How to make a GIF with a transparent background
A transparent GIF shows whatever is behind it — a chat bubble, a coloured page, another image. It is how animated stickers and overlays work. The studio can produce one, but GIF's transparency is blunt, so it pays to know what it can and cannot do before you draw.
Turn on the transparent canvas
In the sidebar, under canvas background, switch on Transparent. The canvas fills with a grey checkerboard — that pattern is not part of your image, it is the studio showing you which pixels are empty. Anything you draw sits on top of nothing.
Only draw what should be visible
Leave the background alone. Do not flood-fill it, do not lay down a base colour “to be safe”. Every pixel you paint becomes opaque in the export; every pixel you leave as checkerboard stays see-through. If you need to remove something you painted, the eraser takes it back to transparent.
Put moving parts on their own layers over a static transparent area, the same as any other animation — see making a GIF frame by frame.
The catch: transparency is all-or-nothing
A GIF pixel is either fully opaque or fully invisible. There is no in-between — no 50% transparent, no soft fade to clear. This is the single most important thing to understand about transparent GIFs.
The practical effect: any soft or anti-aliased edge — the smooth pixels a brush leaves around a shape — cannot be half-transparent, so on export each of those pixels is forced either solid or gone. A smooth curve ends up with a slightly jagged or crunchy edge.
Drawing around it
Work with hard edges. Flat colour, clean shapes and a deliberate outline all export cleanly. Avoid soft airbrush edges, blur and subtle drop shadows at the boundary of the artwork — they are exactly what GIF cannot represent. A bold outline around the whole subject both looks intentional and hides the rough edge.
Watch for a pale halo. If you drew on a white background and then made it transparent, the anti-aliased pixels are partly white and will leave a fringe when the GIF sits on a dark background. Starting from a transparent canvas avoids this; otherwise, go around the edges with the eraser or re-outline them.
Export and check it
Export as a GIF and the transparency is preserved. A PNG (Save PNG) keeps full, smooth transparency for a single frame. An MP4 or WebM video cannot be transparent at all — it always has a solid background — so GIF is the format to use here.
Always view the finished GIF on more than one background colour, light and dark, before you use it. Fringing and stray opaque pixels are invisible on a background that happens to match the colour you drew against.