How to Create an Animation in Procreate in 5 Minutes

Have you ever wanted to add a bit of movement to one of your illustrations? Adding animation to your drawings gives them some visual interest that keeps your viewers looking at your art longer and lucky for us, Procreate has added an animation feature, making it super simple to animate your art!

I’ve put together a quick tutorial here to show you how to animate your illustrations. If you want to watch a video of this tutorial, head over to my Plant Illustrations class where I show the whole process in video 7.

First, duplicate your art in your Procreate gallery so that you can keep your original intact. Then group all the layers that will not be moving and flatten them by merging them together. In our example here, we’ll group all the layers except the leaves because we want the leaves to move as though the wind is blowing them. 

You can also group the layers that will have movement to make them easier to duplicate.

Next turn on Animation Assist. This can be found in Actions -> Canvas -> Animation Assist.

This will pop up a bar on the bottom of your screen. Tap on the picture of your flattened background in this animation bar. Toggle the button to on to make this the background for the whole GIF. 

Now we’ll go back to our layers and duplicate the group of our moving layers.

To add movement, tap on Adjustment > Liquify. There are various movements you can do within the Liquify tab. But for this illustration we’re going to use Push to mimic the wind moving the leaves.

The key is to use small movements on those duplicated layers. This will create a smoother animation. After that, keep duplicating the groups that you adjusted and add small movements. 

If you go to the Settings Menu on the Adjustments Bar you can adjust how many layers you can see below your current layer. These are called Onion Skin Layers and they fade your previous layer so you can see what movement you did last as well as what you’re working on.

You can test your animation at any time by pressing Play on the Animation Bar. Also in Animation Settings, you can adjust the speed and type of animation to suit the look you’re going for.
When you are finished you can go to Actions > Share to save it. For sharing to YouTube and Instagram export an Animated MP4.

And that’s it! You’ve just made your own GIF!