As a quick demonstration, we received a lesson on how shading could be done in Adobe Animate. We had gone over the basics of the program and everybody knew how to create an animation, however, we had not gone over the finer details and extras, and a lot of people didn’t feel confident creating artwork in Animate, including me. One aspect is shading, so I’m grateful we were shown one possible method.
First, we started out by drawing a simple character. There was no need to colour it as of yet, so I focused on quickly sketching out the first thing that popped into mind. I tend to gravitate towards drawing potatoes since they’re quick and easy, so I made use of this and created a little baby potato with the brush tool. Once we had an outline that we were satisfied with, we were told to add the shadows and highlights. Not in the way that we thought though since there was no colour; we would only be adding their outlines where we felt they would go. So, I chose a direction for the light to hit the character, and using the pencil tool (shift + y), I created blobs and shadow-like shapes for the shadowed and highlighted areas.
For the next step, it was essential that there were no gaps anywhere in the linework. This is why we used a particular tool, which I, unfortunately, forgot to take note of and forgot the name of. It is a little square with lines around it that sits at the top right of the main screen, next to the zoom dropdown. Clicking this allowed us to see the drawing differently, making it easier to close any holes or join gaps between lines.
I did this as best as I could and went ahead and filled the pencil lines and entire drawing with colours. This was done using the bucket tool, and I quickly realised that I had missed a couple of spots here and there where there were evidently still some small holes, but these were quickly fixed. I didn’t think too hard about choosing the main colours of the potato, since it was a fun little character and didn’t have to stick to the traditional potato appearance, but I went for something pretty similar. I did, however, put more thought into the colours of the shadows and highlights. I really wanted them to match and look semi-realistic. After playing around with these and settling on a small palette that looked decent, I removed the stroke of the pencil lines by selecting them and clicking ‘delete’.
You’ll notice that with certain areas, such as the hate or tongue, the shadows and highlights don’t match the main palette of those of the body. They are in fact, darker versions of the colours that they are shadowing, which I felt made them more realistic.
The final touches were to edit the colours and experiment with the drawing. I went into the panel to the right and in ‘filters’, chose to add the ‘bevel’ option. This allowed me to play with ‘blur’ and ‘distance’ to give the character an interesting effect. I also added a blending mode on a new layer, where I chose ‘overlay’ and added more white or black for the shading, by scribbling on top in either colour. These were the final highlights and shadows and marked the completion of the process!
To be honest, you wouldn’t really use all of these things on one drawing as we did – that was only for the demonstration, to show us the aspects of shading or working on a design after it has been completed. It was cool to see what you could do in Animate since I hadn’t really done those sorts of things before when using the program. I’ll keep them in mind for the future, especially the quick methods such as the blending mode highlight/shadow technique.
