- Hey, I'm Neil Patrick Harris,
actor, singer, dancer, Tony winner.
But today I am going to learn to draw and animate,
thanks to Skillshare.
(upbeat music)
Here we go, Jon! - Hi, Neil. How are you?
- I'm excellent, man. Thank you.
I'm excited to be doing this.
- I'm very excited to meet you and thanks for joining me.
Let's make some stuff.
- I don't even know what we're going to be making.
- Honestly, I knew I should make a plan,
but you got to have room for improvisation, I feel.
- I want to learn how to illustrate things,
'cause I have twin kids.
They're both 10. - Oh yeah?
- A boy and a girl,
and I feel like I need to step up my skillset.
Where do we start?
- Let's start with a drawing.
Let's start with a pen.
Let's start with a character.
This is my sketchbook.
This is where all my work begins,
in a little notebook like this.
- That's amazing. - So you'll see,
here are some drawings that I've made previously
and then they become different things.
- I like the taco man.
- Like this egg might become a sticker, you see.
Any little drawing here, can become a painting
or a t-shirt or animation or.
- I'm competent with the drawing of the face, right?
That seems like, I can do the face.
It's then turning it into the body.
- Oh, all right. Well yeah.
- Then it starts to like,
it feels like a balloon that's deflating.
Like it starts off as a great idea
and then it suddenly just, it turns,
it becomes sad.
So I think that's the skill that I need.
- Well, let's draw a face.
Let's draw a face and then we're going to give it a body.
- I have no pencils, I just have markers,
which seems very dangerous.
- Where we're going, we don't need erasers.
- What happens if I screw up and I need to,
do I just rip off the page? - Yeah, you won't screw up.
There is no screwing up. Look around you.
This is all screw up.
The great thing about working in a sketchpad,
if you don't like something, you just turn it over
and you never have to see it again.
- Nice. - So I always start,
I, you know, with some eyeballs.
Beautiful. See, you're almost there.
- Mine looks pretty frightened already.
- [Jon] Do any kind of shape around it. Like, so
- He's rotund. He's bigger than I had imagined.
- It's all right. You can- - That's why he's so sad.
Look at him, he's- - All right.
Let's experiment with some body type stuff.
Now you might have some colored paper.
- I do. - So, you just like,
like tear it a bit.
Let's see what happens.
Well no, don't think about it.
Just like tear some shapes.
And once you've got some little shapes,
we can start like placing them below our head.
- Oh, that's cool.
- And we could sort of start to think about
different body shapes you might want to give it.
- I love it. - All right,
that's a nice little sort of kebab lag.
- All right.
I don't like this guy.
I'm starting over.
- But the thing about this is that you get
to try it all out and not have to worry about.
- Yeah, worrying about having to undo, I love that.
Construction paper's the best.
- It's just a thing of joy I find.
How's that feel to you?
Is that the body of your dreams?
- It's the body I've always wanted.
- It's just to find like shapes that maybe are not
in our muscle memory.
I think when we doodle
and we draw a lot, we don't really think about,
we stick to what we know,
and it's like human nature, right?
It's a break out of those things.
Sometimes it's good to just
work in a different material thing.
And then we might unlock some new shapes.
- Will you teach me how to draw a rabbit?
- A rabbit? - Yeah.
Magic's my hobby.
And I thought, like, to be able to master a rabbit,
even if it's a cartoon kind of rabbit,
like in a top hat or something like that,
that will be a skill that I could actually use.
- All right, I tear a V out to make some ears
almost and then,
have you ever pulled a rabbit out of a hat?
- I have, yeah.
I'm into this, but now it's,
it becomes complicated of getting this back onto this.
- Well, you could either draw around it
and just sort of going over the edge a little bit.
That's very rabbity, it's much more rabbity than mine.
- Yes, but here's when, this is now,
now I'm at a standstill, right?
Because I have this outside shape that I like of rabbit
but I'm terrified of where I put the eyes and the nose.
- Again, it's just like trying it out.
And we can even cut out some circles.
So these will be our eyes.
- I do love this idea of using scraps of paper
to sort of set what it is that you're going to do
before you do it.
- Yeah, you can start playing around with like, oh,
maybe I'll move the eyes further apart
or they should overlap.
And you can see how that changes the expression
of your character.
- What does a rabbit's mouth look like?
- [Jon] Rabbits have big teeth like that.
- Oh yeah, yeah. I love that, look at you.
That's a great idea.
- Now we can have a little rabbit puppet show.
Oh, hello, Neil. How are you?
Ooh, I'm okay, just crawling under here.
- [Neil] Cool.
- Or you could just give it a different,
different body altogether, you know.
This isn't, this is good, this is good.
- Is it? Okay.
- Pen will guide you.
That's it.
Fill the rabbit. Be the rabbit.
(Neil laughing)
All right, I think this is wonderful.
- Do you? - Yeah.
I think drawings are always better when they're just
from, you know, from the heart.
- Look at that cute little bunny.
- I mean, that's great.
I think that's wonderful.
That's like an early model.
- Creepy, okay. And now he's happier.
I wish we could make him move around some.
- Have you ever experimented animating anything before?
- I feel like it's
much more challenging than
my bandwidth is capable of.
- So we're going to start with real, real, basic stuff.
- Okay. - Well, we'll use your rabbit
maybe as inspiration.
And we're going to use an iPad.
If you've got a helmet, you might want to put it on,
because we're going to go.
So the first thing we're going to do,
we've got a little, new bar has appeared
and there's a little rectangle.
That's the first frame of our animation.
We're just going to do the absolute basics,
we'll just draw one of your favorite shapes
and we'll draw it slightly towards the left hand side
of the screen. - Okay.
- And then you've seen that bottom toolbar
that we opened up. - Mm hmm.
- [Jon] There's a thing that says add frame.
- Mm hmm. - You're going to hit that.
Now the drawing that you just made,
that circle is slightly grayed out.
- Mm hmm. - So that's what,
it's called onion skinning.
So that's a previous frame.
It allows us to see - Ah, cool.
- What we used to draw.
Now let's draw another circle on the opposite side
of the screen.
And if we hit play.
- Whoa! - Super basic,
but something is missing.
So we're going to go back
to that first frame and hit add frame.
- Okay. - Okay.
And then we could draw a circle
in between those two circles.
Okay, and hit play.
- See it's a little bit smoother.
- Yeah. - So like the principles
of animation really is, now you would go back in
and draw lots of circles going from left to right
and you would have this smooth roll.
Now this time, instead of drawing a circle,
let's draw like a stretched out circle
that kind of overlaps
those two circles a little bit.
This is a technique called stretch.
So when we hit play now,
we kind of have this like idea
that the circle is moving so quick
that it has a kind of blur to it.
That is basically everything I know about animation.
(laughing)
- It's amazing. Thank you so much.
- If we go to the middle frame again and hit add frame,
what we could do is then draw a circle
that's going to overlap the final circle and the middle circle
that sort of go halfway, and you see now,
now the circle looks like it's slightly coming to a stop.
(mimicking air whooshing)
- That's cool.
So when you're doing this,
is the smart call to do the first frame then the last frame,
and then fill in between?
Like as to where you're heading,
or do you just go sequentially?
- Normally what animators would do
is they would draw the key poses.
- I see.
- We would have the starting position
of the character or the object and maybe the final position.
And then those drawings are called the in-between drawings.
- Got it. - So we kind
of know where we start
and we kind of know where we want to end up.
And then the fun is kind of working out how to get there.
- What about a figure jumping into the water?
- (laughs) Okay. - Do you know what I mean?
Like a little squat thing that can go pachoo
and then drop in and then squash at the bottom.
- Why not? Let's give it a go.
- Let me see.
Let me see what I have in my toolbox.
- [Jon] Let me see, yeah, what can I recommend?
- Gel pen!
- I'm all for the gel pen.
I wish it well
I think it's a great pen.
It's just not a pen for all occasions, you know?
- Hey, I have a question. - Yeah.
- Within this, can you draw something
and then have it exist in all of the frames?
All of the subsequent frames?
- This is amazing. Yes, you can.
It's called a background.
What's he going to be leaping from?
- From like the top of a cliff into water.
- [Jon] Let's draw on one side our cliff.
- Okay. - So I'm going to put
a bit of grass and then there's going to be some water
at the bottom.
Oh yeah, you've surpassed me.
The student has become the monster.
Let's toggle on background.
- So this is now the background.
- Yes, so no matter how many,
like whatever frames you put on,
that's going to stay the same, static, okay?
Let's draw the character that's going to make the leap.
So that was our starting position.
- Okay. - I'm loving
what you're doing.
I think we'll do the end position and then we'll go
and do the middle one
in a sec. - Great, great, great.
- So now, we'll go back one frame and add a frame.
So this will be our middle one.
So I want you to imagine the kind
of arc that the blob is going to take into the water.
For me, it'd be kind of like that shape.
I'm going to put my blob somewhere in that sort
of imagined arc.
What I'd like you to do is stretch your blob,
like we did with the ball drawing earlier.
Oh, you've already done it.
- Yep. - You sure you've not
done this before?
- I haven't, but I'm digging it.
This is cool. - Yeah.
It's really fantastic seeing this come alive.
Now, if you take the pen and sort of go back
and forth along the bottom,
this is what animators do a lot as well.
Just to give you a sense of the sort of motion, right?
You can kind of see it with the onion skinning anyway.
So let's go back
and start filling in those in between frames.
And we can add the face at the end.
- This is so cool
and way simpler than I thought.
- Yeah, don't let Disney tell you
that it's all difficult and stuff.
- I'm just about to reach impact.
Wait, give me two, give me two more frames.
I just want to connect this long one here
to the squat one at the end.
Okay, so now I've got the blob dude jumping
and smashing in the water, but I don't have water splashing.
- So you can see on my one, like that is the impact.
I drew some little blue splashes.
(imitates splashing)
Okay. I'm done.
I think I'm done.
- You think you're done?
Oh, you've, all right you've, well.
I was going to say let's animate the splash,
but there you've done it.
You've just made it already.
I've got nothing more to teach you.
- Can I press play?
This is so exciting.
Yeah! (imitates splash) (laughs)
I had mine do a flip in the middle.
- What? - Wahoo! Badoo!
Sabao! - Flip is meant
to be the next lesson.
How you've just gone ahead here.
- This is so fun.
Yours is amazing, too.
- Well, that's very kind, but mine doesn't do a flip.
I'm very disappointed. (laughing)
That's amazing, from like a circle
to a blob man taking a dive
- That is so cool. - Into shark infested waters.
Amazing. - I am like, I can't wait to
do this more often,
but I can't wait to teach this to my kids as well.
- Yeah. They're going to love it.
- They're going to love this.
What a fun thing to do.
Now what? What am I supposed to, what do you do with this?
Is this just a fun diversion?
Or do you, can you put the, turn this into a
GIF? - I'm glad you're curious
as to what we can do with it.
In Procreate, there's a way to export it as a GIF
or as a movie.
So then you can start posting it or sharing it.
- All right, I'm exporting.
- So I'm exporting too, and I'm going to save that to
the camera roll or wherever it is on the iPad.
- Oh, I hope there's not a lot of weird photos on this iPad.
Just, you know, this is right before Ashton Kutcher
jumps out of a corner and says I've been Punk'd.
I can tell.
Hey, there it is. Look at this action.
So how much time do you spend as a professional illustrator
and an animator,
how much time do you spend in the actual drawing
with actual markers
versus using the pen and the tablet now?
- When I work in my studio,
I'm sort of all analog
and it's the kind of stuff you see around me.
- I see. - But I love using the iPad
and this as well.
Different tools for different things.
- I love the idea of making fun, little clever GIFs.
Like you could have a little guy scaling something
and then you could, oh, that's hilarious.
- That's Jeff Bezos coughing up money.
- (laughing) Nice.
But this is what often happens when teaching
sort of basic animation, people just,
like we could all leave now.
I think Neil would be quite,
he's lost, we've lost him now to animation.
- I'm loving this!
- He's gone down the rabbit hole.
A lot of this stuff is like, okay,
these are the real simple parameters
of how to make an animation.
And then the creativity isn't necessarily
learning all the different options.
It's what you put into it.
It's like, okay, well I can move objects on the table
and take photographs, that's loads.
Now, what objects do I have?
Like, what can I add to that?
- This is so fun.
I can't wait to apply this
in all kinds of different, weird ways.
I'm on social media some,
but my only toolbox would be
an image that, a picture that I'm taking,
or a video that I'm making of myself or something.
But like what you're doing right now,
I could see it having an editorial vibe,
so you could take something that's happening
and take a picture of it and then animate it in a way
that makes it have some kind of, I don't know,
political slant or comedic slant
or something. - Definitely.
- I learned new tools for
just coming up with sort of
free association drawings.
I learned to draw a rabbit.
Then I learned all about Procreate,
which I was really excited for.
And I had no idea I would even be excited for it.
And then learned how to animate, make like,
make a stop motion film.
That's a lot of lesson.
- It's a lot of lesson. - Well played.
- I'm a little tired now.
Well, thank you very much
for opening up your home and joining me here.
- My pleasure. Thank you very much.
Oh, you're very welcome.
I just hope that you've learned some stuff
and that you,
yeah, are excited about making stuff.
'Cause that's, you know, no matter what it is,
I think it's such a powerful feeling to
be excited about creativity.
- You're a fantastic teacher. Thank you.
- You've taken to this like a blob to water.
(Neil laughing)
- [Neil] Explore your creativity at skillshare.com.