Hello world! Last month the need came up to learn 2D animation for a videogame I’m creating. Animation can be a daunting task, where even to start?
I found this site with this very helpful free 51 exercises course program:
Animator Island - 51 great animation exercises
And Krita had my back all the time as my animation program of choice.
So I’ll post my journey though the exercises in this thread, starting with one of my favorite animations so far:
26 - hand picking up a small object
But now from the start -
1 The bouncy ball & 2 ball across the screen
3 - Brick falling from shelf
4 - The simple face turn
7 - thinking
I can’t find the files for the other face turn and the blink (5-6) right now, I will insert them later if I find them.
8 - Flour sack waving, 9 jumping, 10 - Flour sack falling and 11 - kicking a ball
Then I took a detour from the official program to go into more animations I need for my game. I sent the flour sack to sword school.
I also wanted to send the flour sack to judo school for some rolls, but my twitch chat convinced me to study the whole figure here. They felt I was ready.
Now the Animator Island level 2 exercises -
12 Change in character emotion
13 Jumping over a gap
14 Standing up from chair
Here I realized how there is no universal “right” way to animate, you have to consider acting - who is the character that does those things? How does it look if this specific character does this?
15 Now to the walks
16-21 are missing because I did them in CSP (should I redo them in krita to make this collection whole?)
And here goes Animator Island Level 3
25. Hand closing and opening
26. (is up there in the first post)
And here I had to pause and go back to implement animations into my game Elegia.
While this specific animation didn’t make it in, this was what I was dealing with then:
My Animator Island journey will continue once the Elegia demo is out and Malware Survivor received a big content update I’m working on next. So…approximately next month. Thanks for reading! And keep working, keep dreaming, keep growing!
Heh, looks like a good challenge))) I took course on 2d animation in blender a few years ago, but to be honest, moving the various sliders and adjusting the graphs is not my thing. I like to draw)
Thank you! Hey, you might consider looking into Blender again as you can now do 2D art/animation with grease pencil. I haven’t looked into it myself yet, so I can’t link to a tutorial right now, but I heard it’s viable now. And of course there’s Krita for all your 2D animation needs.
Oh no))) Blender is a great program, but there are too many things. I won’t be able to draw there at least through the interface))
The exercises are good! 
I tried to draw with Grease Pencil in Blender. One problem is the fact that, unlike Krita, it is not possible to group layers. Also, I still didn’t get along with Blender’s interpolation system, the movements don’t come out natural…
oh I see! Thanks for the compliment, and thank you very much for the input on Blender. It is such a mysterious program sometimes.
Hey, these look really cool! Good job.
Man, animation is hard. I’m not sure yet where I’m going with my art (other than improving the quality), but animation always seemed very compelling to me. But this is such a laborious path! It’s mind-boggling how much work and hours one needs to pour into it to achieve something.
I made a few attempts so far, but I probably started way, way too complex and didn’t get too far 
I do follow a few animation-oriented channels, as the stuff you can learn there translates to illustrations as well.
Finally it is time! The updates will start rolling in from now on.
Starting off with
27 - Lifting a heavy weight.
29 - Character painting
49 - Character putting on pants
I was too curious, so I did that one already - but there are reasons it was so far down in the list! It turned out to be quite complex, but I learned a lot on it.
