Reading Blog #3

Article: https://www.skillshare.com/en/blog/procreate-animation-breathe-life-into-your-drawings/?srsltid=AfmBOoooEO73JyGnOD_BeP_5Q4T0A0UeyOijzCn6xZ-QkPtrJZmKc7Dr 

This article talks about how to use ProCreate for animation, something I’ve only recently learned how to use. Compared to Photoshop and other Adobe Creative Cloud products, the animation features are less limited, but they’re easy to learn for beginners. In order to open up an animation, you simply turn on the animation tab. There’s options for onion skinning, how many frames to include in your onion skinning, frames per second, and how to orient the animation. Depending on the animation type, I tend to do a looping animation or a pingpong animation that goes back and forth.

I only recently learned how to use onion skins, and ProCreate is simpler to understand than Photoshop. In Photoshop, I avoided onion skinning because I felt like it was hard to set up. In Procreate, though, it was easy to mess around with the options in a way that made me feel like I could learn. One thing that’s a hindrance on ProCreate animation assist as compared to Photoshop’s is that you can only have one timeline present. This is good for hand drawn animations, as you can onion skin and completely redraw the frame to allow for a sketchy look, but you need extreme precision in order to make it look smooth. I don’t believe there’s an option to tween, as I normally just duplicate my assets to different parts of my animation. 

Overall, ProCreate’s animation assist feature is a very good introduction into animation. It has some limitations, including the lack of multiple timelines, but these features make it simpler for the user to understand. As someone with minimal animation experience, it was a very easy program to navigate. I believe there’s also an animation specific app created by ProCreate called Dreams that may have more features than the animation assist options than the regular ProCreate app.

Animations done in ProCreate: