Animation in Photoshop - Furry Little Peach | Animating Great Artists ep 01

Hi I'm Ben Marriott, this is my intern Kimchi And welcome to the very first episode of Animating Great Artists with this week we'll be breaking down the process of animating the amazing work of Furry Little Peach Here's what we'll be making let's begin in this series I hope to show motion designers how to approach animating illustrations of different styles and hopefully show some illustrators how to begin thinking about animating their own work and where to start in this episode, we're going to tackle the wonderful happy world of Furry Little Peach She's a brilliant artist illustrator and author based in Sydney she has an amazing YouTube channel where she vlogs about her process her studio and life as an artist whose work has this very unified wholesome optimism that's brought together mainly through these really gorgeous watercolors. we had a chat and thought it would be cool to bring to life this cute house character that pops up through a lot of her work alright so I'm going to try to make a short looping animation of this house sort of scrunching down bouncing up doing a little spin at the top and then falling back down and feeling very chuffed with itself. Because the character is relatively simple in structure and I want to keep the hand-drawn look from Sha'an I'm going to do the main motion traditionally frame by frame in Photoshop and then add texture and finish things up here back in after-effects so I've got my reference layer up here and I've eye dropped a few of the colors so I can easily access them later now the panel down here you might not recognize that is called AnimDessin 2 and that is essentially for making frame by frame animation in Photoshop much much easier this plug-in is completely free and I'll link to where you can get it down in the description click this button down here to make a video timeline and then this button to make the equivalent of a layer you click this button which creates a video group click this button here to zoom in you can click either one of these two buttons to create a new frame this one creates a new frame that's one frame long this one creates a frame that's 2 frames long I'm gonna be using this one because I like animating on 2's because it's a little more manageable and I prefer the look this first stage is going to be a rough path of the animation where I'm going to draw it pretty loose just to make sure the movement feels right and I'm going to draw the first position of the house where the animation is going to start and end this is roughly how our main house character is gonna look now I'm gonna draw the extremes which is where the house is gonna be at its lowest point anticipating before the jump at its highest point where it jumps where it spins around and then at its lowest point when it falls back down again I'm turning my onion skins on here which means I can see a faded version of the frame before and this just helps make sure that the animation each frame is gonna line up with the previous frame and not jitter all over the place all right now if we scrub through the animation we can kind of see the rough path of movement that our house is gonna take so it's gonna squash down at the beginning zoom up in the middle here get really skinny and at the top it's gonna do a bit of a spin around here fall back down squash and then back to its resting position now you'll notice it's squashing and stretching here squash and stretch is one of the 12 principles of animation and it just adds a little more character and exaggeration to the movement which I think works really well for this little character here now in a new layer I'm just gonna rough out some guides which are going to help me dictate the overall pace that how the jumps going to feel and how many frames do include during each section so the tip of the house swings down it's gonna swing down into this last position here and we're going to have the keyframe in the middle and then one other side and we're going to drop more frames towards the start on the end here which would give us that sense of easing into this motion and from here our house is going to explode up and we're going to take this path so we're gonna have and here sit here as well one closer and maybe one more closer still I think I'll have one more frame at the tip of the house sits here before it gets to its maximum spinning position and it'll do a few twirls in the air here and then come back down and I want it to come back down pretty straight so we're gonna have a final position here one where it starts there, let's have another here and maybe a couple down here as it eases in now these are just guides once we add the frames we're going to see how the movement actually sits and how it starts to feel and from there we can tweak and make adjustments so let's make that layer fairly transparent, there we go now I've just come through and colored these frames on our house rough layer blue this is so I can look down at a glance and see where our extreme key frames are and that irregular frames will just be colored purple like this now I'm going to go through and draw all out our in between positions on these main extremes now I've done the in-between to this first transition now I've got our house starting here and we've got five frames of the transitioning into this down extreme over here to make it look like it's easing into that movement the first image is very similar to that first one and it moves very slightly towards the middle then one of it completely facing the front and then the last two almost exactly into this last position now when we play back we can kind of see the pace of the animation and certainly have this first starting scene that's kind of look now let's go and do that for the rest of these transitions all right I'm happy with this now I'm just going to go back through and add stuff like the chimney and the face to all of the frames because I was ignoring that for the most part just so I could get the movement right otherwise it's just extra work drawing in the faces and chimneys into frame that you know might end up on the cutting room floor all right so let's get through and do that I've made his facial expression change a little bit during the scene so when it goes down starts no crunching his eyes up like he's preparing for preparing to do this jump and as he jumped he's sort of excited and surprised and then he becomes sort of happy when he lands like you know that was a that was a thrilling adventure he's just been on I think that it adds you know a little bit of a little bit more character and I think it's a good idea to look for those little moments when you can add more character to your characters I'm gonna add a few more secondary elements in this animation to help sell the movement a little bit more so I'm gonna add this you know sort of puff smoke kind of coming out of the chimney here Now I'm also gonna add some extra sort of lines and are kind of like sparkles that Furry Little Peach has a lot in her illustration so I think they'll sort of help sell the design language of this living in her universe all right I think we're done for our rough stage here now that I'm happy with everything I can move on from here to create the final pieces of the animation it's good practice that before you move on from the rough stage of your animation that all the thinking is done you know where all the elements are going to be and you know the timings of everything this is because the next stage where we're adding in the colors and sort of making the final pieces for our animation is we don't wanna be doing much thinking because this is the most tedious part of the process and you just want to be able to zone out put on a podcast or an audiobook and you know relax now I'm gonna keep my colors separated on different layers so I'm going to do a different layer for the house, a different layer for the roof and the chimney, a different layer for the face and another layer for the smoke and the secondary elements as well so let's go ahead and do those all right I'm pretty happy with how everything looks now one thing I did add is this secondary puff of smoke that comes up out of the chimney after the house sort of bounces back up after it falls down and I just think that adds just you know a little bit extra character and you know always looking for more character now there's only one more thing we need to do in Photoshop before we move into After Effects to composite it all together and that is to make a little watercolor texture that we're going to use now I've got myself one of Kyle T webster's watercolor brushes here and they come they come with Photoshop I believe now I'm just gonna draw a rough circular sort of shape with that's getting darker in the middle and I'm just gonna make four of those there we are now we've got four little watercolor sections and the color doesn't matter here because we can change that in After Effects okay let's save our file we don't have to do anything special to this Photoshop file we can just save it as a regular PSD and after-effects will do all the rest all right now that we're in After Effects let's import our file by pressing ctrl I selecting our file and make sure we import as composition retain layer sizes click OK now we've got our main comp here and you'll see that all our animation has been preserved now the first thing that I'm going to do is color code some of these layers rename them and just tidy up this project so it's easier to manage all right that's a little nicer one thing you will notice is that about two at 2 and a half seconds in our animation disappears that's because our composition here is a little longer than we have frames for so to trim this composition down to the right size we find the last frame where our animation is visible press n on our keyboard which trims our work area to our playhead and right click trim come to work area now it will loop back seamlessly we've also got our watercolor texture here so let's go inside that comp and make that useful so inside here we've got these four layers which where our texture is applied now when I made these I thought two frames will be sufficient for these but now I think I one needs to be four frames long so I'm just gonna select them all and then drag them out two frames and then I'm gonna drag these into a sequence here just like other comp this comp is too long for our frames so we're gonna press n here and trim comp to work area again awesome now let's drag these watercolor textures into the middle so it's a little easier to deal with alright great let's go back into our main comp now we want our watercolor composition to loop so to do that we're going to right click and select time enable time remapping go to the frame before the last keyframe here make a new keyframe delete the last keyframe hold Alt while clicking the stopwatch click this arrow click property and click loop out and that should loop our composition seamlessly alright wonderful it might be a bit tedious but I legit think that's the best way to do this in After Effects alright now we only want this texture to be visible on our house layer and specifically on this wall layer so to do that we're going to drag that above our wall layer duplicate our walls layer and use that as an alpha matte so we select our watercolor layer and under trackmap select alphabet which is the layer above which we're going to rename walls matte and color it purple just so I can see where the mattes are at a glance and now we see it's only taking up the area of our walls now we can also see it's really dark and black and muddy and we don't want that we want it to be just a slight shadow of this existing wall color to do that I'm going to select curves over here in the effects and presets panel and we're gonna select our red Channel and just bump up the red in the shadows a fair bit that seems alright I'm also going to lower the transparency on this to about 25 maybe 35 that might be too subtle and that looks great but when our house moves up our water color texture stays down here so we need to move it up with our house so to do that we're going to make a position keyframe by pressing P clicking the stopwatch and as our house goes up I'm gonna drag our watercolor texture up here and just before it falls down make another keyframe when it falls down let's copy that keyframe from the beginning copy and paste and now we should have our texture up in the air as well awesome now we're going to do the exact same thing for our roof layer now we've added our watercolor texture to the roof but it's still really red so you can barely see it so let's drag this curves down almost to the bottom and now it's barely visible but if we turn it on and off you can see it's there there we go all right now there's only one more thing that we need to do before this is done and that's add a texture overlay to the whole thing now I have a texture overlay already prepared that I use in pretty much all of my animations it's a piece of paper that I paint a black and you just look at all this texture and bits of the paper showing through that I just scanned in and then I've just got this rotated about four times and changed its position so it looks like a new texture in each frame now we're gonna loop that using the same method as before there we go and we're gonna set that blending mode to screen now that'll only show the white areas of that comp and it's pretty subtle at the moment you can barely see if you're the white areas so let's increase that with the curves layer and really bump up the white here and let's crush the blacks a little bit as well now let's make it more obvious let's play that back alright that is looking pretty good if you used any of the techniques or process if you learned from this video in any of your animations of work please upload it to Instagram and tag me @ben_marriott_, I'd love to see what you make and I'd love to share it with my audience and my stories please let me know what other artists and illustrators you think would be great to feature in this series I'd love to know what you think and please don't forget to subscribe hit that Bell icon share and absolutely emulsify that like button I'll see you next week

Channel: Ben Marriott

Views: 66,747

Keywords: animation tutorial, furry little peach, animating illustrations in photoshop, artist collaborations, after effects tutorial, frame by frame animation tutorial, frame by frame tutorial, Animating Great Artists, animdessin2, photoshop skills, photoshop animation, motion graphic tutorial, motion design, frame by frame photoshop, cel animation photoshop, traditional animation photoshop tutorial, photoshop animation tutorial, frame by frame after effects, animation illustration

Id: t_1s5R8vYAU

Length: 14min 38sec (878 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 03 2019