How to Make Animations on Krita

Krita makes for great 2D art. That’s obvious enough. But what makes it even better is that you can turn your 2D art into digital animations on Krita. This article is going to show you how to do exactly that.

How Animation on Krita Works

Krita lets you animate your drawings one frame at a time. This is called a frame-by-frame animation. It’s a technique that has been used by animators everywhere to make cartoons on paper.

Unlike drawing on pen and paper, however, Krita lets you copy layers of content from a previous frame over to a new one. That way, you won’t have to redraw whatever was in the previous frame all the time. Plus, all of its 2D art tools can give you plenty of control over the look and feel of the finished animation.

You can even use it to edit AI art and give the AI-generated artwork some life. Or at the very least, fix whatever misdrawn fingers it makes.

Setting up Krita for Animation

1. Like with any Krita project, you will need to make a new file. Press Ctrl + N or go to “File -> New” to start a new one.

2. The “Create a new document” window should pop up. Pick a width and height then click on the “Create” button.

Alternatively: you can use an existing image file by pressing Ctrl + O or going to “File -> Open.”

3. This should give you a blank canvas and a bunch of drawing tools. But the tools you need won’t be found here. Go to “Window -> Workspace -> Animation” to open the animation workspace. This lets you access everything you’ll need for doing any kind of animation.

How to Make Frame-by-frame Animation on Krita

1. By default, the Background’s opacity is set to 0%. This means that whatever you draw on it will not show up. You can change this by selecting the Background layer and then dragging the Opacity.

2. You can now draw the background of your animation on Krita.

3. To animate your object, you will need to make a new Paint Layer. Go to the Layers bar and click on the big cross sign to make a new one.

4. With that, you can now draw objects that can move together on the canvas.

5. On the Animation Timeline at the bottom, you should see the timeline for Paint Layer 1. Right-click on the box below frame 0 and click on the “Create Duplicate Frame” option.

Note: this makes a sort of an “editable” frame. Whatever change you make on this frame will show up on all the other frames to its right unless there is another editable frame deeper down the line.

6. With the move tool, you can move the current layer around to give the impression that it’s moving.

7. Select the next frame then repeat steps 5 and 6 until you’ve finished your animation.

8. To see a preview of your animation, there is a play button on the top part of the Animation Timeline. You can also use the other keys to stop, play the next frame, play the previous frame, and move to the first and last ends of the animation.

Tip: if the preview takes a long time to reach the end, you can right-click on any frame and select “Set End Time” to make the preview stop there.

How to Set Up Onion-skinning

The onion-skinning effect lets you see what the previous frame looked like while working on a new frame. It’s a handy tool for animating moving objects.

1. The onion-skinning button will not be visible until your layer has already had its first frame. This should be a light bulb right next to the layer’s name on the Layers tab or at the right-most setting on the layer area in the Animation Timeline.

2. Once your layer has already had its first frame, you can click on the onion-skinning light bulb to activate it.

3. If you move an object in the layer one frame at a time, the onion-skinning effect should show the object’s location in the previous frame as a red silhouette. It should also show the object’s next position as a green silhouette.

4. You can edit how far back into the timeline you’d see by going to the Onion Skins settings tab. This is open on the lower-right side by default.

Note: if the Onion Skins settings tab is not open, click on the “onion bulb” button on the right side of the Animation Timeline.

5. Click on the numbers to set how many frames back and forth the current frame that the onion-skinning effect will show.

6. To set the opacity of the onion-skinning effect per slide, click on the blue (or gray) bars below the numbers.

7. To change the color of the previous and next slides, click on the red button for the previous and the green button for the next.

How to Render Video Animations on Krita

Krita normally saves your file as a series of images – one image per frame. To make it render into a video animation, you will need to set it up with FFmpeg first.

1. Download FFmpeg for your operating system from the FFmpeg official download page.

2. Extract the files.

3. On Krita, go to “File -> Render Animation.”

4. Click on the Video option.

5. On the “FFMpeg” textbox, click on the folder icon and navigate to the “ffmpeg.exe” file you extracted beforehand.

6. In the “Render as” dropdown, select the file type you want your animation to render as.

7. On the “Video Location” textbox, click on the folder icon to select where to save the file and its filename.

8. Click “OK.”

9. Wait until Krita finishes rendering your file. Once it’s done, check the file in the folder you specified earlier. You should now find your animation there.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is there a shortcut for "Create Duplicate Frame" in Krita?

There isn’t, but you can make a new one by going to “Settings -> Configure Krita -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> Animation -> Create Duplicate Frame.”

Why is it called onion-skinning in animation?

Animators back in the day used to draw on thin, translucent paper made from onion skins. This paper would show a silhouette of the previous page which the animator could trace to make sure that things aligned perfectly. Nowadays, digital tools can render animation slides that give the same effect.

Can you animate in 3D using Krita?

Krita is a tool for making 2D artwork. It’s not meant for 3D animation. You will need to use something else to animate in 3D instead of Krita.

Why does Krita stop working while rendering?

Rendering takes a lot of RAM to work. Unless you have a good RAM card or can make FFmpeg work with a GPU, you might want to reduce your animation’s length by a bit to help lessen the load.

Images and screenshots by Terenz Jomar Dela Cruz