Basics of Hand-Drawn Animation

Johannes Fast structures this course the way most animation fundamentals classes should: theory first, then practice, repeated across five exercises of rising difficulty. After a short introduction and a rundown of the twelve principles of animation, each subsequent lesson pairs a "Theory" video explaining the concept with a "Practice" video showing the actual drawing process on screen, from boiling text through a bouncing ball, liquid text, a waving flag, and finally a full walk cycle.

The twelve principles lesson is dense but efficient. Fast runs through arcs, squash and stretch, anticipation, secondary action, staging, straight-ahead versus pose-to-pose, slow in and slow out, timing, exaggeration, solid drawing, appeal, and follow-through, giving each one a one- or two-sentence definition and a quick visual example (an angry button-smash for secondary action, a match's trailing flame for follow-through). It moves fast enough that a total newcomer will likely need to rewatch it once the later exercises put the terms into practice.

The exercises build logically

The boiling text exercise is a genuine warm-up: three drawings held for two frames each, looped, just enough to introduce animating on twos before anything harder shows up. The bouncing ball lesson that follows is the strongest piece of teaching in the course. Fast narrates his own drawing process frame by frame, explaining exactly why the spacing tightens near the ground and loosens at the peak of the arc, and why each successive bounce squashes less as the ball loses energy. It is the kind of exercise animation schools use for a reason, and watching someone actually build it while explaining the physics in real time is more useful than any written description of the principle.

The liquid text and flag exercises extend the same ideas into a different register. Liquid text is really an arcs-and-timing exercise dressed up in a fun visual, and the flag lesson doubles as a lesson in wave motion generally, with a direct callout that the same technique applies to smoke, grass, hair, and cloth. That connective thread between exercises is one of the course's better qualities. It is not a random grab bag of tricks; every exercise reinforces the same underlying vocabulary.

The walk cycle payoff, and where the course thins out

The walk cycle gets the most screen time and rightly so, since it is the exercise most animation studios expect to see in an entry-level portfolio. Fast's breakdown into contact, down, passing, and up poses, plus the trick of treating the head and body as two offset bouncing balls before drawing the character over them, is a clean and memorable way to demystify what looks like a complicated twelve-drawing sequence.

Where the course thins out is everything around the animation itself. There is no character design guidance, no discussion of composition or staging beyond a one-line principle definition, and the software section covers only the handful of Animate tools needed for these specific exercises, not a general orientation to the program. Anyone without at least a rough drawing ability will struggle to keep up, since the course assumes you can already sketch a character and a flag competently and simply need to know how to move them. At under an hour of video, it also cannot go deep on any single principle, appeal and staging in particular get little more than a definition. As a first structured pass through the fundamentals, though, with five real hands-on drawings to show for it, it does what it sets out to do.

What you will learn

• ·The twelve classic animation principles (arcs, squash and stretch, anticipation, timing, follow-through and the rest) with a concrete example for each
• ·How to set up and navigate Adobe Animate's timeline, layers, onion skinning, and frame conversion shortcuts
• ·How to animate on twos versus ones and when to use straight-ahead versus pose-to-pose workflow
• ·How to build a bouncing ball that changes weight and material through spacing and squash alone
• ·How to break a walk cycle into contact, down, passing, and up poses, then offset the head and arms for personality
• ·How to export a finished animation as a looping GIF from both Animate and Photoshop