Snowy Stream, Foraging Fowl

Hello! I love your art! I am starting to get back into art after many years, and wanted to animate it. What app do you use to animate things? Do you have any recommendations how to get started? Thank you!

Hey thanks so much! I use a program called Krita, it's free, it's great, it's got the basics of frame animation which is all I really care about. I guess my best advice is that whenever you start an animation project you might benefit from starting simple and adding complexity later. Animation gets frustrating fast whenever something is off and it gets tricky to fix or "get right" when it's in the context of all the frames surrounding it. In my fish loops I started with drawing a ball that stretched and flattened as it moved around and then went over it and added eyes, fins etc. to fit the movement. I think I would have gotten frustrated if I started with a whole complex shape and wouldn't have known where to go next. It's a muscle though and gets easier as you do it.

Pretty much everyone getting into animation I think finds this ancient series of chronophotographs by Eadweard Muybridge showing a horse in motion

It's great and a cool bit of photography history, and I made an exercise of it to try and copy it when I wanted to get into animation. I felt it helped me make sense of what is important in making an image move in a fluid way. It's a fun and not too daunting task, you might want to try it yourself.

Tilting at windmills

Also, if you just animate the bottom half of the horse you won't have to do as much work, so you should do that

As for the program itself, you can make layers static or add keyframes to them to make stuff happen, click window > animation to change the screen to access that part. Make a drawing, hit next frame and turn on onionskin so you can see where you were the frame before

The krita forums are also really helpful if anything technical goes wrong

Hope this helps! And also wasn't too much or too little information :)

Catduck

Smoke break on a night out

Hungry visitor, prejudiced tenant

Red squirrel, sunny day

Once, the sorcerers student stole the head of Orion. Every night the great hunter would make his trek through the heavens, ending it with a bath in the lake where he would wash his body after the hunt. The sorcerers student, coveting his brilliance for himself contrived a plot to take it. He gathered spring herbs and burned them one evening, along with wood and car tires creating a thick smog that lay itself as fog over the lake. When the constellation knelt to cleanse himself in the waters he did not see the man standing on the shore, and as he bent to dive, his head was plucked from his neck.

Fish loop

Four Fairies Fanning a Flame