Creating Fragments in Microsoft Expressive Pixels (6 of 9)

Key Takeaways

[Music] hello again and thanks for joining i'm stacy and today i'm going to open up a world of creative possibilities and show you how to create fragments from images and the hundreds of emojis that are built into expressive pixels so what are fragments they're small parts of an image that you can save to reuse over and over creating fragments from emojis or other images is a really fun way to get creative if you don't want to draw something from scratch there are a wide variety of emojis built into expressive pixels that you can use as they are or modify to create your own fragments let's get started by checking out our emoji collection first we need to be in our authoring screen so i'll select a new animation and we'll look at our media panel here in the toolbar and we have an icon for our fragments library and down below the smiley face is our emoji collection so i'm going to select that and you'll notice the different categories up at the top here i'm going to select travel and places and scroll down to find my favorite yellow helicopter okay there it is so when i select it it automatically pastes into the authoring panel and you'll notice a selection box around it so i'm going to right click to undo the selection now when emojis are used there are often outlines or borders that we may not want so let's clean that up with my eraser tool i'm just going to erase the black lines that are showing up in my image here and set those to transparent and you can erase one pixel at a time or by holding down the mouse button you can erase a number of pixels at once okay almost done okay now i want to change the color of my helicopter to orange so i'm going to select a new color by going into my color picker and i'm going to select a bright orange now this time i'm going to use my paint bucket so that i can fill a large area at once and i'm going to cover up the yellow and paint it orange and a couple of pixels did not get painted so i will just fix those up okay so now i have an orange helicopter now what in order to create a fragment i need to draw a selection i'm going to go into my selection tool and i will draw a square around my helicopter and now with the selection tool highlighted we can see the options at the top here and i can cut and paste resize the one i want here is our fragments icon and i'm going to just select that and when i go to our fragments library we can see my orange helicopter and it's here to use whenever i want okay so another great reason to create a fragment is if there's part of an emoji you want to use so let's cut my helicopter out of the active frame because we don't need that any longer we'll go back into the emoji collection and now i'm going to try and find a mountain so that my helicopter can fly by the mountain well this is a nice mountain but it does have a sun behind it so we can remove the sun i'll select the mountain and then when i come over into my active frame i will deselect by right-clicking okay so we do need to clean up the edges but also since i want to get rid of the sun remember we can erase a large area at once by selecting our color picker and choosing the color set to transparent and now with my paint bucket i can erase a large image all at once so that that is now transparent and then with my eraser tool i'm going to need to go in and just clean up the lines that did not get erased okay so again i want to create a fragment so i will highlight my mountain and [Music] create a fragment okay and now my mountain and my helicopter are ready to use now i also mentioned you can create fragments from one of the images in your animations gallery so i'm going to x out of this screen and go back to my animations gallery and i would like to have a fragment of just my heart here so i am going to choose edit and bring that into the authoring screen and i'd like to have a fragment of the heart that has the orange center so i need to select that frame at the bottom and now come up into my active frame again same thing just make a selection around your image and click create fragment and now we have my heart okay so one more thing is i'm going to show you how to create an image using the fragments that we've just created so i'm going to go into the new animation choose a template and i want my helicopter to fly behind the mountain so i'm going to select my mountain and i think i'll bring it down just a little bit like that deselect and then i can choose my helicopter and have it flying by the mountain okay there you have it now you give it a try and have fun creating something new from the emojis and images you already have thanks for watching be sure to view the other tutorials in our library to learn about using layers to animate multiple fragments and images and visit us at aka.ms whack expressive pixels to find out more you