Free Storyboard Templates for Animation

Download free digital storyboard templates as layered PSD files and start planning out your next animation

By combining illustration and animation, you have the power to translate complex topics into playful visual languages. Illustrator and animator Yukai Du (@yukai_du) knows all about this, helping brands such as Adobe, Spotify, WeTransfer, and MTV to visualize the message they want to communicate with their audience.

Before you bring your illustrations to life and start animating your ideas, it all starts with a storyboard… Here, Yukai shares a template that she’s developed over the years in which you can digitize and refine your storyboard in Photoshop in three aspect ratios: 1:1, 16:9, 9:17.

What is a storyboard?

Storyboarding is an essential stage of the animation process; it's an annotated visual representation of your animation sequence broken down into individual frames.

Whether illustrators choose to start by sketching out drawings on paper or drawing digitally, before the animation process starts, these are adapted into a storyboard format to give a clear picture of the animation order and storyline.

Free PSD Storyboard Templates for Animation

By digitizing your illustrations and refining your storyboards in Photoshop, you end up with a professional, easy-to-edit, and sharable resource that can be sent to current and potential clients. The PSD templates can also be updated and amended for various projects.

Using Yukai's Photoshop files, you can copy and paste your illustrations into the Artwork folder before dropping them into place and cropping them into the different frames, available in three aspect ratios—1:1, 16:9, 9:17.

You can then add or edit captions into the action boxes, drop in additional notes, and pull all the animation's various elements together into one document. Doing this process digitally also means you can experiment by adding different colors to your illustrations before finalizing your key designs.

After clicking on the button below, you will find a file in .psd format in the Downloads folder on your computer containing the Free Storyboard Templates by Yukai Du.

If you want to learn more, you can sign up for Yukai Du's online hand-drawn digital animation course. Throughout, you'll learn more about transforming your illustrations into playful motion graphics with Photoshop, After Effects, and Animate.

For more, discover all of Domestika's online 3D and animation courses. And find more free resources exclusively for the Domestika community by keeping an eye on the Downloads section of our blog.

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- What is Background Design in Animation?
- 6 Online Professional Animation Courses for Beginners
- Digital Background Painting for Animation, a course by Susan Yung
- Mixed Media Animation in Procreate, course by Caroline Kjellberg