I wanted to get past the tutorials and see what I could do on my own. So I decided to try and make a sort of animated greeting card for the holidays. This year has been a bit of a challenge for everyone, and like a lot of people, my partner and I are not going home for Christmas. Both of our families are located in the lower mainland and since that’s one of the areas in BC with the most Covid cases, there is no way we were going to risk ourselves or our families by jumping back and forth between at least three households. So I wanted to make something I could share online.

I started out with an idea. something simple that I could easily create on the app, but would also be visually appealing. I am not much of a graphic designer, I’ll be honest, but I came up with an idea during class and quickly sketched it down in my notes. Now excuse my messy sketch, but the my idea is this: A mountainous, winter scene in a snow globe. I wanted to try my hand at some more guided motion animation with the falling snow, and then isolated animation with the “Happy Holidays” text.

The winter landscape I drew on on the procreate app was pretty simple. I’d like to get a bit better at these simple landscapes. I’ve seen several procreate users create some pretty fantastic images and I don’t think this one is quite up to snuff, but hey, it’s my first go at it this style. I used several layers to create the scene and merged them all together into one. This became my static frame for my isolated animation.

Animating the text was easy enough. I started with writing the text out in a single layer as a guild and then in new layers, slowly drew over the text until I had all the frames of the animated text. The guide layer was then deleted. The text animation worked out pretty smoothly, but it was when I got to the snow that I ran into a pit of a struggle.

The guided animation is one of the most simple methods and it didn’t take me long at all to draw my guide lines and create my many…. many frames of falling snow. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that the snow animation would run separately from the isolated text animation. I then had to go back in and take the individual snow frames, in order, and add them to the isolated animation groups. It was a bit of a time consuming mess, but in the end I was left with a working animation and an uncomfortable amount of frames.

The amount of individual frames turned out to be a bit of a problem. It was hard to export the GIF file and share it since the film was pretty large. I had to go back in and simplify it a little bit, but I was pretty happy with how it was looking and didn’t want to change it too much. So here it is! My little animated, holiday greeting card! I am not thrilled with how the semi-transparent text looks against the write background of my blog, so I added another version with a blue background, which gives more of the effect I was for.