- Hello, wonderful people. Today, we're going to be
drawing a super cute animal holding whatever you want. I'm going to have it hold a huge heart, because we're pretty
close to Valentine's Day, but this is an entirely
customizable tutorial. So throughout the entire video,
I'm going to give you tips on how you can change the different steps to customize your illustration. And all you need to
follow along this video is your favorite digital art software, I will be using Procreate,
as well as a dra
wing brush that you know you're comfortable
with and you know you like. And if like me, you are
working in Procreate, there's going to be a
little bit of a bonus at the end of the video. I'm going to show you how you
can make your character blink. So just to create a very simple animation. Now if you don't know me, my name is Genevieve and my
goal here on this channel is to teach you all about
illustration and design. So if you're new, make sure to subscribe so you don't miss any
of the weekly v
ideos, and so you can join our
wonderful creative community. Now with that said, grab your drawing tools
and let's get started. (bells chiming) So here we're going to jump in straight into drawing the animal, which is going to be super simple. We're going to use
essentially a big blob shape, like potato shape for the body. And then we're going
to add simple elements to customize the animal and turn it into whatever animal you want. Now here, I'm going to be
drawing a white rabbit. So to make sur
e I can see the rabbit, I'm just going to start
by hiding my background. But if you want to draw an
animal that is a different color, you can just keep your
background as it is, no problem. And once that is done, we're just going to create a new layer so that we have somewhere to draw. So if you are working in Procreate, there's always just this layer one that comes within any canvas you create. So you can just rename that one. Otherwise, create a new layer, and we are going to rename that new l
ayer to whatever animal you want to draw. So in my case, I'm going
to rename it to Rabbit. And here, we're going to pick the color, which is the first
customization option you have. I'm going to go with
just a pure white rabbit, but you can easily just have
whatever color you want here. I'm going to give you tips
on how to do the other steps based on the color you picked initially. But again here, I'm keeping
it super simple for myself. I'm just going with a pure white. Now, as I mentioned in th
e
intro, in terms of brushes here, you can pick whatever you want and that you know you're comfortable with. That being said, I'm going to give you
tips on finding brushes that would be a good fit if
you're working with brushes or if you're working in Procreate. I'm also going to try to suggest ways you could find similar
brushes in different software. And last but not least, I'm
going to suggest brushes from my Ultimate Illustration Bundle. Now these brushes are
not essential at all, but they'r
e the brushes
I use in everyday life when I work on children's books and people seem to really like them. So I want to make those
available to you as well. If you want to check them out, they will be linked in
the description below and there's always a special promo code for the YouTube people, but
again, not essential at all. So for the base shape, honestly, depending on the style you want, you could go with just a
super basic round brush. So the most basic round brush
you have available to you
in your software. I personally want to have
a little bit of texture, because the illustration is so simple, I feel like having texture just makes it a little bit more interesting. So if you do want to have texture, what you could do is
if you're working with free Procreate brushes, going in the sketching pack
that comes with the the app, and picking something like the
HB pencil or the 6B pencil. You can really experiment with both. That is totally up to you. If you are working in
a different so
ftware, again, whatever you feel comfortable with, whatever you know you like, or if you want something
similar to what I will be using, just try to find a brush that has the word pencil in the name, and allows you to have
that little bit of texture within the brush without
the brush being too loose. So you don't want like a charcoal pencil, you just want a pencil pencil (giggles). If you do have my illustration bundle, we're going to pick from the texture pack, the sketching brush. No matter wh
ich animal you want to draw, we're all going to start
with the same base shape, which is going to be
this kind of potato blob. So super round kind of
oval with a thicker bottom and a narrower top. And here, the brush size
really does not matter as long as you have control
over what you're drawing. That's really all that matters. Now once you do have a
rough outline that you like, you could, if you want, just
drop your color to fill it in. But again, I want to have
some of that texture myself. So
I'm just going to
increase the size of my brush and then manually fill in the shape. Great. So once we have the base shape,
we're going to add the legs, and the legs are just going to be these very simple U shapes at the bottom. Great, so now that we have
the body and the legs, we can start customizing the animal by adding different kinds of ears and different kind of tails. So this is going to totally be up to you, but the idea here is to look at or think about the animal you want to draw and
think of what would
be the most simple shape to represent the ears and the tail. So I'm going to be drawing a bunny. And in the case of the bunny, the ears are just these long U shapes or inverted U shapes on the head, or tall U shapes I should say. So kinda like this. But you could just as easily draw a cat by drawing some big triangle shapes. Honestly, that could also be a pig. You could draw dog by drawing,
again, big triangle shapes, depending on the kind of dog or big floppy ears on the sid
e. Really you can see here, it's just a super simple
shape outlining that. And then just like we did for the rest, filling those shapes in manually. And same thing for the tail here. You could have really
whatever kind of tail you want to make your animal appear like
the animal you want to draw. So if you have a cat once more, you could have a longer tail. That looks weird with the
ears, but you can get the idea. If you have a dog, you could have kind of an upwards C curve. You could have no tai
l if it's an animal that doesn't really have a tail or if like me, you're drawing a bunny, you could just have a bit
of a fluffy round tail in the back. Great. Now we're going to take
a little bit of break from the silhouette and we're going to start
adding some details just to help us see the
shapes a little bit better. But don't worry, if you're not perfectly
happy with your silhouette, I'm going to give you time
or I'm going to tell you when to take more time to work on it a little bit later
down the road. (bells chiming) And I said details, but honestly here, we're
just going to be mostly adding some very simple
lines to one, see the arms, because otherwise they're just lost in the silhouette of the body. And also adding lines
whenever we have elements or body parts that are overlapping
that we want to separate. So like the tail, I should have a little bit
of line between the bum and the tail here. So that's exactly what
we're going to add in next. And so for that, go ahead and cre
ate a new layer above whatever animal layer you have, and rename that new layer to Details. And we're just going to draw the details with a slightly darker
version of the base color you used for the silhouette. And that makes me realize
I should have said a little something earlier
about your base shape. If you want to draw a black animal, make sure your base
shape is not fully black, so you want a very, very dark charcoal so that we can come back and
add these darker details later. So for now,
your silhouette
is fully black. Not a problem. Just go back on your silhouette layer or whatever animal layer it is and pick a dark charcoal
as opposed to a black and then just drop that
onto your silhouette to recolor it. In my case, I'm totally fine. I'm using a white, so I can just go back on my details layer and then pick a slightly
darker version of that white. A little tip here though, if you are working with a neutral color like white, gray, or black, try to add a bit of color to
that neu
tral gray, or white, or black to make the
illustration more interesting. So that might mean instead of going with just a darker version of my white, which would just be a gray, adding a tiny, tiny bit
of red or pink to it, again, just to make the piece
feel a little bit richer. And if you're not sure
what you're doing here, there's nothing like testing. So just draw a few little lines until you're happy with your color. It should be not too dark that it really distracts
from the base shape. You
want the outlines to
be pretty soft and subtle, but dark enough so that
you actually can see that. And same thing in terms of the brush size, make sure you go ahead and test it out. That's going to depend on a few factors like which brush you're using,
which software you're using, which canvas size you're working on, as well as just your personal preference. So there's really nothing like testing a few times before you start. And once you're happy with a brush size, all we're going to do is just
start outlining the elements that we want to pop from each other. And you can obviously
customize those elements either by drawing fewer lines or adding more lines than
what I will be using. But here is the general rule of thumb. And so here, we're just
going to start by adding a bit of a line between
the left leg and the body. Because in my mind, the animal
is slightly three quarters, so it's not fully straight on front view. And because it would be a
little bit three quarter, the belly would
be
overlapping with the leg, creating that little line. So just go ahead and draw a line from this corner of the right leg to the top of the left leg. And as you can see here,
I'm being very, very loose. I'm okay with having
a few different lines. I think that kind of comes in
when ties in with the texture of the base shape really nicely. So it doesn't need to be
just one clean outline. Having these rougher sketch lines I think can look really good as well. Great. Now we're going to do the same
thing with the area between the bum and the tail if you do have a tail. So you're just going to start your line on the right corner here of the right leg, right up to right above the tail. And we're also going
to add a bit of a line on the top of the head that overlaps with the ears a little bit. Now from there, we're
going to draw the arms, and we're going to be missing
a little bit of the silhouette for the left arm, but don't worry about it for now, we're just going to
start with the outlines
. And once we have the outlines,
we're going to come back and add any missing
color on the base shape. And the arms here are
going to be super simple. We're just going to start
by drawing two big ovals roughly in the middle
vertically of our base or the body shape. And then another one on the left side, which is going to be poking out slightly out of the body shape. So essentially, you can
think of these shapes as the forearms. Now we're going to draw the top of the arm as well as the shoulder,
which is also going to be
just a very basic oval. So starting roughly in the
middle of your oval I would say, you're going to draw a big curve that touches the back of the animal and then connect with what
is going to become the elbow. And the other side is
going to be even easier, we're just going to start from the elbow and then connect that
with the side of the body. And from there, you can
just pick your eraser, whatever it is set to, doesn't
really matter to be honest, although make sure th
e
opacity of it is 100%. And we're just going to erase the bottom, I would say 2/3 of this line here above the crease of the elbow. Doing that on the other side as well. And from there, if you want, you can also add extra
little details on the paw depending on which animal you're drawing. I always like to just draw very simple little curves like this on the ends to make them look like little fingers or yeah, just make them
look more like paws. And you can also add them on the feet, although I'm
not a fan
of that on the feet. I think it just looks kind of weird. So I'm going to not do it at all, but you could do it if you want. And just one little thing we have to fix now that we have this arm, we're also going to need
to add a bit of a line between the body and the shoulder. And honestly here, we might just go ahead and might as well connect
the body with the arm, because the line is almost
coming right up there. So that's actually connected with the arm. Great. Now as I mentioned, we
are now missing a
little bit of a base color on this side of the arm. So we're just going to go
back on our animal layer. We're going to color pick
the base color we used and we're just going to fill in any gap that we might have
created by adding details. If you are enjoying the tutorial so far, please consider giving the video a like and subscribing to the channel
if you haven't already. Now I know everyone on YouTube
is asking you to do that, but believe it or not, it is a fantastic way to
su
pport your favorite creators, because it tells YouTube to take the video and show it to more people,
so thanks for helping. Now if you're drawing an animal
that has big ears like me, you may want to go ahead
and add even more details within the ears just to make
them look less flat and boring. In my case, I'm just going to add some
really pale pink inside the ears. So I'm just going to go back to the color I used for my outlines, 'cause I know it added a
little bit of pink feel to it, and I'm ju
st going to actually
make it pink this time. Then going back on the details layer, you can just go ahead
and add those details within the ears if you want to. Great. Now if you feel like you
need a little bit more time to work on the base shape before moving on to adding
the facial features, feel free to pause the
video to do exactly that. Otherwise, we're going to go
ahead and create a new layer and draw the facial features. So go ahead and create that new layer above everything we have so far
and rename it to well, Facial Features, no big surprise here. And for the facial features here, honestly you could pick
pure black if you wanted to. I'm not a fan of that. So I'm just going to
pick a super dark version of my outline's color. I'm just going to color pick that and then bring it really, really super low into color selector, but
not making it quite black. And from there, still with the same brush but
probably quite a bit smaller, again, the size is totally up to you as long as you'r
e able to
draw what you want to draw, that's all that matters. We're going to zoom onto the face and we're going to start
by drawing the nose, because I feel like it
really helps anchor the eyes. And the nose is another really
easily customizable element. I'm just drawing this
super long oval nose, but you could have a
heart shape for a nose. You could have this really
cute little, you know, Y shape for the nose and the
mouth, whatever you want here. Super easy to change. I'm going with, again,
this huge long oval nose. And the eyes are also something you can very easily customize. If you do have Procreate, I'm going to show you how you
can have your character blink a little bit later in the video. So in that case, you could just start with
very basic round eyes. But if you're not planning on animating and you just want extra
cute little eyes here, you could just draw these upwards curve, which is going to make your character look super happy and super cute. Now the mouth is totally op
tional, you could totally leave it out if you want or you could draw whatever
other style of mouth you want. So it could just be, you
know, the little line below the nose, that's super cute. It could be a huge smiling
mouth, also very cute, although that one is super wonky, but you get the idea. For my characters, I
usually like to draw a mouth that is slightly off to the
side and quite a bit small, so that's what I'm going to do here. It's pretty much exactly just
a flipped version of the eyes.
So super simple. And depending on the
animal you're drawing, you might also want to add some whiskers, which if you do add them, I'm going to show you how to animate them as well later down the road. And if you are drawing whiskers, you could just go ahead
and pick the same color you used for your outlines and go with that for the whiskers as well. Now I like to draw
groups of three whiskers on either side of the face, making them quite big and slightly curvy. But again, this is
something you c
an customize depending on the animal you're drawing as well as just your personal style. Now once you have all the
facial features mapped out, feel free to use any kind
of selection tool you have. For example, this one here in Procreate. Select any element you feel
is not in the right spot. Because we drew them on separate layers, you can just very easily select them and then using an arrow tool, you can just move them around and place them where you want them to be. So once more here, feel
free
to pause the video, take all the time you need
to move the facial features. And then we're going to
meet up in the next step, which is going to be adding
some super simple shadows. (bells chiming) Great, so once you're
happy with the base shape, the facial features, we're going to add super simple shading, but before that, it
might actually be helpful to add the element that
the animal is holding so that we can shade behind that element. So go ahead and create a new layer and put it below the d
etails
but above the animal shape. And rename that new layer to whatever element you want to draw. So here, I'm going to go and draw a heart, again, because it's pretty
close to Valentine's Day, but you could really
draw whatever you want. I think like a big gift
could be super cute, a potted plant, flowers. Really there's so many possibilities here. And I'm drawing a big
heart for Valentine's Day, so I'm going to go with a bright red and to make sure it works
well with what I have so far, I'm j
ust going to color pick the pink I have here in the ears, and turn that into a red. So just making it a little bit darker, well quite a bit darker and
quite a bit more saturated. Otherwise, with the same brush, I'm going to use the exact same technique as I used for the rest of the animal. So just outlining the shape first and then manually filling in the inside. And with that, it is time
for the secret password. So if you've watched this final video, please go ahead and
leave me a comment below
letting me know which
animal you're drawing. And the secret password is a game that we play
here on the channel. In all the long form
step-by-step illustration videos, I hide either a secret word
or a question like today for you to find and then
leave down in the comments. And believe it or not, it actually does give me a lot of insight into how to edit and
paste my videos better, which helps me create
better tutorials for you. So again, if you watched this far, just let me know which
animal yo
u're drawing and then we're going to keep going. And make sure you take the time to erase any overlaps you might have between that shape and the arms. And refining the shape as needed
once it's fully colored in. So feel free to pause the video here if you need more time
to work on your element. Otherwise, we're going
to start the shading, which we're going to keep super simple in this piece, honestly. We just want to add a
little bit more texture, essentially more than
just shadows themselves. (
bells chiming) So go ahead and create a new layer between any element you have
in the base animal shape and rename that new layer to Shadows. And here, we're going to go
with a version of the base color that is a little bit
darker than the base color, but a little bit lighter
than the outlines. So you can go ahead and
color pick the outlines, and then manually make
that a little bit lighter. So probably halfway between the outlines and your base color. So, in my case, halfway between this and
wh
ite would be roughly here. And for this, you can keep
the same brush if you want or you could switch it to a
slightly bigger softer brush. So if you're working with
free Procreate brushes, instead of using a brush
from the sketching pack, you could go in the charcoal
pack that comes with the app if I can tap on it (giggles), and honestly using any
of these would work well, probably not the burnt tree,
it's a little bit too crisp, but something like the willow charcoal would work really, really w
ell. If you are working in
a different software, again, just either sticking to the brush you've been using so far if you like it, or going for something
like a charcoal brush could be a really good option. If you are working with my
illustration bundle though, we're going to pick from the texture pack, the basic texture brush. And the idea for the shadow is just going to be adding a bit of a line on the right side of the character, leaving the tiniest little gap between the very edge of the cha
racter as well as the shadow. So we're going to do this on the bum, both legs, and the back of the head or the neck or this area right here. Now we're also going to add shadows between elements that we separated with a bit of an outline or a detail line. So between the bum and the tail. Onto the tail, we're going
to add a shadow right there. Same thing on this leg here, the leg on the left between
the belly and the leg, we're going to add a bit of a shadow. Keeping it very simple as you can see,
it's not precise in any way. We just want to help the element separate from each other
a little bit better. We're going to add a bit of a shadow on the shoulder on the left right here when there's this fold. Just like that. And you could add some on the ears, but I feel feel like it's starting to look a little bit bulky on the top. So you might leave it out as well. I think I'm going to add
some very simple ones. So on the inside of each ear. It's just very simple shadows
starting from the bott
om, going up to roughly the middle
of the shape I would say. But that's because I have super long ears. If you have shorter ears, it would probably be up
to the top of the ears. And we're also going to
add a bit of a shadow between or below the arm and whatever element
your animal is holding. And once more, taking the time to erase any overlap that
you might have created on the arms themselves. Now we're good to use a
very similar technique to add shadows on the element itself, although we might
just
go ahead and draw them straight onto the element layer. So in my case, the heart layer. But otherwise, same thing, same brush, same modifications for the color. So just color picking the base color and making it slightly darker. And then going in and
adding a bit of a line on the right side, leaving a gap between the
line and the very edge. You can also add a bit of a shadow below the hand of the animal, make it look like it's
actually holding the shape. And maybe a little bit
here at the
top as well. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but I think it just helps
with the volume a little bit. If you want here, why not? You can make your brush super small and maybe outline the shape a little bit. Now we're also going to
add some very simple lights onto the element and onto the nose if you have a big round nose like me. But we're going to start with the element, 'cause we're already on that
layer already with that color. I'm just going to make that
base color quite a bit lighter. And
as you can see here
throughout the entire video, I'm being very loose with the colors. There's no right or wrong
answer, it's just a general idea. So as long as it feels right to you, as long as you're
following the general tips, that should be totally okay. And with that lighter
version of the color, I'm just going to add
some extra shiny lines on top of the heart. So one dot and then one
big line on the left side, and then a smaller line on the right side. I'm also going to add a
bit of light
on the nose. So just going back on the
facial features layer. Color picking the base
color I used for the nose, making it just a little bit lighter first, and adding a super soft light on the general top area of the nose. And then once that is done,
coming back in with a very, very bright version of that color and adding the same kind of shape as we did on the left side of the heart. So a little dot and then a line. So once more, feel free to pause the video
here if you need more time to work o
n your character. Otherwise, we're going to
move onto the background, which is going to be super simple, but it's going to help
bring the piece together. (bells chiming) Okay, so once you're
happy with the animal, we're just going to set the
base color of the background and then I'm going to show you how you can add a bit of
a paper texture to it. The first thing to do
is going to be either creating a layer at the
bottom of your list, renaming that layer to Background if you're working in a
soft
ware that is not Procreate. But if you are working in Procreate, there's always a background color layer that comes within any canvas you create. So you can just reactivate
that if like me, it is hidden right now and
then select that layer. Now the color you pick
here is totally up to you. And I think there's really nothing like just trying a few things. I know my animal is really bright so I want my background to be quite dark. If you are working with
an animal that is darker, you would do the
opposite and
go with a pale background. And if your animal is
kind of middle of the way, so if you have like a neutral
brown or neutral gray, you could experiment with
something super light like a white or super dark like black. Here again, I'm drawing something
Valentine's Day related, so I'm going to go with kind of a purpley raspberry dark red. So I'm just going to experiment here, try a few different thing
and see what I like. So I think something like this honestly. Not fully red, it has a
little bit of purple in it, but not a whole lot, so it's
really this raspberry color. It is fully saturated so
there is no grain to color. It's really just full on saturation and it is roughly middle of the way in terms of the brightness. So it is not super dark, not super light. And I think that's fine, because my animal itself
is really, really bright. I think it's okay to have
more of a neutral color. Now once you do have your background, you may notice that like me, your animal is not exactl
y
where you want it to be in the canvas. So what we're going to do is we're just going to
reposition it super quickly. So we're just going to select our layers by swiping them towards the right, at least if you're working in Procreate, that's the way to do it. And then we're going to use an arrow tool to just reposition the animal
where we want them to be. And at this stage, you can also just resize
the animal if you need to, either by using uniform if you want to keep the
proportions the same o
r by using distort if
you want to squish it or stretch it on one side. So I'm going to actually use distort here just to stretch my rabbit
a tiny, tiny little bit, and I'm going to use uniform to make him a little bit smaller. Great. Now that is totally optional, but if you want you can add
a bit of a paper texture in the background just to
work on that texture effect that we've been introducing in
the colors a little bit more. And for that you can use
whatever paper texture of your choice. If y
ou don't have one, not a problem, I have a free one that you can download. I will link it in description
below, totally free. So you can just pause the video,
go ahead and download that. And then once you do
have your paper texture, all you have to do is import it. So if you're working in Procreate, you can do that by going
in the wrench icon menu here at the top. In the add sub-menu,
selecting either insert a file or insert a photo depending on how you
downloaded the texture. Now if you're work
ing
with my paper texture, it also comes with instruction
on how to open the file, how to unzip the file,
how to install everything. So it's super easy. You can just follow those instructions. Essentially here, no matter
which software you're using, you just want to get the
paper texture in your file. And then I'm going to show you how you can actually
apply it as a texture. So once it is in your file, make sure that it covers
the entire canvas. So if you're working
in Procreate for that, you ca
n just select the fit
canvas option here at the bottom and then use the blue
handle to resize as desired. And then from there, we're going to rename
that layer to Texture. Now we do have our one problem
and it is that right now, it just looks like a
well, a white paper image and that's not what we want. We want it to be textured. So to apply this image as a texture, we're going to apply a
blending mode on the layer. And blending modes are really common. You should be able to find them in your so
ftware no problem. Usually they are with the
opacity of your layers. And the way to access
blending modes in Procreate is just to tap on the little N next to the check mark right here. And we're going to pick a
blending mode called multiply, which is super basic. So again, if you have blending modes, you should be able to find it. Otherwise, if you cannot find
multiply in your software, just scroll through the entire
list until you find something that you think works well
for the texture effect.
And you could keep that
texture above everything. I personally just want to
have it on the background. So I'm going to go ahead and
just put it at the very bottom of my list above the
background color, of course. And from there, we're going
to amp up the background a little bit by adding a
shadow under the animal, a vignette and maybe some little
drawings around the animal. So go ahead and create a new
layer below everything you have except for the texture and the background and rename that lay
er to Ground Shadow. Now for this ground shadow, super simple, just go ahead and color
pick whatever color you used for the background and
make it a little bit darker. Otherwise, same brush as before, we're just going to go ahead and draw a super simple
shadow under the animal. Now we're also going to add
a bit of a vignette effect just to make the piece
a little bit more rich or at least make the
background a little bit richer. So go ahead and create a new layer below anything related to the an
imal, but above anything
related to the background. And rename that new layer to vignette. Here, same brush, same color, but probably a bigger
version of your brush, you're just going to come in and shade in the top and bottom corners of your piece. And once that is done, you always have the option to just lower opacity of that layer. I feel like mine is way too dark. So I'm just going to tap on the little N next to the check mark to
open up the opacity slider. And then I'm going to
play with th
e opacity until I find something that I like. So I'm probably going to set mine around, I don't know, 50%. Yeah, something like that. And if you want, again, as I mentioned, you could also add some little
drawings around the animal just to make the piece once more, a little bit more interesting. You could write something
that could look really cool. So just go ahead and create a new layer above everything background
still but below anything animal. And rename that new layer to
either writing or
drawings, depending on what you're doing. And here, we're just going to pick a really light version of the background, so once more, you can color pick that and make it super, super, super light. Now here obviously, if you are working with a
white background already, you would make your
color a little bit darker instead of quite a bit brighter. And here we're just going
to go back to the brush we used for the outlines or the details. So if you're working with
free Procreate brushes that was from
the sketching pack, either the HB pencil or the 6B pencil. If you're working in a different software, anything that has pencil in
the name was what I suggested. And if you are working with
my illustration bundle, we were working with the
sketching brush here. Now again, because we are
around Valentine's Day and this is kind of
Valentine's Day themed, I'm drawing some simple little
hearts and a few little dots, but you can easily just change
that to whatever you want. So if your animal is holdin
g a gift, maybe you're writing happy birthday. If your animal is holding flowers, it could be a Happy Mother's Day. I don't know really. It's just super easy to change it and completely change
the meaning of the piece. Oh, and by the way, if you are drawing this
piece for a special event and want to turn it into a greetings card, I do have a free template
that you can download below. So make sure you go
ahead and download that. Again, the link is in
the video description. And once more, once you
do
have those elements mapped out, feel free to just go ahead
and play with the opacity, and maybe even the blending mode of that drawing or writing layer just to make sure that they blend in with the background the way you want. So I feel like mine might
be a little bit too intense, they can distract from the character. So I'm going to lower opacity of my layer, probably a little bit less this time, so probably keeping it more around 70%. So feel free to pause the video here if you want more t
ime to
work on your background. And once you're done, if you
are working with Procreate, we're going to meet up in the next step in which we're going to just
make your character blink, just again to add a bit of
extra oomph to the piece. (bells chiming) Great. So at this stage, we're just going to make
the character blink. It is going to be quite easy, but it's going to really amp up the piece. And so the first thing
we need to do for that is just group all the
layers that should not move. So th
at means we're going to select all the layers from the
texture to the details, leaving out the facial features, and we're going to create a
group with that selection. So that means the texture layer, the ground shadow, the vignette,
the drawings or writing, the animal layer, the shadow layer, the element, in my case, the
heart, as well as the details. And once you do have
those layers selected, we're just going to create
a group with that selection that we are then going to collapse and we are g
oing to rename to Background. Now I know in theory, it
is not the background, 'cause there's also the animal, but in terms of animation,
it is the background. Now creating the animation
is going to be super simple. We just need to open up a
menu called animation assist, which you can find in the
wrench icon menu here at the top in the canvas menu. It is right here, it's
animation assist here, and it's just a little toggle that you can activate by tapping on it. Now once you do activate that togg
le, it's probably going to make your piece look absolutely crazy,
but don't worry about it, it's just that we need to tell Procreate what is the background and
what is going to be animated. And so to do that, we're just going to go and
look at this bottom menu here, which is the animation menu. You should have a few squares right here. And those squares are
what we called frame, and frames are what we're going to create to create the animation. But right now we need to tell Procreate that one of
the frames is the background and should remain still
throughout the entire animation. And so that frame should be
the one on the very left. It's the one that has the
background and the animal itself. So you could just tap on that frame and activate the background
toggle right here. Now if you do not see
the background toggle, it is because you have something between your background group and your background color layer. So if you have something
there, you need to delete it. Otherwise, Procreate
is not
going to allow you to activate or set your background group
as the animation background. Now once we have that, if
we go ahead and tap play, nothing is happening, because
we only have one frame. And you can think of frames as being the individual
pages of a flip book. So whenever we create a layer or a group, Procreate creates a new frame
from that layer or group. And when we tap play, Procreate is just going to play
or flip through these frames just like it would flip through
the pages
of a flip book. Now creating a blinking
animation is incredibly easy. What we're going to do is
we're going to create a copy of the facial features we have so far by swiping the Facial Features layer towards the left with one
finger and tapping on duplicate. And we are going to
select the bottom copy, and we're going to rename
this bottom copy to Open Eyes. And once that is done, making sure that your bottom
copy is the one selected, go ahead and erase the eyes. Now if like me, once you're
done
erasing the eyes, you still see a little
bit of gray below them, that is totally normal,
that's actually what we want. It is a feature or an animation feature called onion skin frame that lets you see the frames around the one you're working on so that you know where to
draw the different elements as you're working on the animation. Now if you don't see
that onion skin frame, super easy to activate, just
go in your settings right here on the right of the animation menu, and just set onion skin f
rame here to something like two or
three, honestly doesn't matter. And you can adjust the opacity as desired. Now these two settings, these
onions skin frame settings are not going to affect the final result. So whatever you're comfortable with is what's going to work well. But while we have these
settings pulled up, might as well just change a few settings that are going to affect
the final animation. The first one being
making sure your animation is set to loop, so that it plays through the
fr
ame in a looping order. And also go ahead and set
your frames per second to 24. Now from there, what we're going to do is we're going to color pick the color we used for the facial features, so you should just be able
to color pick the mouth and it should be the same as for the eyes. And making sure you're still
working with the same brush you used for the details
in the facial features, so the pencil brush. You're just going to draw
an open version of the eyes, whatever that means to you. So yo
u can easily customize
the style of the eye here, and I'm just going to
go with super simple, dark round eyes. So now if we tap play, we
should see that the frames are just alternating
between closed and open, but it looks absolutely crazy. And the reason for that
is we need to set a pause so that the animal is not always like just
constantly blinking. And also we need to add
a bit of a transition between completely open
and completely closed. So the first thing we're going to do is add the paus
e onto the open eye layer. And to do that, just locate
which frame is your open eye. It should be the one on the
left that is not the background. And then tap on that and set
the hold duration to at least, I don't know, at least 20. So now if we tap play, we can see that the eyes stay open and then blink really quickly, but it still looks kind of off, because we don't have
that transition frame between open and closed. So the next thing we're going to do is create that transition frame. And so y
ou can just go ahead and duplicate the open eye layer, selecting the top copy, and renaming that top
copy to Half Closed Eyes. Now by the way, at this point, we might want to go ahead and
just rename the very top copy to Closed Eyes just to make
sure we're not getting confused. But then going back on
the half closed eyes, we're just going to erase the open eyes, and we're going to do our
best to draw a transition between whatever open eye we have and whatever closed eye we have. And so essential
ly it should just be a slightly stretched out
version of the open eye. Now because we duplicated
the open eye layer, which had a hold on it, this half closed eye frame
is also going to have a hold. So make sure you go ahead and just set the hold
duration here back to none. And here if we tap play, we should be able to
see the animal blinking, but it's still not optimal. And the reason for that is that yes, we do have that's transition
frame between open and closed, but we don't have a transition
frame between closed and open. So we're just going to take
our half closed eye layer here, we're going to duplicate that, and we're just going to take the frame and put it at the very end,
so after the closed eyes. So now if we tap play, it
should be a little bit smoother. Now once you do have the animation, feel free to go back and play
with the frames per second here in the setting and
see if there's something that you prefer. The lower the frame per second, the slower the animation
is going
to appear. And the higher the frame per second, the faster the animation is going to look. So I think I'm going to be going with 15, but I'm going to keep the
open eyes open for longer. So I'm going to increase the
hold duration on that frame, probably up to, I don't know, 45. Now one extra bonus if you are
working on a rabbit like me, or if you're working on an
animal that has whiskers, if you want to make it look extra cute, you can make them kinda
scrunch their nose, so the whiskers move. And
so to do that, it's quite easy. What we're going to do is we're going to take our open eye layer, create a copy and put it at the very top. And on this copy, we are going
to lower the hold duration, 'cause otherwise, it's just going to be
too long of an animation. We're going to probably
lower it quite a bit around, I'm going to set mine around 10, but again, this is something
you can experiment with. And the idea with this
extra open eye layer here is just to create a pause between the blinkin
g
and the nose twitching. Otherwise, I feel like it's
a little bit too intense. Now once you do have that
extra open eye layer, we're going to duplicate it. We're going to select top copy, and we are going to rename that new copy to Whiskers Half Up. And once more here, we're just going to deactivate
the hold duration here. So setting it to none. And there's a few things
that we're going to do here. The first is going to
be rotating the whiskers a little tiny bit. So you could just use your
sele
ction tool for that and drawing around one
side of the whiskers. And then with your arrow tool, you're going to use the green handle here to rotate the whiskers, but the idea is to keep the
inside of the whiskers still and just have the outside
move towards the top. So rotating a tiny little
bit, not a lot really, just the slightest bit as you can see. And then just repositioning the whiskers so that the inside stays still. Now doing that on the other side, just selecting the whiskers, and rotat
ing them the tiniest little bit, and moving them to align the inside. Great. Now we're also going to
scrunch the nose a little bit. So selection tool, selecting the nose. And then with the arrow
tool, set to distort, we're going to squish the nose upwards, making sure that the top
of the nose remains still. So we're just going to
start from the bottom. Squishing it a tiny, tiny little bit. You should barely see the difference between your onion skin frame
and your new frame here, just the tinies
t little scrunch. But to make it look extra scrunchy, we're just going to color pick the color we used for the outlines. And we're going to add
just a tiny little line above the nose. And now if we tap play,
we should see the blinking as well as a tiny little
start of a twitch in the nose. Now just like we did for the blinking, we're going to add extra frames just to make that twitching
a little bit more fluid, a little bit more interesting. So you could go ahead and duplicate the Whiskers Half
Up layer and rename it to Whiskers Up. And we're just going to
repeat the exact same step to amplify the movement a bit. So selecting one side of the whiskers and rotating it a little bit, making sure the inside are aligned. Doing that on the other
side as well, of course. Then squishing in the bottom of the nose. And amplifying the line
that we have above the nose a little bit. And just like we did for the blinking, to make the transition
a little bit smoother, we're going to also just
duplicat
e the Whiskers Half Up and put that copy above the Whiskers Up so that the movement is not only fluid when the whiskers go up,
but also when they go down. So from here, you should
be able to tap play and see the whole animation take place. Now to export animation, super easy, all you have to do is go
in the wrench icon menu. In the share sub-menu, instead of picking something
from the top section here as you would with an image, you're just going to pick
from the share layer option here at the b
ottom. Now, the only two options you want to make sure
you're not picking here is PDF or PNG files, that would just export
the layers separately. That's not what we want. So we have four options in
terms of animated videos. Now all of those have different purposes, but if you just want to save
the image as a regular video for posting on social media, for example, I would recommend going for animated MP4, making sure that the frame
per second option here is the same that you
used in your settings
. You can just tap on export. And from there, you're
going to have a few options on where you can save the file. If you just select save video, it's going to save it on your camera roll with all your other videos. If you enjoyed this video and want to learn how to draw
a cute monster in a bottle, I highly recommend you
check out this tutorial, because I'm going to show you exactly how you can do it step by step. But before you leave, make sure you get this video a like and subscribe to the chann
el
if you haven't already. I post every Tuesday and Saturday, then click on the link right
here and I'll meet you there.
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