Making Simple Animated Gif's

There appear to be few websites that help the novice animater free of charge. So for those who have never dabbled in creating an animation but would like to have a go at seeing their own achievements here is how to do a simple animation in the paint program. Firstly, it is best to come up with a simple idea something that you find reasonably easy to draw. Perhaps sketch out the idea on a scrap of paper. Choose the size which you want the end product to be and also the background colour and save the blank canvas as a 24-bit Bitmap (*.bmp; *dib). Find this in the save as type pull down arrow underneath the File name line.

Blank canvas - saved as 24-bit Bitmap

Once this has been done then open up the saved Bitmap once more and use the magnifying glass to enlarge the canvas. Decide on what features you would like to animate and draw your picture to that point before once more saving as a Bitmap. Sometimes if your drawing is made up of many lines then it could pay to save it as you are going along but place a simple note alongside it such as "nfu" not for use in your final animation.

draw the skeleton outline of the picture you intend to use - then save this picture before adding more information to your picture -

As this is called 'tree lights' the next step is to decide where the tree lights are to be placed.

After placing where the wire of the lights should go - the lights may then be added.

Finally, all of the bitmap pictures that you want to use need to be saved in Gif format and dragged onto a Gif maker. Three pictures have been used in the above simple picture of tree lights flashing.