I have a 12 y/o daughter who has gotten extremely into digital art and animation over the past 2 years. She says she wants to make a career out of it.
I’m completely clueless about the industry but I did manage to get her a Samsung S6 tablet with an S-pen (can’t afford an iPad Pro and we’re an Android family anyway). I downloaded Krita for her on the recommendation of some kind Redditors. She says it’s way too overwhelming and complicated so she’s been drawing and making short animations using IbisPaint, Capcut, and Flipaclip.
She thinks she’s outgrowing it, I guess since all her favorite YouTube animators use Procreate(?) She wants an iPad but that just ain’t happening right now ($$). I still want to encourage my kid though. She seems pretty good at it (but yeah I’m biased and I don’t know much).
Anyway–someome wanna help a dad do right by his kid here? I need suggestions. Are there Krita tutorials/courses? Other Android apps comparable to Procreate and Krita for art and animating? Something to help my kid understand the importance of fundamental art skills as they apply to animating? (She really just does cartoon sketches). I really wanna help her grow this passion of hers. Thanks!
Krita is my favourite program but if I had a kid to advise, I’d download HiPaint and see what they make of that one. It works quite well on Android and has a simple, clean interface.
You might find something useful here. This is my results from a "Resources: Tutorial / Animation search on here. I am definitely not an animator but I am sure this would a good place to start.
I think having a problem solving session might be helpful. It’s important to let your daughter drive the problem solving. What does she think it will take to make a career out of it? Have her formulate a plan. The plan doesn’t need to be good. As long as she can execute and evaluate the plan, any plan will work. If Plan A doesn’t work, maybe Plan B might. If her school has an arts program, encourage her to share her plans with the faculty and other students. Eventually, the plan might include fundamental art skills.
If she wants something similar to Procreate that can also do animations, then Hipaint (~7€) is the tool for her.
If she prefers to continue using her animation tools separately (flipaclip for example), use Infinite Painter (4,99€) to draw, At the moment, it is the best alternative to Procreate that I know of. Although HiPaint is very close to it.
Also for animation is Rough Animator (7,49€) on Android, but maybe too complicated.
But honestly, after trying dozens of apps over the years, Krita is the best for me. There are ways to make the Android interface more user-friendly. Although never as simple as Infinite Painter or HiPaint can be. Let her use the one she enjoys the most, with all of them she can achieve her drawings.
But definitely, having an iPad is not going to make you a better artist. Another question would be whether the options and tools that Procreate has may be the ones that best fit her style and make the process easier for her, but you never know until you practice for hours.
I don’t know if krita is the optimal tool for animation… sure, it got the features, but it is fairly complicated. See the thread about animation feedback here in the forum.
Why? Because has it all. You have a simple ui. You have frame by frame animation. Pixelart can be really pretty, and animating 1 pixel is far easier than a ball you have drawn. Later on, she will have to change to something like spriter or spine 2d, but for those it is necessary to have your own pc.
I can understand that Krita can be overwhelming, it aims to be a tool for professionals. If your child really want’s to make animation a career it probably won’t get any easier than that, though. However, I don’t even know if Krita on Android currently really actually can render animations. The Android version can still be considered a Beta (the user interface is also not really made for mobile devices) and the rendering tool Krita uses (ffmpeg) is not available on Android.
@eyo If you made that image yourself, using Blender, please say that you did.
If not, you’ll need to provide it as a link to where it can be downloaded from.
In that case, if the owner/creator of the image has given permission for it to be posted in other places then you can post the image here as long as you give a link to where it was downloaded from.
I think you can export animations in Krita for Android but frame by frame. For example, if you have a 100-frame animation, it saves the 100 different .png files in a folder and you convert that folder to video on a PC.
At least that’s how recording the drawing process works.
As a side note, the monkey face is a default object you can simply create in blender with two clicks, like the default cube. It is a base mesh for animated humanoid faces.
If she is more serious about animation, then Krita and Clip Studio Paint would be the best tools on Android, as they are closest to the programs major studios use. I can imagine the experience is overwhelming, so I would advise you to look for tutorials online. You can find quite a few things on both programs on Youtube, but there are also structured courses to buy, especially for CSP.
If she just wants to animate small parts of a drawing, then HiPaint or similar would do, though I would say that the workflow is quite different and not suitable for bigger animations as they are not optimized for it.
It really depends on how you want to learn. You can do a lot of practice in animation in a basic frame by frame app like ones mentioned above. You don’t need bells and whistles for that. If you have archieved results and want to dig deeper, it is good to start in a program like Krita, and just learn the basics first.
However, starting with a fully featured program might be overkill at the start and the subsequent frustration might dampen the enthousiasm.
This YouTube tutorial by Jenna Drawings might be helpful, she shows some basics on setting up as well as a short tutorial on coloring and sketching. Its a very simple tutorial but it might be helpful.
As a young artist myself I suggest for your daughter to play around with the interface of her Krita and not dwell to much on special brushes!
(In case she accidently deletes something while customizing or wants to reset her interface, the Reset All Settings is under Settings on the top of her screen.)
I would also suggest she first figures out how to draw on Krita before animating so its much easier to figure out the animation stuff.
As for tutorials, there are some Krita courses on Udemy, but she doesn’t need to only watch tutorials specific for Krita. She can watch tutorials done on Procreate, Photoshop, ClipStudio Paint etc. She should be able to still follow the tutorials as most of the things they use are also on Krita. (Except for some brushes)
She should also get used to using simple brushes, so she has some solid ground before relying on custom brushes.
As for some tips for her wanting art as a career, I suggest she compiles a Portfolio. It would be very useful for when she wants to get hired or possibly wants to enter an art school. Its also good that she learns some basic things like Color theory and anatomy. I myself am still learning them both, but it is very important that she starts learning some basic knowledge Art as a whole, even if she is more into Cartoon drawing she can still apply what she’s learnt.
Are there Krita Tutorials/Courses? Yes. If you want to learn about the program, the shortest way is through a course, as I said in this other topic. I took my course on Udemy.
As for the other questions, the problem is not the program or the animation style. The basic principles and techniques of animation were developed in the first half of the last century. Even 3D animation follows these principles.
You can see this topic, where I made an animation in Krita, following a tutorial that was for another program. Today I would make that animation in Krita in a different way, because I learned more…
