By Kelly Neaton, Senior Art Director | S50 Agency
I’ve been animating in After Effects for years. It’s my comfort zone — the place where I know exactly which levers to pull, which expressions to write, which keyframes to nudge. And for a long time, that felt like enough.
But if I’m honest with myself, I knew it wasn’t.
Animation is a broad, endlessly evolving discipline, and I had been living in one corner of it. I kept telling myself I’d explore Procreate’s animation tools eventually — after this campaign wrapped, after Q4 settled down, after things slowed down a little. Anyone in this industry knows that “after things slow down” is a myth. Things don’t slow down. You just choose to grow or you don’t.
The Excuses Were Getting Old
There’s a particular kind of professional restlessness that creeps in when you know you want to expand but you keep finding reasons not to. I wanted to understand illustration-based animation. I wanted to feel the tactile, hand-drawn quality that Procreate offers — something After Effects, for all its power, doesn’t give you. I’d seen @stefankunz’s work floating around and it stopped me every time. The way he moves between illustration and motion felt fluid and intentional and alive.
So I signed up for his Procreate Animation Bootcamp and committed to showing up for myself after work hours. No more waiting for the right moment. The right moment was never coming, so I made one.
What the Bootcamp Actually Taught Me
Stefan’s course is the kind of instruction that doesn’t just teach you a tool — it reshapes how you think about movement. Working through Procreate animation from the ground up, I found myself reconnecting with principles I’d applied for years in After Effects but had never approached from an illustrative, frame-by-frame perspective. Timing, easing, squash and stretch — the fundamentals translate, but the feel is completely different. There’s an intimacy to drawing each frame by hand that changes your relationship to motion.
The course gave me a genuinely new medium. And more than that, it gave me confidence in that medium — the kind of confidence you can only get by doing the work, making the bad frames, and figuring out why they’re bad.
Bootcamp Course Week 2 “Homework”
Passion Doesn’t Clock Out
Here’s something I’ve come to believe pretty deeply: the designers who grow the fastest are the ones whose curiosity doesn’t stop when they close their laptops. That’s not a grind mentality — it’s about being genuinely lit up by the work. When something excites you enough to spend your evenings on it, it stops feeling like sacrifice and starts feeling like investment.
That investment compounds. Every new medium I explore, every technique I understand more deeply, makes me more versatile and more confident when I’m sitting across from a client challenge. It makes me a better collaborator, a more resourceful problem-solver, and honestly, a more enthusiastic one.
From Bootcamp to Billable Work
The most direct proof of that investment? After completing the bootcamp, I brought Procreate-style animation into a paid media campaign series for Myriad Women’s Health. The hand-drawn, illustrative quality of the work felt right for the subject matter — warm, human, accessible — in a way that a purely After Effects approach might not have achieved.
That campaign was recognized by the Cancer Awareness Advertising Awards.
Let that sit for a second. A skill I learned after work hours, driven entirely by personal curiosity, directly contributed to award-recognized client work. That’s not a coincidence. That’s what happens when you treat your own growth as a professional priority.
The Investment Always Pays Off
I’m sharing this because I know I’m not the only one with a list of tools they’ve been meaning to learn, courses they’ve bookmarked and never started, skills they keep deferring to some imaginary slower season.
The excuses feel reasonable in the moment. But time spent investing in yourself — even in small, consistent after-work sessions — has a way of returning to you in ways you can’t fully predict. It shows up in your work. It shows up in your confidence. It shows up in what you’re able to offer your clients and your team.