A Goon's Guide to Making MS Paint Animations!

As the column name suggests, Phriday usually showcases images made using Photoshop, and the most popular articles often contain a lot of fancy GIFs. But occasionally, the SA Goons will take a break from their pro-tier picture manipulation to share some charmingly crude static scribbles they made with MS Paint. Drawings that move have been pretty rare, but maybe they won't be anymore, now that Digital Fingers has written this easy-to-follow guide to making GIFs with free software!

Digital Fingers

I've seen some people ask how to make their MS paint drawings move, so I decided it's worth my time to teach you all.

Here's a link to GiMPS website, it's a free photoshop http://www.gimp.org/

Phase One: Frames

We'll start with something basic: A moving colour band you can prank your epileptic friends with:

Make yourself a coffee and use the bathroom (recommended) and open MS Paint.

Step 1) Start with a block and put a dividing line on one side of it:

Step 2) Copy and paste this block as many times as you want to. Each block represents one "frame"; This colour band has twelve (12) frames:

Step 3) Fill in the red portion of these blocks with the colours of your choice and then fill in the dividing lines:

Step 4) Expand the bottom a little and make little colour swatches in the space to help you keep track:

Step 5) Fill in one of the blocks with a contrasting colour:

Step 6) Start hopping the colours down the line, fill in the green block last:

Step 7) Every time you make it back to the green block and fill it in, collapse the bottom of the canvas where the swatches are and "save as" to your work folder as a separate frame.

After you save the frame, hit undo (crtl-z) to re-expose the swatches. When you've done this for each frame, your work folder should look like this:

Step 8) Load up GiMP, go to File > Open as layers. Shift click all those layers you just made and click open.

Step 9) Lets look at those layers in GiMP

Click View> Navigation window.

When the navigation window pops up, click the little arrow on the top right and select layers:

In the case of this colour band no changes are needed (i'm still showing you how to view layers now though because it''ll be coming up shortly). We can go ahead and export to a .gif right away.

Step 10) Click File> Export and either Select File Type on the bottom left or just type .gif into the bar I have highlighted in the 1st of these pictures and click Export on the bottom right and select the box that says As Animation:

BOOM, you fucking did it, you just animated a thing and now you're a fucking boss! Go ahead and type a new resume up and send it into the cartoon network.