It is great to hear about how you’ve been inspired to draw, or go back to school, or
try something new because of Scribble Kibble. You might not see it from your side of things,
but I learn a lot by making this show. More often than not I have to do research to figure
out how something was done. There’s a ton of animation techniques out there!
I haven’t talked about animations without outlines yet, so at your request the featured
animation is Temmie Chang’s Potion Shop.
Cute. Not an especially remarkable story, but cute and easy to follow.
More interesting is the animation style because it has fuzzy edges yet it’s drawn in Flash,
Photoshop, and After Effects.
You can’t make this in Flash. Flash can’t natively make fuzzy lines like this - or at
least the older versions can’t. So to recreate this style you would animate your character
in Flash, export the animation file, import it into After Effects, and apply a filter
to the character that makes the edges rough.
That would be the easy way. The problem with that is all of the edges on the closeup shots
are fuzzy. Not just the outside edge of the whole character, but the inside pieces. A
filter would only affect the outside edge… unless you... Hm.
Style recreation adventure! Let’s try to make an animation with fuzzy edges in three
different ways.
The fastest style is an After Effects filter. Here is the picture I’m going to recreate.
First, I’ll trace all of the different pieces of the character on different layers.
This is what it would look like if drawn in Flash. Now, I’ll try exporting this as a
single animation file. There. Okay, bring it into After Effects.
My first instinct is to use a Sharpen effect. No, no, that’s not right. It makes the edges
different colors.
Smart blur. Woah. What the… What is this noodle soup going on. Weird.
Okay, this is what we want, but with colored edges. Not white. Possibly could combine another
effect with this to keep the edges the same color. But let’s keep trying filters.
Nope. Nope. Nope. Cool though.
This looks promising. Block Load. Uncheck start cleared. There. Now I can adjust how
fuzzy the edges are. It’s working on the edges of all the pieces, which is awesome.
I didn’t think it would do that. So this really is that easy to recreate.
Let’s compare. Hm. Yeah. It’s like the original, but definitely not the same. But
the Block Load filter will pixelate your art and make the edges fuzzy, and it’s so easy
to do. Drag and drop and fiddle with two control options. Simple.
Pff. And here I thought I’d have to export all of these different layers from Flash independently
so I could individually control fuzziness levels on each piece.
How about attempting method two? This time I’ll use the Flash CC brush library to get
fuzzy outlines.
Make the line thicker and try a couple of brushes here. This one is pretty close. This
is the one. Fuzzy all around.
Now to draw the character, delete the overshot lines, change the fill and line color. Done.
I have a very nice lineless, fuzzy edged character now. The brush library in Flash is great - the
only problem is that it is very hard on your computer. I’m getting a lag because of this
simple drawing. Strange that it’s not affecting drawing, only when I pan, zoom, or move around.
Well, call me surprised. I didn’t think either of those two methods would give very
good results, but they did. Only one more thing to try now, the most time consuming
method to do: animate the basics in Flash, export every single frame, draw the actual
animation in Photoshop, and then import the sequence of frames into After Effects. Or
animate directly in Photoshop. Yikes. But I have a sneaking suspicion this may be the
answer because of the quality of certain lines on closeup shots. See the semitransparent
tails on these necklace triangles? And these other brush imperfections? Those clues are
like looking at wild Photoshop tracks in the mud.
I already drew the smooth character, so I’ll “export the movie” now. If I had a whole
animation in Flash, this would export every individual frame of the animation from every
single scene.
Okay, open it up in Photoshop. Honestly the best way to do this is probably open and paint
each frame individually and save over it when finished, but I’m opening it as a movie
clip.
Now I’ll brush the lines with some different brush tools. Gotta find the right brush for this.
There’s so many Photoshop brushes. I’m just going to use this one. Bah, doesn’t
look right with pressure sensitivity. I’ll resort to my sketch brushes.
Honestly why stick with fuzziness? Look at all the cool painting techniques you could
do. Plus, if I were really going to animate in Photoshop, I would do sketches in Flash
and then use those as a basis to draw and paint everything in Photoshop. I would not
paint over a colored drawing like I’m doing here.
Finished painting, export the frame, overwrite the original. I’ll overwrite frame 2 in
this case. Open After Effects and import as a PNG sequence. There’s frame one and there’s
frame two that I painted on.
Yeah. Maybe Temmie Chang animated directly in Photoshop. I know the spells and special
effects are Flash because they are smooth. You can see the difference. And I know the
backgrounds are Photoshop because they are painted. The real mystery is the characters,
and what blend of programs she used to make them.
This is what makes Scribble Kibble so difficult sometimes. There are many different ways to
achieve the same result!
My name is Reeve, I am almost 13 years old and I’m a professional artist, apparently.
xD Anyways, I love your vids so so so much, they’ve
helped me out a lot with animations! You are BY FAR one of my favourite channels!
Hi Scribbles, my name is Madison. I made you this picture and I made you look really tough
and cool. I hope you like it.