create a handwriting effect inside of After Effects the key to doing this is

choosing a font that looks like handwriting and that is pretty easy to

trace using the pen tool if you use a very fine font that's very curvy it will

be pretty hard to trace using the pen tool so I've included some links to some

handwriting fonts that I would recommend for producing this effect but let's not

waste any more time and let's get started okay so I'm inside of After

Effects CC 2017 and the first thing we have to do is create a new composition

by clicking on this icon here create a new composition I'm going to leave the

background color white and leave my aspect ratio to be a 16 by 9 1920 by

1080 when I hit OK and now you'll see if I fit this to window that we have a 16

by 9 canvas and now I just want to add the font text of the word that I'm going

to animate which is gal and I'm using the font lekker ly one which I've left

as a link to download in the description box below

so if you just click on the canvas here and type out the word that you want to

produce the handwriting effect with I'm just going to do gal it does take a bit

of time to trace this but once you get the hang of it you can start to do it

more quickly so that's why I'm going to use a short word because I don't want to

hold you guys up so you guys want to do this for yourself so what I'm going to

do is just zoom in here a bit zoom in to about 100% and then you can use the hand

tool by hitting H to sort of Center it you can get a nice view now we're going

to use the pen tool first make sure that the gal is selected down here and then

you're going to go up and hit the pen tool you can use G as a shortcut and now

we're just going to trace this word as if we're writing it and you'll have to

think about what's the natural way that you're going to write this so for the G

we're going to start up here so we're going to just going to create one dot

click if you click and hold you can make it a curved line and then just continue

along the path here try to keep it as centered as

possible it takes a while to get used to it but once you start to get the hang of

it you know it'll be a lot easier to do as you get more skilled and again see

this started a new path we want to make sure that these are connected so instead

what we have to do is command Z and click on this last dot in order to make

sure that it keeps the same path as you're tracing this all right so let's

keep going here if you forget to click and hold you can hit option and click

and it creates the curved line again so I'm just going to go along here and

trace this entire gal and you can follow along with your own work I'm going to

pull this up higher because the a in English we usually start right here and

create the a this way so what you want to do is go up and then start the stroke

here and then make it curved again much work the center as possible and now you

can probably see why I recommended using a font that is not so curvy right

and then the L we want to start here for the L so let's go up around and let's

start the L stroke here so now that we have a pretty good path happening here

we can always make adjustment after we apply a stroke on top of this path to do

this first we have to go up to effect and then go to generate and then we're

going to click stroke and you will see that there's now this white line that

just emerged on top of this path to make it easier to see let's change the color

of the stroke to like a hot pink color so now you can more easily see the

stroke that was applied so right now we need to make sure that this stroke is

completely covering the font beneath it so that means we need to change the

brush size to be much larger so let's go ahead and increase the size of the

stroke until we begin to see it covering the entire width of the font and now you

can see we need to make a few more adjustments here to the path because we

still see a little bit of the font here so let's see if we can move this around

a bit to get it just right that looks pretty good and now to create the

animation of this stroke on top of the Gal font what we're going to do is

animate the stroke so let's go ahead and turn this to zero and let's hit the

keyframe toggle animation next to end and then let's pull it forward in time

to when we want the animation to finish and then we're going to hit 100 so now

you can see that over time the stroke is painting on top of the font right but

now we want to get rid of this hot pink stroke so we just see the font animating

so just go here next to paint style and reveal original image so now we will

just see now if we fit to the window here we will just see

animation and now you have an animated text as if it's hand-drawn so I hope

that you guys found this useful this video was requested by someone just like

you by going to my website PremiereGal.com/tutorials and I will see you

guys next week pa