Making simple gifs with the Pixelbook and Photoshop
I’ve been (slowly) learning bits of animation, because I love seeing movement in my illustrations. Gifs are a great way to create subtle, eye catching animations. They can be as simple or complicated as you’d like to make them, and I’ve been making simple gifs, using the Pixelbook and Photoshop. I wanted to share the process I use for making these:
The first step is creating an illustration. I’ve been working digitally on the Pixelbook, and using an app called “Infinite Painter”. Here’s what the original image looks like:
(Please note: You can use just about any method to create your image: Illustrator, Procreate, etc. I use a Pixelbook for all my digital illustrations but feel free to use whatever method is best for you!)
After creating the initial illustration, I decide what part I want to animate.
(To read more about how I use the Pixelbook for digital illustration, check out this article.)
In this case, I wanted the background shapes to move. To create that, I made two layers of those shapes, and drew each one by hand — this way, the slight variations and inconsistencies will create the movement in the animation. In Infinite Painter, the layers end up looking something like this:
So you can see on the right hand side, there are two layers of the background shapes. I export two images, one with each background layer.
Next, I switch to my MacBook (the Pixelbook doesn’t yet support full Photoshop) and open a new Photoshop document (Open Photoshop and go to File > New) and place each of my images as a new layer. If the Layer menu isn’t open, you can find it in the menu as Window> Layers. You’ll need the “Timeline” to make this work, so if that’s not open, go to Window > Timeline. You’ll see text in the middle of the empty Timeline that says “Create Frame Animation”:
If you click that text, it will create a frame:
I duplicate the frame by dragging it to the highlighted icon. Through trial and error, I came to the conclusion that three frames works best for me. You want to make sure that each frame has the correct layers selected. Frame 1 should have Layer 1 visible, Frame 2 should have layer 2 visible, then back to Frame 1 and Layer 1.
The other important selection you need to make is the time. Under each frame you’ll see a drop down with a time selection. I use 0.1 sec, but feel free to change it up and see what works best for you.
The last step is to export the file, which you can do by going to the menu and choosing File > Export > Save for Web. When the dialog box comes up, the two most important settings are “GIF” as the file type, and “Forever” as the looping option:
(To learn more about exporting gifs, here’s a great article!)
Name and save your file, and it’s ready to share!
You can also apply this technique to photos and other imagery, you don’t have to just use illustrations!
Here are some additional examples of gifs used with illustration:
I’ve found this to be a fun and easy way to add a little animation into my illustrations and hopefully you do as well!
I’d love to see what you create — feel free to tag me on Twitter (@VPoltrack) or let me know if you have any questions.
(Thank you to Liam Spradlin and Kiran Puri for their help with this article!)
