Animation Tutorial
Dedicated to dj_rocca for requesting!
A few people have been asked me about how I make animation icons. The truth is, I’ve only just started getting back into making them and I’m still figuring out the process. That disclaimer aside, I hope this might be interesting or helpful!
I use Photoshop Elements 6. All my tutorials should be pretty translatable, I just use the brush tool, blur tool, blending modes (multiply, soft light and screen) and the gaussian blur tool.
STEP ONE :: IMAGE SELECTION AND CROPPING
Not going to go in depth here because I figure most people are more interested in my coloring/shading habits, but I try to pick images that are dramatic in nature and crop them with a specific focal point.
I crop on a 100x100 canvas and use that size the whole time. If I’m going to take out background or any logos, I do that at this stage.
Anyway, here our out lucky five bases:
STEP ONE :: PREP
The first thing I do is duplicate the base three times. I set the original to be invisible. Technically this isn’t necessary, I just like having the base intact to check back on later. Next, I set the three copies on soft light. This won’t look very good, but don’t worry about that yet.
Next, create a new layer beneath the soft light layers and fill it completely with a single color. The exact color varies from icon to icon- I usually start with #a6a886 because I find it easy to remember and use the hue/saturation tool to toggle the hue around until it looks good to me. I rarely change the brightness or saturation level unless the cap is particularly dark or looks washed out.
- #a6a886
The colors I ended up with for these five icons were as follows:
With the soft light layers visible over top, the icons now look like this:
On the Korra icon (#4) I thought the lines looked a bit too harsh so I moved the opacity of the topmost soft light layer down to 57%, leaving to looking like this:
Now I consider the icons officially prepped and ready to be colored.
STEP TWO :: COLORING
Now, all of my coloring is done by creating a new layer under the soft light layers, using the brush tool to draw in the color of the section I am working on and setting it to soft light or multiply. Sometimes I have to move the coloring layers above one or two of the soft light base layers if the cap has very bright spots, but usually I color beneath them all.
For coloring, the exact order you color in doesn’t really matter, though I always start with skin.
I always start off by coloring skin. I used to color skin by using pink and yellow soft light layers but I found that coloring with a very pale shade using multiply lets the color hold up more as I do more adjustments and especially with the light process. The only time I’ll use soft light is if the cap has ended up dark and I want to lighten as I color.
Important note: Don’t color in the character’s eyes with this layer (including all the sclera (whites) and irises (colored section).
The key thing to remember with multiply layers is that you usually have to use a much, much paler shade than you want the end product to look like. This is especially true for characters with darker skin. For these character’s skin tones, I used:
You may notice that one of these things is really not like the others! For icon #3, Tiana, her skin already has so much redness in it that using a color with red tints to color it would make it way too saturated in that one shade. Using the hue/saturation tool to fiddle, I eventually ended up with that pale green shade. Since I felt it made her slightly too pale, I copied that layer and shifted it to a purple shade that I then set on 43% opacity. I often use purple on lowered opacities to color darker skin because it keeps in some reddish shades while still having a cooler palette overall.
- The purple shade I used
- On 43% opacity over the green shade.
Now, I could probably lower the number of layers and figure out a good shade to use in just one layer, but since I was finding her skin tricky I wanted to keep the two main skin shade (green for the yellow tints, purples for the reds) separate so I could more easily adjust them as I went along.
I also added a purple layer to the 2nd (Yoruichi) icon because I felt she was a bit too yellow and bright with just the one color:
So I multiplied her skin layer, turned it purple and set it on 88% opacity.
For the Korra icon, I also colored in her hair with the same color as her skin on the same layer. Since her hair and skin are both brown, just slightly different shades, and she is such a small part of the icon, this works and saves time.
Anyway, with all the current layers visible, this is how we now look:
Next, hair coloring! Korra won’t be included in this since I colored her hair in with her skin.
Sometimes I color hair with multiply layers, sometimes with soft light. I don’t have a hard and fast rule but the general trend is that darker hair colors I color with multiply, lighter with soft light. Sometimes I mix and match. In that case, I usually use a multiply layer on all the hair and then soft light just on the highlights. Often I just experiment around until I find what looks best.
For completely black hair, like in the Tiana icon, I still color it in on multiply so that no strangely colored highlights show up by accident layer- since her base layer is teal, a highlight near her hair layer could turn the hair teal. So, by putting in a pale reddish multiply layer, I save myself the future trouble.
For picking the colors, I usually just pick something as close as possible to the shade I want and then play with saturation/hue until it looks nice.
Checking back in with our icons, the four that were changed now look like this:
The last piece of the subject to be colored in is their eyes, lips and any other markings they may have (such as the stripe on the face of Nel in #1 and the bit of the teeth of her mask that can be seen.).
For eyes, I almost always color with multiply layers. That way I can color across the pupil and not worry about it getting accidentally lightened and it gives the eye color depth.
For marking such as the line on Nel’s face, I just color in the a soft light layer. For those, I generally don’t want to change the colors too much since it should retain some of the skin’s tones through it. For her mask’s teeth, I made them more blue to match her hair more.
I don’t usually alter lip color unless the characters lips are clearly supposed to be a different color from the rest of their skin, such as in the Tiana icon. Even then, I don’t want to change it too much- in her case I added a slight soft layer in a very close shade just to make the lips a touch darker.
Again, Korra is left out of this since she is too small and downward looking to have anything that would be colored at this stage showing.
Anyway, now we are here:
Next up is coloring the rest of the non-background items- this includes the character’s clothing, anything they are holding, stuff like that.
Giving each individual color its own layer, I generally use soft light/multiply layers to color in the rest of the objects. This is really the same sort of stuff as the rest of the coloring process so I won’t bore you with the details. Just think of it as pumping up the colors of the original cap.
Finally, the last thing to color is the background. I treat the background a bit differently from the rest of coloring. While for the subject I want to keep the original colors somewhat intact, just making them more saturated/dramatic, for the background I generally don’t care about that, I want it to make the subject look good. Generally I like backgrounds that either heavily contrast with the subject or else are extremely similar in shade. I do try to keep some aspects of the original background intact, especially for outdoor scenes with trees and sky. I do enjoy bright colors, though!
For the first icon of Nel, I chose to go the contrasting route with a warm colored background to set off her hair. I also wanted it to be a bit darker so that it wouldn’t be too close to her skin tone while still calling back to it. I ended up using a deep reddish orange on overlay.
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For Yoruichi, I just wanted to bring out the bright sky behind her. I generally like nice cyan shades so I used a blue slightly on the more purple end of the spectrum (just slightly!) to take away the faint green cast to the original background.
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On to Tiana, I wanted to make the green and yellow of her clothing since it calls forward to her frog transformation, so I decided to have the background be nice and red in hue. I tried to go for a shade that was somewhat similar to her lip color to subtly make her smile stand out a bit more as well. I ended up using two layers of red on soft light to make it really glow.
-> (one layer)
-> (two layers)
For Korra, I wanted a pale background to make her really stand out, but with a blue tint to call back to her clothes so that it stayed somewhat cohesive. I picked a pretty pale blue with a hex code that tickled my funny bone and set it on soft light, then duplicated the layer to make it as bright as I wanted.
-> (one layer)
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Finally, Temari didn’t have a lot of bg showing so I just brightened the green a bit and called it a day.
And that’s the end of the core coloring! A few later steps alter coloring here and there but this is the main meat of it. To see the full difference the coloring makes from beginning to end here is a comparison:
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As a general note about coloring... I almost never pick the final shade I’ll go with for any layer right off. I use and abuse the hue/saturation tool to get the color right, just messing around with it to see my options.
STEP THREE :: SHADING
Now comes the fun part! This is my favorite part of the process, 100%. Anyway, I shade in a few separate layers.
First off I create a layer to shade the subject. Using the brush tool again, I put white blobs roughly where I want highlights and black blobs where I want shadows- all in one layer, mind!
Here is what that layer looks like for the five icons when on Normal. It won’t stay on normal, but it’s the best way to see it.
I’m a bit slapdash with my placement- I’ve never studied light sources in any way, so I probably do all kinds of mistakes on those terms, but I just try to put things where they look right to me.
Generally, I darken over the eye to about the eyelid, put highlights on the shoulder, the cheekbone and the nose, darken along one side of the nose, below the lower lip, etc. The more exaggerated an expression, the more in depth I go. Sometimes I shade hair at this step, sometimes I give it its own layer. When I do shade the hair, I usually darken along the edge of each drawn lock of hair and lighten toward the middle. I do not shade eyes in this step. Usually I pick one side of the face to be the darker side and have heavier shadows there, though it’s rare to not include at least one highlight on the cheek.
I then put this layer on soft light, like so:
Yep, still looks pretty ridiculous! Which is why I next use Gaussian Blur on the layer. I fidget with the radius until it looks right- this change from icon to icon.
Now the icons look like this:
That looks much better! Next I’ll create a layer to shade things more individually. The only icon that had nothing more in the subject to fix up was Korra.
Eyes:
The main way I shade eyes is the way I did it in the Nel icon. I find the highlight that is already there- in this case, upper right, and draw in white there. Then I draw in white on the opposite side of the pupil to create a lesser highlight there. Next, I use black to color in the rest of the iris: the pupil and the two quarters of the eye left. Then I often use white on the rest of sclera and black around the rim where the eyelashes are drawn. Finally, I set the whole thing on Soft Light. I do not blur this layer.
Now it will look like this:
The alternating shadow/highlight/shadow/highlight around the iris gives it a more rounded look.
Sometimes, however, I want to do something slightly different with the eye, as in the last icon of Termari. For her, I created a layer with just two blobs of white at the bottom of her eyes.
On normal:
On soft light:
Leaving that layer on soft light, I created another layer, this time with a thinner line of white at the bottom of her eye and a line of black at the top.
On normal:
On soft light:
This creates a dramatic lit from below effect in her eyes.
Lips:
In some cases I will focus more on lighting the lips, such as with the Tiana icon. Her lips are already defined and are a focal point of the icon, so it makes sense to give them a bit more attention. I draw all the way around her bottom lip with black and then add two thin white strips along the largest portions of her bottom lip, like so:
Next I set it on soft light:
This is still waaay too intense so I always lower the opacity to be less than 50% with lip shading. In this case, I went for 37%:
Ta-da! Now her lips have more definition.
Little Fixes:
The last thing on our list of main subject shading is just little fixes, things here and there that I want to alter a bit. For instance, on that Tiana icon, I had tried to darken her hat in the main subject shading layer but didn’t like how it looked, so now I add a bit of black around her ear on soft light. For Yoruichi, I wanted a bit more intense highlight around her arms, her hair and on her one leg, just to make it a bit more dramatic, so I drew in a few white lines where I wanted and set them on a low opacity (35%). For Temari, I wanted her bangs to be a bit lighter, so I drew on white on each triangle-y section.
With those final tweaks done, we are ready to move on to the next stage of shading.
So, which the subject taken care of, it’s time to shade the background! Since Temari doesn’t have enough background to shade, we put her aside for now.
I don’t like super complicated shading in my backgrounds. I prefer a simple light direction, drawing attention to the subject. I draw on the black and white again on a Normal layer. Going one by one:
- If you read comics or manga, you’ve probably scene a background similar to this general idea, black on top and bottom with a white section emanating from the subject’s close up face. It’s a dramatic shot, good for scenes of characters realizing something or being intense in general.
- My favorite background lighting style, a diagonal! This creates a sense of motion. Obviously, I’ve covered Yoruichi up here but I’ll erase the bits off her later. This just ensures that the lines all meet up right.
- A more basic background shading, this will just add a bit more depth to the background.
- I struggled the most with shading Korra’s background and finally settling on this. It splits the icon in half but there is a subtle arch to the light so it does convery a sense of downward movement on Korra’s part.
Next, I stick these suckers on soft light and blur them. Then I erase any bits that are covering the subject in ways I don’t like, including everything covering Yoruichi.
I’m happy with the first and third icons, but the other two I felt still weren’t right yet. For the Yoruichi, it’s not quite dramatic enough. For Korra, I want it a bit more subtle. So, I duplicated the shade layer for Yoruichi and set Korra’s to 67% opacity.
There we go!
Now, back to that Temari icon. For some icons, especially ones with little to no negative space, I decide to do another whole shading layer to up the drama a bit. This is similar to the subject shading layer we did first, except that is is much looser and will cover all the icon even if there is background. In Temari’s case, I did this:
Soft light and blur leads to:
This just pulls the icon together more even without a background.
I did something similar to the Nel icon, to pull the lighting from the background across her face as well.
Normal:
Soft light:
Often with these, it’s a bit too intense on full opacity so I move it down a bit. In this case, I set the layer at 54%.
And that’s the end of shading! These icons are almost done.
Comparison from beginning to end of this step:
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STEP FOUR :: FINISHING TOUCHES
Now it’s time to finish these icons up! If any of the icons I feel need to be a bit more cohesive in their coloring, I’ll create a new layer and completely fill it with a dark shade of a color I’d like to pull the icon together, then set it on screen and lower the opacity.
In this case, I added a dark blue layer on 80% opacity over top the Yoruichi icon.
This shouldn’t change the icon too much, of course, it’s just a small adjustment.
Next, I merge all the layers down into one layer and copy the image. Undoing the merge, I paste the merged image from before in up top and set it to soft light.
This obviously makes the icons a bit sharp and harsh, so I next use Gaussian Blur on the new soft light layer. The radius varies, I just toggle until I like how it looks.
In the case of the Tiana icon, I felt that the new layer made it too dark, so I lowered the opacity to 40%.
This is where it becomes more individualized. Some icons I’d consider done (or except for one step done) at this step, but often I continue to switch up and change a few things depending on the icon.
Sometimes its just a few little fixes, finding areas I dislike and trying to correct them. For instance, in the Yoruichi icons I felt like the highlights on her bust had gotten too dark, so I put two blobs where the highlights should be, hand blurred them with the blur tool and set them to soft light on 73% opacity.
On the Tiana icon, she ended up having this jagged pale line around her neck. Using a very pale orange shade, I drew a line on multiple to get rid of the highlight. Then I created a new copy merge layer of the how she now looked and blurred just around her neck ever so slightly with the blur tool.
Multiply layer:
Blurred:
Then there are bigger, coloring fixes. The Korra icon just wasn’t popping the way I wanted it to so I experimented around with different colors on screen layers. I ended up putting a dark maroon screen layer on.
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Next, I picked out a texture by cielo_gris:
I rotated it around so that lightest part would be over Korra’s body and adjusted the hue so that it looked like this:
Putting it below the blurry soft light layer and on screen at 38% opacity gave me this:
Then I added another copy merge, excluding these finishing touches, on soft light on 40% opacity:
And that’s how I wanted it to look!
For the Temari icon, I wanted the cool tones brought out a bit more so I added in a dark blue/purple screen layer above all the other layers at 72% opacity.
So, stuff like that. I just experiment around until it looks right.
Finally, sometimes with all the soft light layers and all things can get a bit sharp! In this case I just merge everything down and use the blur tool on 10% strength on the problem areas until I like it. Honestly, sometimes the change is so subtle that I’m the only one who’d notice/care and sometimes I probably go overboard, but I just follow my instincts.
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And that’s it! The icons are now 100% done.
Comparison from start to finish:
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And in case you aren’t overwhelmed yet, I have more!
Here are 25 icons I made in the last few days (including our lucky 5 examples!) and an album of all the bases for you to compare.
01-05
06-10
11-15
16-20
21-25
And here is a link to where you can download the psds for all of these 25 icons. You can look through every layer (including the pre-blur shading) and feel free to as me any questions about anything to find therein.
First 20 psds and last 5.
If you have any questions, ask away! I hope I will be able to answer. I hope this was at all helpful!
Wow, over 5000 words. NOW AREN’T YOU SORRY YOU ASKED?!