"Penny's Dream" Animation Process part 1

I've had a few people ask me about how I make animations so I thought I'd do a little writeup and explain what my process usually is. I've been using a program called Aseprite but other pixel art programs will probably work just fine. I hope it's helpful, most of it is stuff you could get in most anim tutorials but it might help to see it applied to pixels/a looping anim if that's what you wanna make

I'll start with a really rough sketch just to get an idea of my composition, the prompt here is the character penny falling asleep and dreaming that the chair she's sitting on comes to life an grows a bunch of hands. I dunno what the chair looks like at this stage but I'll figure it out along the way, the important stuff to me is her movement.

Next I'll make some shapes to represent the big movement that'll happen. I'll start with like the main piece, in this case her hips colored in purple, and just move it around each frame with the move tool while I figure out how many frames it'll take to get the loop feeling like I want. This loop has 7 frames which feels good but I can also tweak the frame rate later if I have to

Then, on a new layer I'll add the next part that would be attached, in this case her upper torso in orange. Animating this separately is going to help me give the torso a realistic squish and stretch as she moves up and down. At this stage think of the shapes you're animating kind of abstractly like you're doing a bouncing ball animation exercise: if there was a big impact we could even squish and stretch these shapes to really exaggerate the movement.

Keep adding in the rest of whatever shapes you'll need like I did with the arms and head and keep em on different layers to make it easy to tweak stuff. You can do this again for anything you need to add, I'll do it again for the boobs and the hair a little later, it's a great way to get a feel for the movement quickly before spending time doing lines.

Then I'll do some quick linework. You'll see with like the green hand and her face that I just copy pasted and moved them into place: this is just a way to keep like face features somewhat consistent, I will force myself to draw over them later on because I hate the look of copy pasted stuff and the process of redrawing it every frame will give a little bit of extra life to the final animation even if the face isn't actually changing a ton.

Here I've animated just her body stretching and squashing, in the next GIF you'll see I also used the move tool to move everything up and down to give a little more vertical movement since it felt like it needed it

Adding in the basic fill: using a line for your shadows/highlights will make it a little easier to track with onion skins and give you a feel for the volume of the shape so that it stays consistent through the animation.

To plan out any extra bits like hair or the arms of this chair you can use dots like I have here to simplify things, just draw the movement of one at a time through the loop. It really can help you visualize the movement. Sometimes drawing an arc you want the movement to follow helps too

Then I'll pick one frame and do a loose "illustration" and add in a rough BG and some of the details I'll want. I like waiting till after I've done my movement to do this because it lets me stay a little looser with my ideas and go with the flow. The design will probably change again a couple of times (The chair's dick is supposed to be like the seat's upholstery but it isn't working for me) but that's fine, as long as the main animation looks good I can keep tweaking little stuff like that as I go.

That's the fast part done, the rest is the real grind, I'll document it and post it when the anim is all finished. Let me know if you have questions!