Procreate Animation: Make Fun GIFs & Videos (Original)

This class sets out to do one specific thing well: get an iPad artist from zero to a looping animated GIF in Procreate, without touching a desktop app. It mostly succeeds, though it arrives carrying an unusual asterisk that any prospective student needs to know about upfront.

What the course actually teaches

The opening lessons cover animation fundamentals in plain terms, frames, frame rate, and the idea of a seamless loop, before moving into the two practical methods Procreate supports: animating via stacked top-level layers, and animating via top-level groups that can each hold several layers. The distinction matters more than it sounds. A layer becomes a single frame, useful for quick sketches, while a group lets multiple elements sit inside one frame and get animated independently, which is what most real projects need. The class also walks through onion skinning, both the built-in reduced-opacity trick and a manual version using a filled, semi-transparent layer between two frames, so a learner can trace movement accurately frame to frame.

From there the course gets into production concerns that beginners rarely think about ahead of time: GIFs cap out at 256 colors, so busy digital painting with gradients loses fidelity on export; canvas dimensions should be planned in pixels against real destinations like Instagram (1080x1350), Dribbble (800x600), or HD video (1920x1080); and file size scales with dimensions, color count, and frame count together. None of this is groundbreaking information, but bundling it specifically around Procreate's export dialog is genuinely useful, since the app's own controls (web-ready versus full resolution, transparent background, frames per second) are shown live rather than described abstractly.

The looping problem, and its fix

The most useful stretch of the class is the one addressing a real limitation: Procreate exports a video straight from the timeline, but that export does not loop, and a three-frame animation exported as a three-frame video is barely a fraction of a second long. The workaround shown, feeding the exported GIF through a free third-party app called GIF Cracker to convert it into a properly looping video, and a paid-tier trick of doubling canvas size to dodge the free version's resolution cap, is the kind of practical detail a beginner would otherwise lose an afternoon discovering on their own.

The later Animation Assist lesson, filmed after an app update, adds real value: automatic frame creation, Ping-Pong playback for instant seamless loops, and background/foreground layers that stay static across every frame. It is presented candidly, including the caveat that Animation Assist does not work with grouped layers, so anyone using groups still needs the manual layer-by-layer method taught earlier.

Where it falls short

The course's biggest weakness has nothing to do with content quality: right in lesson two, the teacher tells students there is now a newer, longer, more thorough version of this exact class and recommends enrolling in that one instead. That is an honest disclosure, but it leaves this version feeling like a legacy artifact rather than a currently recommended path, and a new student has to decide whether to push through material the instructor himself has partly deprioritized. The final project, illustrating and animating a five-frame "sun's out, guns out" character, is demonstrated in full and makes for a solid capstone, but the class overall reads best as a fast, functional primer rather than a definitive treatment of Procreate animation.

What you will learn

• ·How to build frame-by-frame animations in Procreate using both top-level layers and top-level groups, including onion skinning
• ·How to design a seamless looping animation so the last frame leads back into the first
• ·How to choose canvas dimensions and frame rate for different destinations (Instagram, Dribbble, YouTube)
• ·How to convert a non-looping exported GIF or MP4 into a genuinely looping video using the third-party app GIF Cracker
• ·How to organize a messy multi-layer animation project into named, grouped frames before animating
• ·How to use Procreate's Animation Assist panel, including Ping-Pong playback and background/foreground layers