How to make an animated GIF frame by frame

Changing dimensions later rescales everything you have drawn, so it is worth choosing up front. Small is your friend with GIF: 480×480 or 640×360 is plenty for something shared in a chat or on a forum, and it keeps the exported file light. The canvas size selector in the sidebar has common presets for square, 4:3 and 16:9 shapes, plus an option to match a video you are importing.

The drawing tools work the way you would expect from any paint program. The pen draws freehand; hold right-click and drag to change its size without leaving the canvas, or nudge the size with the [ and ] keys. There is a flood fill, an eraser, shape tools, a colour picker for sampling a colour already on the canvas, and a text tool that creates a movable text box you can re-select and edit later.

You can also paste an image straight from the clipboard with Ctrl/⌘+V, or import a photo from disk. Anything you bring in can be selected, moved, mirrored, rotated in quarter turns or freely distorted.

Each frame can hold several layers. The usual approach is a background layer that stays put and one or more layers for whatever moves. That way you can redraw a waving arm without touching the sky behind it, and you can hide a layer temporarily to see what is underneath.

Layers are per-frame, so when you add a new frame the layer structure comes with it and stays consistent through the animation.

This is the heart of the tool. When you add a frame you choose whether the previous frame is copied into the new one, or shown as a faint ghost behind an empty canvas.

Copy suits small changes: duplicate the drawing, erase the part that moves, and redraw it a little further along. Ghosting — traditionally called onion skinning — suits bigger changes, because you redraw the subject from scratch while still seeing where it was, which keeps the motion consistent. Both approaches can be mixed within one animation.

A useful habit is to draw the extremes first — the very start and very end of a movement — then fill in the frames between them. It is much easier to keep an action on-model that way than by feeling your way forward one frame at a time.

If a pose should linger, do not draw the same picture five times. Set a hold on the frame instead and it will stay on screen for that many beats. This keeps the timeline readable and, on export, produces a smaller file than five identical frames would.

Select a consecutive block of frames on the timeline — click the first, shift-click the last, or long-press on a touch screen — and turn it into a loop with a repeat count. A four-frame walk cycle repeated six times costs you four drawings, not twenty-four.

Loops can nest: a small loop for blinking eyes can sit inside a longer loop for the whole scene. Coloured brackets on the timeline show which frames belong to which loop, and the export expands them all in order.

Frame rate decides how fast your drawings play. 8–12 frames per second is the classic hand-drawn look and is very forgiving — most cartoon animation is drawn on twos at around 12fps. 15–24fps looks smoother but needs proportionally more drawings for the same length of action.

Note that GIF stores frame delays in hundredths of a second, so very high frame rates are approximated and rarely worth the extra file size.

Export as an animated GIF for something that autoplays anywhere, as MP4 (or WebM) when you want better quality at a smaller size for a video-friendly platform, or as PNG to grab a single frame. Transparent areas of the canvas stay transparent in an exported GIF.

If the resulting GIF is heavier than you would like, the file size guide covers what to change. If you would rather start from footage than a blank canvas, see converting a video to a GIF.

Remember that nothing is saved on a server — your animation lives in the open browser tab, so export before you close it.