Illustrating and Animating Characters With After Effects and Procreate

Character design is one of the most rewarding and fun processes in the motion design world. It becomes even more fun and rewarding when you learn to animate them. Here’s how.

Creating and animating a character almost makes one feel omnipotent. There are so many ways of infusing your own personality and design sense into something that can truly invoke emotion, tell stories, and make people in the world feel less alone. Characters are powerful, especially when you designed them with heart and intentionality. 

The same, in a lot of ways, is just as true for when you make them move and animate them. You can add personality and further tell the story that way too. There are many ways to animate a character, and some of them are easier than others. However, Audrey Stemen made this video that will get you off on the right foot using After Effects and Procreate to make thoughtfully designed characters and animations.

As with most things in the creative realm (and really everything in life in general for that matter) the best way to learn is to just start trying. Just make your first character and make it move. You’ll find that it’s somehow not as hard as you thought, but also one of the hardest things you’ve done. The animation part specifically can be a truly grueling process, but if you put the right thought into various aspects, you’ll find that it’s one of those skills that gets easier and easier over time. Here are some tips that will get you there quicker.

Design Comes First

If your character doesn’t look good when in still form, then it’s probably not going to look any better animated. You have to put the right amount of thought into your design and how you want your design to move and feel. You want your design to look better in motion, but still look great when it’s static. 

Your character design should evoke the right emotions and feelings that you’re intending to convey before you’ve ever laid down a single keyframe. You want the motion to enhance those aspects, not be the only saving grace of your design. 

You’ll want to pull reference imagery and get a good idea of they types of things you want to use to inform the design of your character. Are we going for Spider-Verse or are we going for Charlie Brown? (Probably couldn’t have come up with two more wildly different examples.) Then you can start to sketch out the anatomy of your character and get a feel for the way they might move. Consider the proportions of your character and the world they’re living in.