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How I Animate

Tips and Tricks I've Picked Up

By Cierra HarknessPublished 6 years ago 4 min read
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We all know that animation isn't an easy process, and some of us want to try it but never know how to start out. Shoot, I didn't know how to start out either, if I'm being honest.

When I first started animating, it was stupid skits and music videos created on a DSi with Flipnote. At the time, it was the only real way I could animate, but, hey, it was a start that a lot of animators seemed to have started out on.

While Flipnote was a good program to start with, I never knew much about how to animate, and for the most part, I winged it. Draw a frame, add a frame, draw that frame, copy and paste a few frames, and so on. My older animations never had a lot of motion, only lip sync and tracings of the original Flipnote. Nobody said anything then because it was all garbage.

Anyway, the main thing I would do back then was draw the frames one after another. I had no idea what keyframes were, had no idea how to animate "right," but I was still able to make characters move. It felt good to be able to create something out of nothing like that. Some looked good, but a lot of them were terrible. Unfortunately, I don't have any examples to show you, but I' glad I don't because they sucked. Trust me.

Over the years, I've learned more techniques on how to animate and learned what a "keyframe" was and how to use them. Keyframes are frames that animators use to map out motions before they start animating. Like a storyboard, of sorts. Storyboards are choppy but give a basic layout of how characters should move.

To use keyframes, the movement has to be up front and map out where the character's next position will be. It's better to have a visual idea of placement rather than guessing where the character will go next. Once you have it how you want it, you can clean it up or go ahead and sketch some in-betweens. Once you have that, you clean it up a little more and tweak it in places to your liking!

Keyframes

Some Betweens

Full Betweens

Lining is a little slow, which is why I usually use a brush that it doesn't matter if the lines aren't smooth. After all, it's an animation and few people will notice it anyway—unless they want to, for some reason, go through it frame by frame, but it takes dedication to do that.

Anyway, I use special brushes such as the Firealpaca marker and SAI crayon brushes. I use these brushes because I can draw faster without using the stabilizer. Many artists use the stabilizer to make clean lines. I do when making still art, but when I animate I like to get things done. So, for me, those brushes work great for fast and smooth animating.

Lined

Coloring: It's always the coloring that gets to me. I'm new to colored animations, only started a few years before writing this, but I'm still rusty. My colors tend to dance a little, but I'm getting better.

The easiest way to animate designs is to line-out the designs in their color before coloring.

It looks weird and skeletal, and I've noticed a few animators lining them in black, but for me it's confusing. If you want to go ahead and color each frame and not line the designs, though, go ahead. In Firealpaca, the onion skin has a different shade of green and red for other colors. Of course, I'm only saying what's easiest for me.

You know what you can do when you outline everything, though, right?

You can Paint Bucket it all!

Colorlined

Once you have all the designs lined, you can Paint Bucket everything, and it's colored! Although, you might have to tweak spots like tiny corners, but that's not as bad as hand-coloring everything.

Colored

SO now you have a colored animation. There's no background, but I use a different program for backgrounds usually. I don't add too much detail or animation to my backgrounds. I keep them as an image with camera movement usually. I have to draw ten billion backgrounds, but I would have to draw ten billion more if I animated it. Sometimes my backgrounds have details. Usually, for PMV MAP parts they're more painted.

Background

I never do shading on my parts unless it's a PMV MAP. But, for the sake of this article, I'll attempt to do shading. Shading is difficult to do, and you may need to outline it or give a reference of where the shading will go beforehand. Keep in mind where the light source is coming from. In this case, it's coming from behind the cat.

Shaded

Put it with the background and add whatever effects you want to, and you have an animation! Keep in mind, these are only things that I have found to be easy for me; you don't have to follow my exact words! I hope you found this helpful in some way, and happy animating!

Full Animation

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About the Creator

Cierra Harkness

Hello, I'm just a 23-year-old artist and animator trying to let out emotions with something outside of art. Idk what all I'll post here lol

pfp by averysadpencil on artfight >w<

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