pretty rave boy

I use Krita for all of my animations, but you can use any program(s) that can export gifs and has a transform tool that can be set to the nearest neighbor mode. I first started by using Paint Tool SAI for the drawing part and Gimp for the animation part.

I animate on 10 frames per second, as it allows for a smooth effect with less individual frames.

First, you need to have the base for your animation. Each asset has to be drawn on a separate layer, so that they are easy to manipulate. This is how I divided the drawing for this animation:

Generally speaking, you don't want to have a ridiculous amount of layers to work with. The process is already very time-consuming even without that.

Now that the drawing is done, time to make each part move. For that I use the transform tool set to the nearest neighbor mode, which keeps the pixels crisp. The assets are separately copied and animated for each frame. Transforming the same copy of the asset more than once will further degrade the quality of it, so do that with caution.

Depending on the desired outcome, I move, rotate and sometimes even stretch or shrink the asset, either whole or a part of it. I do that intuitively through trial and error. Sometimes I will redo the animation several times until I get it right.

I usually start by animating the body. The rest of the assets is then moved based on that, for example the head is moved for each frame so that it's still properly connected to the neck. I then duplicate the head layer and animate it with the transform tool; that way if I have to redo the animation, I don't need to start it all over from scratch, I can just duplicate the layer again.

Animating the limbs is usually the most difficult part. Instead of dividing the limb into even more layers, I use the selection tool to animate each part separately. The process is messy and often leaves "cracks" that I then fill in by hand.

And that's basically how I make my animations! For some additional details (such as a blinking animation) I will draw over the asset. For this specific example, I erased the parts of the tongue that are hidden inside the mouth.