Getting started
Draw a frame, duplicate it, change one thing. That is the whole loop, and it takes about a minute.
Flipghost is a flipbook animator that runs in your browser. You draw each frame by hand, trace the motion between them with onion skinning, and export the result as a looping GIF or an MP4. There is nothing to install and nothing to set up.
This page gets you to a finished loop. The rest of the docs go deeper on each part of the workshop.
Your first loop
Open the workshop and follow along. The whole thing takes about a minute, and finishing something small teaches more than reading the rest of these docs will.
1. Draw something simple
Pick the brush with B and draw a circle near the left of the canvas. Do not make it good. A wobbly circle is the correct amount of effort here.
2. Duplicate the frame
Press the duplicate button in the timeline. You now have two identical frames. Duplicating rather than adding a blank frame is the normal way to work, because most frames are mostly the same as the one before them.
3. Move the circle
You are now on frame 2. Erase the circle with E and redraw it slightly to the right. The faint red ghost behind it is frame 1, showing you exactly where you were. That ghost is onion skinning, and it is the reason this tool exists.
4. Repeat
Duplicate, erase, redraw a little further along. Do this until the circle has crossed the canvas. Six frames is plenty.
5. Play it
Press Space. The circle moves. That is animation, and you have now done all of it. Everything else is a refinement of these five steps.
If the motion looks jerky, you probably moved the circle too far between frames. If it looks slow, you moved it too little. That relationship between distance and time is called spacing, and it is most of the craft.
What to read next
The canvas
Tools, brush sizes, pressure, colour, zoom, and canvas sizes.
The timeline
Adding, duplicating, reordering, and playing back frames.
Onion skinning
The ghosts of neighbouring frames, and how to tune them.
Exporting
Getting a looping GIF or an MP4 out of the workshop.
Saving your work
Autosave, local storage, and cloud projects.
Keyboard shortcuts
The full map, including which keys you can rebind.
Requirements
Flipghost runs on any modern browser. The workshop needs the canvas and the timeline on screen at the same time, so it is available on tablets and larger screens but not on phones.
A stylus is not required, but it is the best way to use this. See pressure for what changes when you draw with a pen.