How to Animate Bouncing Effects in Procreate

For this contest, I decided to show how to animate a bouncing effect in Procreate. I started off by drawing a ball bouncing up some steps. It actually started out as just a regular ball bouncing up stairs, but then it turned into a whole different thing! I ended up making the ball bounce up three squares and then smash right into the screen.

The next thing I did was draw a boy shooting a bow and arrow. He shoots the arrow, and it flies through the air for a few seconds before puncturing a target. I hope this is helpful to you in some way!

All you need for this project is an iPad and a stylus.

For this animation, I started with a scene of three squares in a room with a door on the left side. To make the room, I imagined what it would look like to stand at the far wall looking in. I pictured the light source being in the top right-hand corner, which helped me shade the squares and the door. I made one small square and then duplicated it twice to make the steps.

Once I finished the room, I started drawing the ball. I made a black outline and filled it with red. To shade it, I slowly made the red get brighter and brighter as it got closer to the light source, and then I blended it with the smudge tool (the one that looks like a little hand).

Once the ball was done, I animated it frame-by-frame so it would jump up the steps. I squashed the ball a little bit whenever it landed on a block to give it more of a realistic landing effect. Finally, I had the ball smash into the screen. To make the cracked screen effect, I just scribbled a bunch of small white lines over a red screen. Look at the images for help!

For this second animation, I started by drawing the boy. To give it a more realistic effect, I drew creases in his shirt and studied human anatomy a bit to get the muscles and arms looking right. Once I finished that, I drew the bow and arrow. After the bow was done, I made it so his hair blew back from the wind when the arrow was let go.

Animating the bounce of the string was relatively easy—you just make the string vibrate back and forth, getting smaller and smaller every time until it stands still. Once I finished that, I moved on to the next scene where the arrow is flying through the air. I started by drawing the rotating arrow, then added streaks in the air to symbolize the wind flying past.

After that scene, I moved on to the arrow hitting the target. I drew the target and used the same vibration method as before to show the arrow bouncing and shaking as it hits the bullseye. Check out the MP4 to see the final result!

This was a super fun project and I hope to do something like it again in the future. Thank you for reading, and keep on animating!