“persimmon season” is a rotoscope animation I hand-illustrated in Procreate using their Animation Assist. This rotoscope is inspired by the many persimmon trees and fallen fruits at our rental house that give me a bit of nostalgia and a pop of warm color as the season try to turn.

how I made the rotoscope animation:

I started with a video taken in our front yard of my hand opening to reveal a persimmon sitting on my palm. I then imported that video into Procreate. (Which is a cool thing you can do in Procreate, and if you didn’t know you could, now you do!)

When you bring a video into Procreate, it’s imported into your workspace as layers, with each frame being an individual layer. This can mean LOTS of frames, usually many more than you need if planning to create a rotoscope animation from the video. I typically delete every second and third frame, and sometimes every forth, too, to get the frames down to a more manageable amount.

When working in Procreate’s Animation Assist, each group of layers counts as one animated frame, so you want to make sure you have any of your illustrated layers groups accordingly. You can see in the picture above that I have an outline layer, a couple base color layers, and a full detail/shading and highlights layer for the hand and persimmon each in each layer group. I decided to keep all my shading and highlighting on one layer for this project just to keep things simple, and just because more detailed layers weren’t needed for this project, but I could have had my shading and highlights on separate layers within each group, too.

Procreate’s Animation Assist has settings for background and foreground layers (or layer groups), frames per second, and how you want the animation to play – Loop, Ping-Pong, or One Shot. I set this animation to Ping-Pong so it would show my hand opening and closing around the persimmon. You can also set each individual frame’s duration, so I set the last two frames, where my hand is fully open, to hold a little longer that the rest of the frames.

I’m still relatively new to animation, but I’m made a few animations and rotoscopes now in Procreate, and I’m eager to keep going and learn more. (Side note: I’m veeeerrry excited about the Procreate team’s new full animation app, Dreams, set to come out later this month.)

Are you into rotoscope animation? Would you like to see more? Or do you have any tips for me?

I should note, none of this is sponsored by or affiliated with Procreate, I just like and use their app in all of my digital illustration work!