The Story of Dumplings | Simon Ip Creates a Tribute in Procreate Dreams 2

So here you can see little me or the outline of little me next to my mom. Now my mom is a great cook. She makes dumplings but she doesn't make a few. She makes hundreds. This memory is based on me being in the kitchen helping her seeing her artistry. And I really want to share this time that we had together bonding. — Hey Simon, thanks for jumping on. Hey, so excited to talk to you. — I'm so excited to learn about what you're working on. Do you mind telling me a little bit about it? — Sure. I hope you're hungry because I'm working on a very precious childhood memory. It's me and my mom folding dumplings together. When I was young, my parents always playfully teased me that my dumplings were the ugliest one and that we could not serve them to guest. And whenever it was the five of us as a family, my mom would always start preparing and cooking my dumplings to serve to our family. I think that's one of the precious memory that I had that we were eating something that I've made with my own hands. — Do you mind showing me the animation of the story about how you and your mom made dumplings? — Yeah, for me making dumpling with my mom was a very intimate moment. It was just the two of us in a very small kitchen. And it just shows my admiration for my mom, her artistry, her skill, and her love language, which was making food for everyone. — I'm really loving the background of your scene. There's like so much detail there. How did you build that? — For the background, because it's the first thing that I've created for this animation, the kitchen, the Chinese kitchen with all the different condiment. This is something that really takes me back to my childhood. Creating the mood for this kitchen was super important. I started actually on Procreate. Procreate is I would say my bread and butter app now as a illustrator. Once I created all the details of this Chinese kitchen with the soy sauce, the Chinese vinegar, the rice cooker, I simply hold on to the flatten illustration and drag it to Procreate Dreams. I'm going to show you a animation brush that I really like for creating clean lines. So under animation brushes, monol line, I pick the looper brush. What's really cool with this update is that you can also change the streamline of the brush if you want smoother or rougher lines. Streamline is like bicycle wheels maybe for your hand. So if you have too many coffee and you feel like your hand is a little bit shaky, streamline really helps even the most seasoned animator or illustrator to create nice and smooth line. So right now my streamline is at 40. I customize it. I'll take some black and here with the sketches I created underneath. I start creating. So here are examples of what has been done in the past. Now there's three things that I do directly on Procreate Dreams. The first one is sketching. The second one is creating the clean lines for the illustration. And the third one is dropping the colors. These are all things that I would have done before on Procreate, but now I do it directly on Procreate Dreams. Whenever my mom and I would repair dumplings together, she would do everything. She would kneel the dough. She will create individual wrappers and I was in charge of folding them. That was my main responsibility. I was really not good at it at the time. My dad would ask my mom in Chinese, "Why are these dumplings so ugly? " And she would say, "It's your son. Your son made these. So, we have to eat them now because we cannot serve them to our guest. " And all I heard is, "Your son made these. " And I was like, "Damn right. I made them. Like, they're amazing. And we're going to eat them as a family. " — I'm also noticing that there's like that focus shifting from little U to the finished dumpling at the end is so heartwarming. How did you do that? That focus shift is something super easy to do on Procreate Dreams and it's quite impactful. So, I'm glad you asked about it. If we go on the flip book where the hand is, we go to key frame. Now we hold this little icon filter and I'm going to set a gausian blur of let's say 2% will be enough where we can see the hand is still visible but a little bit blurry. And then let's say after 2 seconds when the hand start to open up midway we're going to set the gausian blur back to 0%. — And now if we play, we can see that transition. Now it will only make sense if we shift the focus from little Simon to the hand. That means that at the beginning, Simon should be at 0%. Because this is where he's in focus. So we add a key from

there. And then a few seconds later, at the same time as the hand, we start adding a gian blur. 1 second later at around 4% gausian blur. Now if we play, we can see that easy shift of focus and it's a really easy trick that you can use in order to add depth to your scene. — So what was your favorite part of dumpling making? — My favorite part about dumpling making was uh first of all to spend time with my mom cuz I love my mom. She's my favorite person in the whole world. In a family where the love language is act of service, I felt very useful to be in the kitchen and doing something in proximity of my mom. That's one of the best thing that I remember. And then the second one is also the activity of doing something manually with your hands. I think one of the reason why so many people like pottery, painting, drawing is to have the opportunity to get your hands dirty. and to not have the opportunity to do anything else but stay hyperfocus on your task. These are the two things that really resonate the most with me. Doing an activity that required all my attention and spending time with my mom. Thanks for sharing that beautiful story, Simon. You're welcome. All right, I'll let you get back to work. I'll see you next time. Thank you. See you guys soon. —