Your first 12 frames

Twelve frames at twelve per second give you exactly one second of animation, and one second on a loop is already a real animation. Let's make a ball bounce. It takes about fifteen minutes, and by the end it's published.

1. Frame 1 is the highest point

Draw the ball up top, touching the top of the paper. A rough circle is fine — the lesson here is timing, not line quality. If you want a perfectly round circle, use the Shape tool and hold Shift.

2. Turn on onion skin before frame 2

Onion skin places the previous frame underneath, faded out. Without it you're drawing blind: the ball in frame 2 could land anywhere, and the motion comes out jerky. With it, you can see where it came from and decide where it's going.

3. Tight spacing at the top, wide at the bottom

Here is the only rule that matters in this lesson: the ball barely moves near the top and covers a lot of ground near the floor. It's accelerating as it falls — that's what reads as weight to the eye. Equal spacing from start to finish looks like an elevator, not a ball.

Notice: between frames 1 and 2 it barely moves; between 5 and 6 it crosses a third of the strip. Frame 6 is the floor — and the rise repeats the same drawings in reverse, a little lower each time, because the bounce loses energy.

Duplicate the previous frame instead of drawing from scratch — Ctrl + D — and move the ball. In frames 4 and 5, stretch the ball in the direction of the fall; in frame 6, squash it against the floor. It rounds back out on the way up.

4. Scrub before you finish

Press space every two or three new frames. Animation gets fixed by playing it, not by staring at it still — and a mistake you catch on the fifth frame is cheap; by the twelfth, it's already cost you eleven drawings.

5. Close the loop

Frame 12 needs to be almost identical to frame 1, but not exactly: if they're the same drawing, the loop hitches for an instant on every pass. Leave the ball just a hair below where it started.

6. Export and publish

In Export, choose GIF to send in a chat or MP4 to post elsewhere. After exporting, Publish shows up: with a Google account, your bounce goes into the community and you get a link.