layer to place it in the timeline.

Similarly, with the hand, right click and place it onto the timeline.

Now, let’s start making the hand move. Place it wherever you want the hand to be initially and then go to layer>duplicate layer and start placing the duplicates like so:

Now, select the second duplicate layer and click “Ctrl+t” to transform the hand. Once the box appears, you’ll notice a small “+” icon in the middle, move that plus icon to the bottom of the hand, this will determine the axis for rotation. Now, when you rotate the hand to the right, it will look natural, further, you’ll also notice a translucent image behind it, this is “onion skin” that shows where your previous frame was. Once you move the third frame as well, you’ll notice that the second frame now shows both the frames before and after.

I added my onion skin settings as well, just in case.

To make it look smooth, I like to keep the starting movement slow and use the inbetweens to get the movement there, finishing off slow again to make the movement settle in. This also helps the loop since there’s a pattern of slow then fast and then slow again.

Also, try to stay a little longer on the “extreme” positions, that is, when the hand is at the far left and at the far right. In my case, I did this by leaving the 1st and 6th frame for two frames instead of just one.

Now, to export, just go to file>export animation>animated GIF.

You can change the image resolution under “edit” to keep the size smaller.

And there you have it!! Your first animated emote is done!! yippee!!

Instead of uploading the actual smaller resolution gifs, for the sake of clarity, I’ll be uploading the gifs at a higher resolution.

 

 

Introduction 2.0

That was pretty easy, right? You don’t have to limit yourself to just the transform tool, though! CSP also has “free transform” and “perspective tools”

I’ll show you how you can use these and also how to directly open an animation file directly. Let’s begin!

When you click “New,” CSP gives the option of “animation” at the end. We’ll select that. When you select this, you’ll see the basic width, height and resolution, but if you scroll down, you’ll see a few more options.

You can ignore the other options right now, all we need to focus on is the timeline, which you already know how to use and the “blank space”.

Blank space is essentially a border around your canvas, this can be really useful in animation because the elements can go out of frame and still be visible. You can set these to any amount of pixels, just keep in mind that during exporting, these pixels will be minus-ed from the final animation. So, if my width is 800, and the total added left, and right space has 100 pixels, then the final saved animation will be the 700 pixels that are inside the margin lines.

When you click “ok,” The file will directly open with one frame and one animation folder. You can do your sketching outside the folder to make sure all layers are visible without needing to create a folder.

Earlier, I skipped a few buttons in the timeline because they weren’t necessary yet, these include buttons for adding cels. Next to the new animation folder, you’ll find the “add cel” which adds an empty layer wherever the cursor is on the timeline, “assign cel” that lets you select what cell to place and finally “delete specified cels” that lets you delete all selected cels at once from the timeline.

 

 

Animating using The Free Transform Tool

For the next animation, lets go for a character getting a head pat, here’s the idea:

 

 

To do this, you have to divide the elements according to the movement. First and foremost, I want the hand to rotate downwards to make it look like a pat.

Then comes the impact of the pat, the entire face doesn’t need to come down, instead, it would be better to use the “free transform” tool, so you can squish the hair down. Further, for the face as well, while that may move down, I need it to squish a bit along with the arm. So, keeping it on a separate layer, we can make it squish while moving down.

That makes four elements: the still body from the neck, the hair, the face and the hand.

In my case, since the hair were above the face, but ears above the hair, I kept the ears as a separate layer that moves up and down, without any squishing.

Here are the elements moving separately:

When you place all these elements together, you need to sync them a bit as well. Remember that the movement of the body will follow that of the hand, since everything is a minor change, you don’t have to make any big movements. So, in this example the breakdown is as follows: First, the hand goes down, then the face first moves down, then squishes, and then this goes in reverse to make a loop. As for the hair, in all frames they squish downward, not having any major change in the main position.

And with that, you’re ready with your final animated emote, ready to export. Remember how I mentioned that the area outside margins won't be included? You’ll see that in action when you export. You’ll notice that the final dimensions displayed are different. If you wish to keep the size as the original one, you can change the dimensions on the final window, but even then, the ratio without the margins needs to stay consistent, so keep that in mind.

What If You Already Have an Emote Drawn?

Say, for example, I already have this emote made, but now I want to add animation to it, what now? If you look back on the first example, see how we started with an illustration file only? That’s exactly how we’ll approach this emote. The only difference is, we need to separate the elements. Most emotes use simple art styles, so all you need to do is open the file, duplicate the layers and manually erase the area surrounding the elements.

I want to make the emote show the character touching their fingers and then, additionally, moving her head down whenever the fingers touch and up whenever they’re apart.

Once the elements on the top are all separated, select all the layers with the elements above the still base layer and go to “layer”>"selection from layer" >"create selection". This will select all the area that will be moving. Now, on the base, you’ll erase this area because we don’t want parts of her head or hands visible under the moving hand or head. Also, once this area is erased, you can easily color in the parts that are empty now.

Onto the moment, like we did before, add a new timeline and then make the separate animation folders for each element. This animation is fairly simple, so we only need 3 different frames: the First one is the first extreme, that will be the head at it’s lowest, with the fingers touching. The Second frame will be the next extreme, this will have the hands at their furthest distance and the head at its highest position. Now you only need a frame connecting these, so, for the hands, this will be the hands at a middle position. Same for the head, place it at a height that’s loosely the middle of the two extreme positions. These cels will be between the two extremes.

Below is how I placed these frames and a screenshot of the timeline.

 

 

And there we have it! Three easy animated emotes that you can make for yourself, just using the “transform” tool in csp!

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Frame By Frame Animation

Frame by frame animation is more time-consuming, but it has its own special vibe that you just can’t skip out on. Frame by frame animation is more expressive as well since you have more freedom with the movement.

Let’s start with something simple like animating hearts next to a character.

As we did in all the previous animations, start with the base and add a new animation layer for the hearts. Since we’re going frame by frame, drawing everything manually, the “add new cel” option will be your go to for this.

For hearts that will be appearing “out of nowhere,” start small, like a dot that slowly grows bigger. The next part will be taking this growing hard and adding a flowy movement to it, like making it go up in a “c” shape. This is better explained visually below:

 

 

This approach works for any simple shape or even complex shape that you want coming out of nowhere. Hearts are anyway essential to any animated emote set.

All we need to do now is add these hearts next to the character, and make sure that it loops back properly! Below, I’ve added the animation, both at 2 fps and it’s original 8 fps so you can really see what’s going on in each frame.

Frame By Frame Animation With Complete Movement

Frame by frame animation involves each cel being hand-drawn, unlike in the previous example, I will be animating everything seperately, without the transform tool, in order to make the animated emote look more organic.

A full-fledged animated emote might look a bit daunting, but if you approach this one frame at a time, it won’t be that difficult. That said, I do admit that it might take time and a few tries to really get it to look right. I will openly admit that i myself, am still improving with my skills so take your time to make it look right for you.

For this example, I took a character crying, the rough draft, slowed down is below:

This will involve a lot of layers to make the process more clean, consisting of:

1. Separately drawn hair that expand when the character cries.

2. The face moving up, with the changing facial expressions.

3. The tears falling.

4. The shoulders moving up when the character cries.

5. The colors.

This is what the final timeline looked like:

My biggest advice for animations like this is to look at other people’s work, observe real people and to see tutorials by people from the industry itself. Animation, like any other skill can be developed.

My second advice would be to not get stuck trying to make it look perfect, for example, I see several faults in the above animation, but instead of dwelling on that, I think it’s better to let it be and keep making new things. Fixing an animation isn’t an easy task, In my opinion, instead of going back to it again and again can become counterproductive, instead taking a break and redrawing it with a new approach after learning where you made the mistakes can be a better learning experience.

Adding Animation Over an Emote

Let's pick up the old emote again and add some sparkle to the eyes and behind the character.

For both the sparkles, remember the hearts approach, a small dot that take shapes and then turns back into a dot. To add more life to it, you can make it rotate a bit as well.

In the yellow sparkle, once the shape is at its biggest, make the next frame’s shape slightly smaller and then alternate between the bigger and smaller shape, this will give a twinkling effect.

There are several other things you can add over a pre-existing emote, you could even cover up the hands like we did earlier and then redraw the hands, making them do any gesture that you’d like. For the sake of simplicity, I won’t be adding too much to it right now, but you can take it as a task to pick up an existing illustration and think of all the different ways you could add animation to it, whether it be with the transform tool or by drawing frame-by-frame. Have fun!

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Using The Liquify Tool

The liquify tool is probably not most people’s go-to for animation, but it's great for getting a very smooth animation that feels similar to 3-D animation or after effects animations. For this example, I’ll be animating a character winking, with his hair moving as an additional. Let’s start!

I’ll begin by first separating the entire character and the eye, making sure to color the eyelid alongside. Then, in separate folders, I’ll add the line art for the eye and the colors under it.

Further, I also separated the front hair that will be moving, keeping the blue on the base so that there’s no empty space or weird skin color when the hair moves.

Starting with the base, I decided to duplicate it and using “push” in the liquify tool, I gently moved the hair. When you look at it directly, this movement might seem really minor, but it has it’s own impact in the final animation, since the eye catches movement easily.

 

 

Now, let’s tackle the eye. For the eye, using the same tool, we slowly push the line downwards. The liquify tool helps give a rounded effect that makes the movement look more natural.

In the image below, you’ll see that I redrew the eye in the 5th frame, this is because the eye curves in a way that would’ve distorted the eye if I used liquify. That aside, in the previous frames, I saved a lot of time by simply “pushing” down the curve, instead of redrawing every frame.

Now, all I needed to do was erase the iris and the sclera according to the eye closing.

After that, aligned with the frame where the other hair move, using the liquify tool, I pushed the hair to the right as well.

Since the movement is only for the frames where the back hair move, most of the timeline uses the 1st frame only.

When the movement begins, I use the same logic as before, one bigger movement between minor changes in the position of the hair. With this movement, I also had to change the places where the strand's color is visible to make sure that there is no blank space.

When all the elements are put together, the emote looks great, but there's still something missing…..which makes this a perfect example to mix everything we did earlier!

I begin by first adding a start flying out, the way we did in the frame by frame animation. Then, to really bring it to life, I separate the arm from the body, cover up the blank space and give it a little sway with the transform tool.

 

And there you have it!! Our final example using all three methods: Liquify for eyes and hair, Transform> Rotate for the arm and finally, a star drawn frame by frame!

 

 

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Thank You!

That concludes this tutorial!! I really hope that this helps you and inspires you to make your own animated emotes. If any section is unclear, please feel free to ask! Thank you for your time and best of luck for all your next creations !!