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