How-To

How to make an animated illustration in After Effects

Animation adds dynamics and variety to the design.

Designers often animate details in their projects, such as icons, navigation, character images, and more. In this tutorial, we make an animated illustration from a static one using After Effects.

Let’s arrange our image. First of all, divide the picture into layers.

Open the file with layers in After Effect. Prepare the face of our piggy for animation.

Now we make Alfa Mate masks for the eyes.

Create a Null Object and attach the eyes, nose, and ears to it.

Bind the Null object to the body layer.

Then, animate the body by position.

Align the Anchor points of all layers to how they will be animated.

Animate the face by position using a Null Object.

Move the nose a little.

Now is the time to make it blink. Open the Path setting of the eye layers and edit their shapes.

Move the pupils by position.

Next, we animate the legs. When the piggy sits down – the legs should move apart a little.

Animate the position and rotation of the legs.

The shadows on the legs should move too.

Now we correct small elements in the movements.

Then, animate the tail by Path.

And finally, animate the back the same way.

Done!

Now add the illustration to your project and let it catch users’ attention.

Check out our other After Effect tutorials to improve your workflow:

icons8

Recent Posts

Free MCP server that will save you 3 hours of icon hunting every day

AI coding tools got smart about everything except icons. Still hunting through browser tabs like…

1 week ago

Liquid Glass icon generator, 53 curated styles, and more: Illustration Generator vol. 2

Your design workflow just got stupid fast. Skip the creative block spiral and generate exactly…

2 weeks ago

UX gems: from tooltips to flying unicorns

Small design touches that create loyal users and word-of-mouth marketing—secrets that will make people love…

1 month ago

Is this the end of painful character design for game devs?

How Distinctive Games used AI generated faces to nail character design for Rugby Nations without…

1 month ago

What they don’t tell you about taking your freelance graphic design career

From insurance chaos to client nightmares—the freelance design world hits different when you're flying solo.…

1 month ago

Why great designers break alignment rules

Discover the science behind visual weight and optical balance that design tools can’t do—and why…

2 months ago

This website uses cookies.