In this Skillshare course entitled Procreate Animation: Animate a Personalized Holiday Greeting Card, Isaiah Cardona walks you through his process for creating an animated holiday greeting card. He starts with a few sample animations playing in the background as his discusses what he will cover in the course. He explains his five step process from setting up the project file to exporting the file as an animated gif or mp4 video. He also suggests that you download his Procreate color palette and visit the links to the brushes and fonts used in the project.

As his process begins with the easy steps and progresses to more advanced techniques, Cardona walks you through the best settings for a new Procreate animation project. He also demonstrates how to import the color palette and a reference image.

Now it’s time to draw the illustration. Cardonal demonstrates how he starts by drawing the lines around the major shapes, using the reference image as a guide. Then he blocks in the color and adds the details. When adding the text greeting, Cardona discusses how to set the font, size, alignment and color for the text. As the layers that he has created so far are static and not part of the animation, he discusses how he groups the layers together as the background.

In the next video, Cardona starts working on the first of the animation layers, which is an animated snowfall. He begins by choosing a brush and color and adding the snowflakes that he will animate with Procreate's Animation Assist. He adds snowflakes to several layers, which will become the frames for the animation. He demonstrates how he uses one layer as an onion skin when adding snowflakes to a second layer, insuring the placement of the snowflakes in different positions on each layer. Next, he demonstrates how to set the looping options and to scrub over the timeline to test the results of the snowfall animation. Finally, he discusses how to set the frames per second for the animation, how to duplicate the first frame and move the duplicate frame to the end of the timeline, which will result in a smooth looping animation.

Next, Cardona demonstrates his process for creating blinking lights. As he has already drawn the red and green lights on the tree on one of the background layers, he shows how to add a glow around each light, adding the red and green glows on different layers. In this way, each layer becomes part of a different frame in the animation, resulting in the lights blinking from one color to the other.

The twinkle effect is a little more challenging and Cardona demonstrates how he creates a realistic twinkle effect around the star on the top of the tree. With a combination of dots and lines, he creates the appearance of streams of light expanding outward from the star.

Now it’s time to export your project. Cardona discusses how to adjust the export settings for both an animated gif and an mp4 video. As a summary of what you have learned, Cardona demonstrates this same process for a Halloween animation, including the sketching process for the Halloween design elements.

Isaiah Cardona is a senior art director based in the United States, with several years of experience in the advertising industry. He has several other animation and character design courses on Skillshare.

Procreate Animation: Animate a Personalized Holiday Greeting Card by Isaiah Cardona (affiliate link)

Disclosure: As a participant in the Skillshare affiliate program, some of the links in this article are affiliate links. However, my opinions are completely my own based on my experience.

Screenshots used by permission of Skillshare, Inc.