Learn how to animate in Illustrator and After Effects in this free motion design course for beginners.
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What You’ll Learn: The Motion Design Process
- How to find inspiration before you start your project
- How to draw a character from scratch using simple shapes in Adobe Illustrator
- How to prep your files so you can move seamlessly from AI to AE
- How to animate individual parts of your character
- How to create a sticker peel effect
1. Introduction
1.1 What to Expect in This Course
In this short lesson you’ll get an insight into what you’ll learn in this course. If you’re looking to get into motion design but don’t quite know where to start, then we’ll get you on the road to creating your very own animation from scratch.
1.2 Getting Started: Design Inspiration
It’s always best to have some ideas before you get started on a project, and sometimes that means turning to other products and brands for inspiration. We’ll take a look at some great work by other illustrators in this quick video.
“Are you a designer looking to add a little bit of movement to your work, or perhaps you’re an animator looking to create your own custom designs. Either way, this is the course for you.”
2. Creating Your Character
2.1 Creating Your Character in Illustrator
I’ll show you how I picked a color scheme and how to get started with creating a character in Illustrator using some basic shapes.
2.2 Drawing Eyes: Creating Layers for Animation
Getting your character’s eyes right is one of the most important parts of the process, so here I’ll walk you through creating them, again using simple shapes. I’ll also share some tips on how you can add things like stars to the pupils with tools like Pucker & Bloat.
2.3 Drawing Facial Features
Your character is taking shape so now it’s time to add some more facial features. I’ll show you how to create a puckered mouth – he’s ‘freshly squeezed’ after all! – a nose, and some cute freckles. We’ll also add some little touches to the top of its head. By the end of this video your character will have a full, adorable face.
2.4 Drawing Hands: Quick Tips and Shortcuts!
Hands are notoriously difficult to draw. Don’t worry if you’re not great with them, I’ll show you a way to work around this with a reference. We’ll end up with a cute, cartoon ‘Mickey Mouse’ style hand.
2.5 Creating Highlights and Shadows
I’ll show you how to choose a good color for your highlights by starting with the base color of your character, adjusting that, and then changing the blending mode. We’ll then add a rotation anchor point, and I’ll also introduce you to the Pathfinder tool, which you’ll see is a really powerful one when it comes to making and adjusting shapes in your illustration.
3. Making The Sticker
3.1 Creating the Rest of the Sticker: Type on a Path Tool
Now we’ve created our character, we can concentrate on making the sticker around him. We’ll be adding some background shape and color, text, plus another little illustration of an orange segment. I’ll also show you how to navigate some little issues you might come across, like needing to flip your text.
3.2 Giving the Sticker Some Texture
We’ve got our sticker now, and it’s looking great, but it’s a little too clean and flat, so in this quick video we’ll look at adding some texture to create a crumpled sticker effect.
4. Moving From Illustrator to After Effects
4.1 Getting Our Layers Ready For After Effects
At this point you’ll be ready to bring your creation over to After Effects ready for animation. We can do this without any plugins, but the most important thing is to separate your illustration into separate layers, so I’ll walk you through how you can do that.
4.2 Moving Over From Illustrator to After Effects
In this quick lesson you’ll learn how to make a composition in After Effects that matches what you have in Illustrator, so that you’ll have as seamless a transition as possible when bringing in your work.
4.3 Importing Your Illustrator File into After Effects
It’s time to bring your AI file into After Effects, and everything we’ve prepped in the last couple of lessons means this should be smooth and hopefully problem free. Don’t worry if you have minor issues with your layers, I’ll go into this in the next lesson.
4.4 Fixing Any Small Issues on Your Layers
When you open your file in After Effects you might find one or two small issues, things like blending modes not coming over with their associated layers. That’s okay, it’s an easy fix and I’ll show you how in this quick lesson.
Quick Shortcuts for Animation in After Effects
Anchor Point
Shift/Opt + A
Quick Access Hand Tool
Hold Spacebar and drag
Ease Keyframes Quickly
F9
5. Animating in After Effects
5.1 Parenting Layers
If we pair some layers together it means we can create animation effects on those at the same time rather than having to duplicate that effort, so it’s a great time saver. At this stage, you should also make sure your anchor points are in the right place so we’ll go through that in this video, too.
5.2 Animating the Eyes
Selecting all the ‘eye’ elements of our character, we’ll set up a pre-comp and be able to work on just those parts to animate them. In this lesson you’ll finish up with the eyelid moving and a nice little twinkle from the star too!
5.3 Animating the Sticker Background and Text Layers
I’ll show you how to add some simple rotation animation to the sticker behind our character in this quick video lesson.
5.4 Animating the Thumbs Up
In this video tutorial we’ll animate our character’s arm so that he’s raising it to give us a thumbs up. We want the shadow to move along with the arm, so I’ll show you how to use a Track Matte to do that.
5.5 Creating the Sticker Peel Animation
Using Page Turn from the Effects panel, you’ll add a cool peeling effect to your sticker. There are tons of options for you to work through so you can have fun with this. We don’t want to see the back of the sticker when it peels though, so I’ll also show you how to add a white back to make the sticker appear opaque.
5.6 Using Posterize Time to Create Old-School Animated Motion
If you’ve made it to this video, congratulations, you’ve designed and animated a very cool character and sticker. As a final touch we’ll add a vintage Posterize Time effect so we can control the frame rate separately. This gives you a little more control than setting the frame rate manually.
Take Motion Graphics Further
Learn more about After Effects animation, After Effects animation techniques and Adobe Illustrator, with some of our free video courses.
If you prefer to learn in a different way, you could try our After Effects animation tutorials, motion graphics tutorials, motion design tutorials and much more.
