Winter is Passing, Spring has Sprung
The other day I noticed that the cherry blossom trees are already starting to bloom. I thought, “It’s mid February and we are still getting freezing temperatures! I wonder if they will survive the cold?” Driving up and down the Main Street by my house, I realized that it is completely lined with these trees – which I hadn’t seen since moving to the area this past summer. Instantly I pictured how beautiful the street will be in the middle of March when it’s starting to warm up and the street will be filled with petals flowing in the wind, streaks of pink and white passing by.
I felt a moment of hope and excitement picturing what is to come, after the long wait of winter. I thought of this image when thinking of what to draw to create a gif of my poster.
I’d seen some designers on social media show short tutorials of using the Procreate app on their iPad to create short animations, but I had never tried myself. I started by sketching the barren tree on a layer itself. I wanted to create a simple, organic ink drawn image, slightly referencing Japanese calligraphy since cherry blossom trees grow rampantly there.
From there I worked as I usually do, creating new layers to add more features to the image. I thought it would work nicely to find a way to show the tree growing the buds of the flowers, then the flowers being swept away with the wind – signaling the short lived lives of cherry blossoms and the full onset of Springtime.
I knew that each layer would be processed as it’s own image, then played in a sequence to create the gif, so I used a process of duplicating images and adding an element, and repeating the pattern.
Once I reached the height of the tree’s blooms, I backtracked and made duplicates of previous versions, then drew some of the petals gently wafting away as the tree lost more and more flowers.
After the tree lost it’s flowers I had to finish the story by showing what comes next, so I made the new base composition a version of the tree full of green leaves. Layer by layer, I added in each letter to the phrase “Spring Has Sprung”, then create an ending, exploding with the colors of the season.
I knew that there was a way to export the layers as a GIF and had a classmate with some experience with Procreate show me a few tips. I exported all of my layers as an “Animated GIF” and it allowed me to adjust the frame rate down to the optimal speed. It was easy to save to my iPad as it’s own file and airdrop to the computer.
Challenges I faced were having to imagine how much of a jump should be made between each layer or “frame” in the GIF. I have no experience creating art that would be animated so it was mostly guesswork. When I was already almost finished with my drawings my classmate shared with me that Procreate has an animation “helper” tool that allows you to create small changes and watch back what you added in real time as you go. That would have been helpful if I had known about that feature from the start, but I was so close to being done already, I had to finish the final layers and hope it turned out okay. Thankfully, it did!