How to Make an Easy Animation Using a Digital Tablet

This summer, with the help of my parents I was able to get the Wacom Intous Pro small. I learned photo editing, drawing and sketching cartoons, etc. I then decided on making an Instructable. I ultimately settled on creating a short and fun animation, and that’s what I intend to teach you in this Instructable. This Instructable is easy to follow and is step by step, if you want to see the end product read to the end! Now, let’s get started.

What you need: A digital tablet (more on that later) Photoshop cc 2017 (more to follow) A computer with the requirements that are needed to run Photoshop and a digital tablet.

So, you are thinking about buying a digital tablet. I suggest that you buy the Wacom Intous Pro Small. If you decide to buy this tablet it means that you got 1 free year of Photoshop. There are two ways that you could think of this, you bought a year of Photoshop ($240) and bought a $10 tablet, or, you bought a tablet and got Photoshop for free (where I bought the tablet it was $250. It is the same price on the Wacom's website, Amazon and Bestbuy.) Here's a link to the redemption code page: https://creative.adobe.com/redeem Then once you are here, enter your code and click activate membership. After that there should be a code that pops up. Make note of this code because you will need it later. When it is installing you will be prompted to enter the code, go ahead and do so.

I used a well focused picture of my dog, I picked a halo, devil horns and a tail to go with it. But, like I said above this can be anything. You could make a friend grow a beard, or horns, or animal ears, etc.

As you can see there are lots of different brushes. The two that I used were the hard round and light oil flat tip. I used hard round for joining corners when I was using the gradient tool (more on this down below.)

The Gradient Tool: When making your animation and you get to your stage of shading you use this tool. Press “b”, and make a line from one side of the horn to the other side, if the drawing isn't connected. Then once you have that, press “w”, and select the horn. This should make a selection around the horn (this will look like a dashed white and grey line), but we want just the outside selected. So while still pressing “w”, press shift and click the middle of the horn. This should make it so just the outside it selected.

Join the corners, press “w” and select the horn outline

Then hold down the shift button and click the center.

This is how it should look. Once you have this press “g”. Make sure you have the gradient tool selected, NOT the paint bucket! Also, make sure you have red, or the color you used to draw your outline. You can change the color by selecting the paint palette in the top right hand corner. This means that when you do the gradient if you click the left hand side, then the right hand side will go from red to black. In your selected area (the gradient will only show up if it is in the selected area) click down on one corner, and drag to the opposite corner. Then click down once more to make the gradient stop. Pick red, then pick black.

I start by making all of my layers. For this project I had 37 layers. When you make the layers first you just transfer it over to frames and it makes animating much easier.

Things to avoid/know:

Working in frames. This makes it so that if you make a new frame it is a linked copy of your old one so that changes to one cause the same changes to be made on the other. Turning layers into frames is a much better way of doing this. The difference between a timeline and frames is that frames are meant for animating, while on the other hand the timeline is used for video editing. You should use frames when making animations and a timeline for video editing.

Using a timeline. When using a timeline you can not slow down your frames. Timing your frames is a very important aspect of animating.

If you draw everything in layers, you can view everything in order before you turn it into frames. You turn your layer to a frame by clicking a button in the bottom right corner that looks like three horizontal lines stacked atop each other (see upward facing arrow). Once you click it, you should see something that says;

“Make frames from layers” (see Right facing arrow). Click this menu item and all of your layers will become frames!

Exporting to a video file; When you are done with your animation, click “File”, then “Export”, then “Render Video...”. On the resulting page you will be able to choose different settings and specify where you want your file saved. When ready, click “Render”, then go to your file’s location and play it to enjoy your animation!

Congratulations! If you followed the steps and made it this far, then you’re well on your way to becoming a very skilled animator! I had 6 days to make this animation, so I went from not knowing anything about animating to making this. So if I can do it, so can you!

Here was my final product! This Instructable was made by an 11 year old! Here is my final product after finding just the right way of doing this.