- Place drawings on frames and scrub through them as animation.
- Use onion skinning the way hand-drawn animators always have.
- Change the feel of a motion by adding a single drawing between two others.
Build · 30–45 min Two drawings, then a third
- Turn on onion skinning
You now see the drawings before and after the current one as ghosts. This is how hand-drawn animation has always been made — the paper was thin and the desk was lit from below, and this is the same idea with the light switched on in software.
Do this first, not last. Drawing the second frame without seeing the first is working blind for no reason.
- Draw on frame 1
Something simple with one clear moving part. A bouncing ball is the classic for a reason: it isolates timing from draughtsmanship, so you cannot hide a timing problem behind a nice drawing.
- Move to frame 12 and draw the changed version
Scrub between them. Two drawings is already animation — a fast, blunt kind, but the timeline is doing exactly what it will do with fifty.
- Now add one drawing between them
Put it at frame 6, then at frame 3, then at frame 9, and watch each time. You have not changed either original drawing, and the motion feels completely different in each case.
That is the entire lesson, and it is worth sitting with for a few minutes.
Spacing is timing. Two drawings close together read fast; the same two spread apart read slow. It is the graph editor's lesson in a different medium — which is exactly why doing both makes each one clearer.
If the graph editor felt abstract on Day 5, this is the version of it you can see with your eyes.
- Onion skinning is on and you used it while drawing.
- You have a sequence of at least three drawings that reads as motion.
- You moved one in-between drawing and felt the timing change.