Learn Procreate Dreams FAST- a Comprehensive Step-by-Step Tutorial for Beginners

In this Procreate Dreams tutorial, you're going to learn all the tools, including masking, easing, and keyframing, all while creating this adorable ghost. Whether you're a beginner or pro animator, you'll be ready to create your own animations by the end, but you can always skip ahead using the timestamps below. I've created animations in Procreate Dreams I never thought possible. Even beginners can create impressive results. I've put the project files below for free so that you can follow along step by step. I'm Brooke Glaser. I'm a professional illustrator and I So let's dive in. To create an animation, you're going to want to tap the plus icon, and then you can swipe through these different options to choose a preset size. If you tap the three buttons, you can choose your frames per second or your duration. If you tap the 4k, you can choose different sizes and dimensions for your movie. But once we open a movie, we can change this at any time by tapping on the name of the movie right here in the properties tab. You can change any of these settings so you can choose a custom dimension for your animation. Once you're inside a movie, we have two active spaces. We've got the stage and our timeline, and on the movie stage, we've got this active area, and then there's kind of like this grayed out area, and it's called the backstage. We can see it because we're the director, but when we export our movie, that's not going to show up. And the timeline over here, this has all of my tracks. If I tap on this arrow, you'll see that I've actually got quite a few tracks in here. So I've got the ghost, which has its face and its body, lots of tracks in here. These are similar to layers in Procreate, but they're different elements that I've animated. And if you're familiar with Procreate, you know that you can use two fingers to pinch and zoom around the canvas or the stage, and we can do the same thing with the tracks, but we can actually go further with this. So if I take three fingers and I scrub them side to side, it's going to zoom my timeline in and out. And if I move three fingers up and down, it's going to scale the sides of my tracks. This little clapperboard is called our playhead. And if I drag it across the timeline, it's going to play our movie backwards or forwards. I can also hit the play button, and that will also just play it automatically. And once this reaches the end of what's on screen, it's going to pop back and it's going to loop that animation. And that is true however close I zoom in. So if I zoom in really close, it's only playing that section of the timeline. And if I zoom out, it's going to play more of the timeline. Another fun trick. So if I grab this playhead and I flick it back, it's going to go all the way to the end of the movie. This is really useful because sometimes I'm super zoomed in and I want to start it from the beginning. Boom, just flick it back all the way. And also, if I double tap on the screen, it's going to zoom in to wherever I've double tapped. So I can get a lot closer in a lot faster. Finally, if you tap four fingers on the screen, it's going to pull up our preview mode. And if I tap again on the screen, it's going to pull up the playhead controls here and I can watch my entire movie. I can even move my finger back and forth across the screen to play different areas, and I can zoom in and out of my image. There's a couple ways to import your art from Procreate. One of the simplest ways is to simply go into Procreate, tap and grab the file that you want to import, navigate to your Dreams file, and drop it in. You may need to move your file or adjust it to fit the canvas size, and then if you tap and hold on the track, there's an option here that says convert tracks to layers. This will convert your track into a group, and if you open it, all of your layers will have been imported with their names. Sometimes you may find that you've got a working file and you just want to add one extra layer from Procreate. So for example, I want to add this flower, so I'm just going to grab this single layer, not the entire file, and I'm just going to drop it in. And again, you may need to move it, but now I have just that single layer in my existing animation. You can also import a Dream file from someone that you're working with. For example, I've linked the ghost animation file below in the description, so you can follow along with the rest of the tutorial. Once you've downloaded the Dream file to your iPad, you're going to need to find it in your files app, which looks like this. If you downloaded your file from Firefox browser, you're going to want to navigate to on my iPad. Look for the Firefox browser icon, and then check your downloads file. If you downloaded from a Safari browser, you're going to want to navigate to the iCloud drive under locations, and find the download folder there. Once you've located your file, you're going to want to tap and hold until this menu pops up, and we're going to choose move. Now we're going to go to look for Procreate Dreams, and choose the theater. Now I'll choose copy or move. Once you've copied that file to your theater folder, it'll show up inside the theater when you open Procreate Dreams. Okay, let's try our hand at animating. Now there's a few different ways to animate in Procreate Dreams. You can animate via keyframes, perform mode, or frame-by-frame animation. And we're going to start with keyframing because it's going to help you understand everything else. What's awesome about using keyframing is that you draw something once, then animate it without having to redraw it. So I'm going to move my playhead to the start of my ghost track because I want to move this ghost up and down. Now I'm going to tap on the playhead, and I've got a couple of choices here. If I choose filter, I could animate the opacity or the hue saturation and brightness. But I'm going to choose move for now, and I'm going to choose move and scale. Notice that there's been a change in my timeline. If I zoom in here, my playhead has changed into this new little move and scale icon, and a new mini track has been created. This is my keyframe track. If I drag my playhead now, this move and scale icon is grayed out. But if I tap it, it turns white. Now I'm going to move my ghost down on the screen. And if I play this back, my ghost is moving. So what's happening here is this track is our keyframe track. This is where the animation is. And if I put my playhead back on the content right here, it turns back into the clapperboard because this track holds my art. One track holds your art, and the other holds your animation. Let's zoom out over here. I can tap, create a new keyframe, and move my ghost. Now the ghost is moving up and down. But let's say I don't really like how fast this is moving. What I can do is I can tap and hold on this keyframe until it pops, and then I can move it around. So I can move these across the timeline. And now my ghost is moving a little bit slower. Now here's where things get really exciting. We can do this automatically with the perform mode. I'm going to hop over to my leaf layers, and I'm going to find leaf one. And I can see my leaf one is right here. It's got the bounding box right around it. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to tap on the perform mode, and I'm just going to move my leaf down across the screen. And if I play it back, you can see that this has created that movement for me. And if I zoom onto the track, I can see it's created a track here, and it's added the keyframes automatically for me. Now let's say for some reason I don't really like the way that the leaf is falling. So there's a couple of things that I can do about this. First, I can undo it. You can undo by tapping two fingers and redo by tapping three fingers, just like in Procreate. But what's cool about Procreate Dreams is that these undo and redo states are available even if you leave the movie. If you go back to the gallery by tapping that button right there, and then I go back in, I can still undo and redo. Really cool. Now our second option is to play with the motion filtering. So if you tap on the record icon and tap modify up here, it's going to open up motion filtering. If you're familiar with Procreate, you know that they have these stabilization settings that can help you draw smoother lines. Perform mode has this similar feature. The default is around 30%. That 30% is usually a really good setting. But sometimes when I've tried to make really small, fast movements, it doesn't get picked up in perform mode. So if I want to animate this needle right here, okay, so I'm going to go into perform mode, and I want this needle to go really, really, really, really, really fast. Check out how this plays back. It's not picking up that really tiny, fast movement. So if I go, I'm going to undo that, and I'm going to go into motion filtering and take it down to 0%. And now let's try it and play that back. Now it's going much faster. Back to my leaf example, I'd like my leaf to kind of twist and turn as it falls. So let's take a closer look at what we can do here. So if I zoom in, there's this bounding box. If your bounding box disappears, you just need to tap back on the playhead, and it'll reappear. But if I grab one of these little red corners, and I pull back and forth, I can scale. If I grab one of these sides, I can skew on either end. I'm going to undo that. But if I tap on one of these corners, there's a little curve that shows up, and I can see it disappeared. I just tap on the playhead, tap on that red corner, pull that curve around. Now I can rotate. And this little cross in the center, that is my anchor. So if I tap these three dots, and tap edit anchor, I can move it to the base of the leaf, hit done, and now it's going to rotate from that point. I'm going to move to the beginning of my track. I'm going to hit the perform mode, and I'm going to tap the corner so I can pull up that curve, and I'm going to rotate it as it falls. And if I play that back, it's rotating as it falls. None of these changes that I'm making are permanent. All of the properties that we can animate here are non-destructive, meaning nothing that you do is permanent. You can always change it or delete it. Let's say I don't like one of these keyframes. Well, if I tap and hold on it, I can delete that keyframe. But let's say I don't like anything that I've done on this leaf. I tried an experiment and I hated it. Well, if I tap and hold in between those icons, I can delete that entire track. And now it's gone. My leaf is still up here, off stage. It's right there, but none of the movement is associated with it anymore. But let's take it even one step further. Let's say I like the way the leaf falls, but I don't like the way it twists. Well, if I tap on the track and I expand the transformation, now I can get into each of these properties. So this is the translate X and Y. This is the scale, and this is the rotation. So if I tap in between the rotation icons, I can delete the rotate, and now my leaf is just going to fall. It's not going to rotate. What if I decide that I really hate the color of these cheeks? Well, I can draw and paint directly in Procreate Dreams. If I tap on the squiggle icon, it's going to open up the draw and paint mode. If you're familiar with Procreate, this is going to look really familiar. You've got your paint brushes right here. If you tap on it, you can scroll through and choose any of these different brush sets. There's tons of brushes. You can also do the same thing with your smudge and erase tool. So if you tap in there, you also have a layers panel. I'm going to eyedrop the cheek color by tapping and holding my finger on the screen, and then I can pull up the color and eyedrop that color, and I'll just choose a darker color here. Pull the color circle all the way over here and drop it onto the cheeks. Draw and paint mode is also where you're going to do frame by frame animation. So I want to draw his eyes blinking. So I need a new layer for that. So I'm going to tap on the plus icon. I'm going to hit content track, and I've got a new layer here for drawing my frame by frame animation. So there's a gray bar in the middle right here, and if you grab it and flick either upwards or downwards, it's going to open up the flipbook. And I can move the flipbook around by grabbing that gray icon right there, and I can tap the X to exit this mode. Now if I tap through these empty frames, you can see the leaves are moving. So I'm moving a single frame forward and backward. So what I want to do is I want to draw some white around his eyes. So I'm going to draw his eyes shutting just a little bit, and then if I tap to the next frame, well I want to close his eyes halfway, but it's hard to decide where to draw it without knowing where the last drawing was. So we're going to turn on onion skin. Onion skins are a semi-transparent preview of the frames that came before so that you can tell where to draw the next bit. So if I tap on the time code right here, I can tap to turn on onion skins, and if I tap edit onion skin, I can actually customize the settings of my onion skin. So maybe I want this to be blue instead of yellow so it's a little bit easier to see. I can change how many frames I can, how many frames back it's going to preview for me, and I can also play with the opacity. You can do the same thing with your forwards. So I'm gonna tap back out here, and now that I can see how far my eyes were, I'm going to draw them a little bit halfway closed, and then maybe just a touch up. See now it's hard to see what I'm doing here, so if I go to edit my onion skins, and I reduce the opacity, now I can see, oh yeah, I can see a little bit of that eye there, so I want to cover that in. Now if I hit done, I can play this through, and boom, I've got a blink. Now I wish that he blinked a little bit longer. So there's a couple of things that you can do. When you do a frame by frame drawing, you are creating individual tracks. I can tap and hold, and I can move these tracks around. I can also grab one end of the track, and move it forward or backwards to make it last longer or shorter. Now here's where it gets really cool. So I've got a frame in the center here where his eyes are totally closed, and I would like that to last longer. So I'm going to tap and hold until I get one half of my track highlighted, and then I'm going to tap a finger on the screen, and now when I push this track, it's pushing the other tracks forward and backwards. So I can leave this at two frames of his eyes closed. So let's preview that. Yeah, I like that better. Now his blink is a little bit more slow, but the thing is, I'd like to have him blinking several times. So in order to do that, I don't have to redraw this. I'm going to duplicate this blink. So I'm going to go to the timeline edit, and use my pen, not my finger, to select all these tracks. I'm going to tap and hold on here, and I'm going to choose group. I'm going to exit the timeline edit mode, and now if I tap and hold on this group, I've got a bunch of different options in here. Some of them are clipping masks, layer masks, I can play with blend modes, but what I care about right now is I want to duplicate this. So now I've got him blinking twice, and what I want to do is I'm going to move one of these blinks further over here. So now I've got him blinking a couple of times, and I didn't have to redraw it. I can also duplicate an entire track by hitting track options, duplicate, and now I have two instances of this leaf, and if I pull it back, now I have them falling at different times. We can also set easings between keyframes in Procreate Dreams. So you just tap in between two keyframes on the keyframe track, and choose set all easings. Now if you've never heard of easing before, it can kind of help to think of it like this. In real life, a car at a stop sign will slowly start accelerating, pick up speed, and then slow down before coming to a stop. So it eases into the motion, and then eases out. But if I chose a linear easing, the track is going to move at the same rate the entire time. In the case of a moving car, this is going to look a little unnatural, because in real life, if a car stopped suddenly, it would probably jerk around a bit. However, a linear easing could easily make sense in other scenarios. Here's all of our easing options together. So an ease in motion would start slow, and then pick up speed to the end, and an ease out would start at full speed and slow down towards the end of the keyframe. I've turned off my background layer so we can see the next point. Above my body layer, I've created an animated texture, but the texture is floating outside of the ghost's body. So if I tap and hold on this group of texture, I can tap mask and clipping masks, and then it's going to contain those textures to the body shape. Now let me show you how I create the waves at the bottom of my ghost. The waves are simply a curved line that moves back and forth, but I need to hide the sides. That's where the mask comes in. This pink layer is big enough that it can cover the entire wave, and when I turn it into a layer mask, then it becomes invisible, and it only shows the wave line behind it, and it shows the leaves that fall behind the waves. Once you've finished animating your cute ghost, you're going to want to share it. So if we tap on the name of the file, you're going open up your movie settings, but we're interested in share for now. This is where you can choose the settings or the format that you'd like to share in. I'm going to choose video, good quality. It'll pull up your share options, and if you tap save video, it'll save your video to your photos app. There's always a learning curve when learning a new software or skill, but I hope I've helped spark your curiosity. I've got several more tutorials and edit as we speak, so stay tuned for more. If you share your work on Instagram, please tag me at Paper Playgrounds, and if you're up your illustrations even more, you may want to check out my program, The Illustrator's Launchpad, where you'll learn how to draw, stylize your art, choose beautiful colors, and add shading and highlighting. I'll see you soon with another tutorial.