Long, long ago, I “liked” a page called Drawing Club on Facebook, and today, Drawing Club posted a link to a page of 3D animated GIFs made with ballpoint pen drawings. At the bottom of the page, a graphic designer named Sydnee Davidson made a guess that it was made with the Liquify tool in Photoshop. My immediate response?

No way. I know my Photoshop. That’s Distort and Displace.

So I set out to prove to myself that I was right. I took one of my old drawings, which I posted here, and created a 3D animated GIF of my own. Voila:

What I did worked, so I was right. It was Distort and Displace. How did I do it? Easy. Here are the steps.

1. Create a grayscale depth of field map version of the drawing you want to make three dimensional. Save it as a grayscale image in PSD format. For instance, here’s mine:

Best way to do this is to create a layer above a copy of the original drawing and paint by tracing the elements in your image. Background areas should be black. Foreground elements (the parts that should seem to pop out at you) should be white. Everything else in between should be in shades of gray.

2. Duplicate the original drawing in two layers above it. Name them whatever you like.

3. On one of the two new layers, use Distort > Displace set at 1 pixel horizontal/vertical scale using the grayscale PSD from step 1 as your displacement map.

4. On the other new layer, use Distort > Displace set at 2 pixels, blah, blah.

5. Create an animated GIF. Each layer is a frame.

Too easy. Am I right?

Still, it killed half an hour of my work time. I don’t know why I let my curiosity get the better of me. Experimenting with making this, and now creating a tutorial out of it, too. No wonder I’m so behind in my work.

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