Hand-Drawn Digital Animation: Bring Illustrations to Life

Through illustration and animation, you have the power to translate complex topics into playful visual languages. Yukai Du specializes in creating digital illustrations and animations that look hand-crafted. She helps brands to visualize the message they want to communicate with their audience and has worked with clients including Adobe, Spotify, WeTransfer, and MTV.

In this course, Yukai teaches you how to combine the art of illustration with 2D animation to create striking digital artwork of your own. Are you ready to bring your illustrations to life and start animating your ideas?

Begin by getting to know illustrator and animator Yukai Du. She takes you behind the scenes of her creative journey before sharing the artists and influences which have inspired her career.

Explore how to compile references for your artwork using keywords from a brief. Then, narrow them down and use your images to create a mood board with Keynote or Google Slides. Find out how to extract the color theme from your mood board using Adobe Colors.

Sketch your initial ideas on paper in the form of a storyboard as a starting point for your animation. Yukai then talks through digitizing, refining, and organizing your drawing in a storyboard template in Photoshop. Experiment with adding color to your work before finalizing your key designs and cropping them in different frames.

Time to start animating! Begin by analyzing your frames, looking at how to animate each part, and preparing your assets in Photoshop. Then set up your project in After Effects and animate the character, shapes, and background. Import your work into Animate to create frame-by-frame transitions before putting the finishing touches to your animation.