GIF: HAPPY CHINESE NEW YEAR

February 16, 2018

It is Chinese New Year! Here I presented how I created a simple anime gif to celebrate The Year Of Dog.

Sketching

Credits to Wendi.

Using iPad with Apple Pencil, my friend Wendi drew the basic line graph of a shōjo holding a doggie.

Illustration

I am using magical Pen Tool to quickly draw bezier curves according to the sketches. This is an essential process of converting a pixel image to a vector image.

Pen Tool

Use the Blob Brush Tool with Wacom drawing tablet to draw the eyelash. The major parts of eye are composed of several gradient ellipses layering on top of each other.

Eyes

It is arduous to create the watercolor effect on Illustrator; therefore, I decided to create a flat anime design instead. I am using Live Bucket to fill in colors.

Coloring

This is the Outline View of the artwork. It shows the magic tricks of how I added details (hair shadows): I drew a line without any stroke and fill; it is only a boundary of two colors.

Lines and Vector

References

This details and colors of the piece are certainly not fully came up by myself; I looked up several references great anime pieces as followings.

Anime References

Animation

The last step. I created two different layers of both eyes and mouth (two states: open and closed). Each layer from Illustrator is imported as a layer in After Effects.

Finally, I rendered an mp4 file and then exported a gif file in PhotoShop.