How to Animate in KRITA for Beginners!

hey there fellow art nerds my name is Josh and I teach animation class here at Wing canvas in this video I'm going to walk through how you can use K in order to bring your drawings to life K is a

free open-source Digital Arts software that is pretty great to use for animation as well here we will cover basic tools setup and functions you'll need to get started as an animator if

you're looking to use K just for digital art and not animation we'll link another tutorial video in the corner let's get right into it now we're going to click new file over here CR comes with some default

templates but we're just going to ignore those and go into custom document if you want to follow along with my file settings I do have my file set at 1920 pixels x 1080 pixels with a resolution

of 100 pixels now if you want to add a little higher 300's usually the standard just know that 300 will be a little bit more demanding on your computer and sometimes during playback if your

computer's Hardware is not good enough it might drop some frames and it might stutter so 100's pretty good for if you're just experimenting or trying things out now if you like these settings you can always name it press

save and predefine sections so that if you open up CR and want to get that setting immediately you can find it that way now these settings look pretty good so I'm just going to press create this is what it's going to look like so in

order to get animating we need the animation timeline and to find that we go to settings Dockers and you can see animation timelines right there any other tool or panel that you need to

find can also be found over here so once you have them open a little check mark will show up for it so we're going to click animation timeline and this timeline is where all our animating is going to be you can see it takes up

quite a lot of space so typically this workspace layout isn't what I use instead I like to use K's animation workspace and we're going to open that by going to Windows workspace and

default is how you can reset everything but we're just going to use animation and you can see now we get one free side on the right now you can see my brush preset and my color Wheels missing so to bring those back up we go to settings

Dockers and there's my color wheel picker and I'm just going to put it here and I also want my brush preset so settings Dockers and brush preset I'm

going to drag it over here and this is typically the layout that I like and now that everything's set up we're going to get animating so now that we have our timeline set up you can see that it's a

empty timeline and you can tell that it's empty because of all these gray squares so to in order to create a frame of Animation we're going to click this icon over here that says add blank frame

we can also rightclick and press create blank frame and I'm just going to do that a few more times and once you create a blank frame of Animation what you'll see are these diagonal lines

going across the cells or these frames what you'll also notice is that because we created a blank frame of Animation it's going to have this blue outline AC

around the cell so I'm going to click on frame one over here and I'm just going to draw a DOT and now you'll see that on frame one it's filled in with this blue color to help indicate to us that it now

has a drawing inside of it so I'm just going to go to frame two now and what I want to do is animate this dot jumping across the screen so I'm going to give this kind of arching motion on frame

three it's hard to tell what I should be drawing next kind of hard to figure out the trajectory of this ball and this is where the onion skin comes in and the onion skin is this light bulb icon over here you can also find it on the layers

panel basically anything that you do on the layers panel will be reflected on the timelines layer itself you can do similar things on both and it'll affect each other so I'm just going to turn it

on and now I can see my drawings on frame one and frame two and on frame three now I can now see where I should place the next drawing and it's going to

be this big long Arch over here and then on frame four it's going to be coming down and on frame five I'm going to create another blank frame of animation

and put this dot over here so now I can take a look at my drawings and flip through the frames that have the drawings on them and I can do this by using the arrow keys you might have to

click on the timeline itself so K knows you want to use the arrow keys to flip through your frames you can also use the mouse wheel to somewhat quickly scroll through your animation or click on the

numbers on the timeline to really quickly scrub through the timeline I want to play my animation I can click click this play button over here and if I click it again it'll pause it on where

I click pause on the timeline you'll see that there's this orange marker indicating where we are on the timeline and if I click stop that orange marker now jumps back to wherever we started playing our animation which was frame

one so to show it again I'm going to go to frame three click play and now if I click stop you'll notice that it jumps to frame three instead of stopping on wherever I clicked stopped on the timeline so that's just like a neat

useful tool on K's playback setting now this forward and back key over here lets me go frame by frame on the timeline whether there's a frame of Animation or

if it's a blank and empty frame so again it's very similar to the arrow keys and just a way to navigate around your timeline and the skip forward and Skip back keys in order for me to show you

how these work I'm going to have to shift my frames around and so to do that I'm going to select frame two hold down shift and click on frame five and now I can really move them anywhere on the

timeline but I'm just going to space them out one by one this is called animating on twos and this just means that there's a blank frame of Animation in between each drawing so now if I

click the skip forward button it'll only jump to the frames that have drawings on them which are frames 1 3 5 7 and N so this is really good for checking what your animation looks like and instead of

going frame by frame you can just jump to the frames that actually have your drawings on them now if I want to delete a frame I can either click this remove

key frame button or I can rightclick and press remove key frame if I want to duplicate I can click the duplicate button and it'll basically duplicate anything that's on my canvas or it'll

duplicate whatever key frame what is ahead of it so let's say though I create this beautiful drawing over here but I forgot to create a blank frame of Animation before I drew it so if I click blank frame it's going to erase my

drawing so in order to save your drawing what you can do is actually click duplicate and it'll save whatever is on your canvas and now I'm just going to run down down the timeline settings on the top here this bar basically lets me

input any kind of frame number and it'll jump to that on the timeline so I jumped to frame 50 and then now I jump back to frame one it's like a quick way to jump across your timeline especially if

you're animating a lot of frames now drop key frames is good if your computer's having trouble basically playing back your animation and it's like chugging and it's not running really well clicking drop frames will

drop frames of Animation so that it plays at the speed that your animation should be playing at this is good for blocking but if you're fine-tuning your animation and you really want things to be smooth and checking that things are playing properly I would keep it off now

the speed bar over here basically lets you speed up or speed down your animation now if I look over here we have the onion skin and if I click it it toggles on and off the onion skin panel

and the onion skin lets us see the frames of Animation that came before as well as the animation frames of Animation that are coming up ahead and it's super useful in letting us map out

and plan out our animation sequence so we get up to 10 frames previous and 10 frames coming up ahead I like to personally keep it at 3 to 1 frames or else your screen starts getting a little

bit too hectic and it's hard to tell what you need to draw next now these little bars let you control the opacity of individual onion skins and the big bar lets you control the opacity of all

the onion skins and the tint slider well lets you control the tint of the onion skins I leave it at 74% it's kind of like the default percentage and these color swatches down here lets me change

the colors of my onion skin so if I want to change it I can do that and then click okay and it'll change the color of my onion skin so feel free to play around with the settings if I want to create a new layer on my timeline I

don't have to go to the layers panel I can click this plus icon these layer settings will pop up and if I want to ever import audio I can click this and click open audio and this window will

pop up letting me import music or dialogue especially if I have characters talking to one another and if I ever want to zoom in and out of my timeline like let's say I'm working with a 100 frames there's no need to be looking at

100 frames on my timeline if I'm only working on the first 20 frames so I usually just zoom in if that's the case now the icon next to the onion skin these three bars is the animation

setting menu it lets me control where my clip starts and end meaning like where my animation plays when I click play and because my animation sequence isn't that long I'm going to change it to 12 frame

and the frame rate I'm going to keep at 24 which is like the standard frame rate or 12 frames also works so if I click play right now you'll notice that the moment it hits frame 12 it goes back to

the beginning and that's because I clip and I changed it to 12 so the next tool is super important this is the autof frame mode and I use this pretty much all the time basically I don't have to click add blank frame and I don't have

to right click to create blank frame it automatically creates a blank frame of Animation the moment my stylus touches my tablet or the moment I start drawing essentially so you can see that on frame

four I just immediately start drawing and it automatically created a frame of animation for me which is super convenient and I can just focus on my drawing and not have to worry about

whether I created a blank frame or not so I'm just connecting my ball over here making sure that it's smooth and kind of creating this motion Trail you can join

our patreon as that will allow you access to special member perks like critiques and classes so if I click play this is what it looks like and you know I'm going to say it look looking not too

bad it's dropping a little early maybe but you know I like it now the other option that comes with auto key is auto key duplicate and it does the exact same as auto key blank but instead of a blank frame of Animation it creates well a

duplicate and it does exactly what we talked about previously now I'm going to walk through how you can render your animation and as you can see on my screen I have a new file with this kind

of Fireball type character and what I did is I took this red blob and I took the momentum and the kind of the jumping action that it had and I turn it into a character so this is the fireball

character that you can see over here and this is what the animation for this file looks like and it's looking uh not too bad pretty good now before you kind of

render your animation is probably good to get some few things set up first so you can see here on my desktop I have a file called Fireball and this is the

file or folder that everything's going to go into so all my images like the render images and the video file are all going to be here so to get a render going we're going to go to file click

render animation and this window will pop up now CR gives you two options you can either render it as an image sequence or you can do it as a video now

in order to do it instantly as a video you do need something called an FFM Peg it's a little bit complicated to get it set up you do need to download it and then change some settings on your

computer first so we're not going to go into it in the this video as it's quite complicated whereas the image sequence is a little bit more open to everyone it's just that it takes a few more steps

and it's a bit of a hassle to render your video so everything looks good but I want it to start from frame one and for my Fireball animation it it's 50 frames so everything looks good you can

also change the different images but I'm going to keep it at PNG if you want to change it to a gif image or JPEG that works as well and if you ever want to check if your files are all going into the correct location just click that

folder icon and everything looks good so I'm going to click okay as you can see it only took about like a second to get everything rendered now you can see all the rendered images go into my Fireball

folder I'm going to select all the images by click dragging or you can crl a and I'm just going to right click the first image and click create a new video and windows default kind of movie

editing video editing software will pop up kind of similarish to iMovie I'm just going to name it Fireball now if you are doing this on the Mac or if you want to edit it on your Mac the steps are fairly

similar so in this project Library area I'm going to click the first image scroll all the way down shift click the last image and then I'm going to click place in the storyboard now I'm just

going to check that all the images are here and it looks like it now I click the first image and I holding down shift and I selected the last image to kind of select all the images right now I'm just

checking to make sure they are and once they all are selected go to duration and change it to 0.03 or 0.02 depending on if you want it a little bit faster or a little bit

slower you might have to just kind of play around with the duration a little bit to see which one matches closest to the final animation speed that you want but I'm just going to keep it at 0.03 as

I feel like that's the closest I can get to the motion that I had for my Fireball so once that looks good again I'm just going to check that all the images are changed to that 0.03 duration I'm going

to play it just again to make sure it looks good and it does so I'm going to click finish video on the upper right and I'm going to click export and again I'm just going to make sure that it's going to be exporting to the fireball

folder click okay this is what it looks like and as you can see in our Fireball folder our video file is now there if you want to learn from me or any of our

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