This is a tutorial for complete beginners in animation! It will teach you how to add small fun motion to your art!

Although the theme is emotes, this is applicable to any art type or style =)

I hope you learn something new in this tip! Enjoy reading

In the end you’ll be able to animate this kind of emote, stick around to see the process!

🧩 Video Tutorial

🧩 How to Draw and Design Emotes that Read Well

Emotes are usually drawn on 500x500px and later scaled down for use. This means that if you want your emote to read well, the amount of detail you can add is limited.

It’s also important to exaggerate your emote’s facial expression.

When you have a clean design with exaggerated emotion and minimal detail, your emote will read well even at a distance.

Once the design is clear and readable at a small size, the next step is preparing it for animation in Simple Mode.

🧩 Simple Mode Animation Setup

Before animating, setting up your file in a simple and consistent way makes the process much smoother.

In this section, we’ll go over a minimal animation setup in Simple Mode, just enough to animate efficiently without overcomplicating the workflow.

🖥️ The interface

The animation interface itself is pretty simple,

1️⃣ Upon clicking on a frame the options to duplicate or delete it appear.

2️⃣ When clicking the 3 dots at the bottom left, a small menu shows up where you can enable/disable Onion skin* and check the frame rate.

3️⃣ The PLUS sign adds a new frame.

4️⃣ The Play button to start or pause animation

🖼️ Canvas Size & Frame Rate

Emotes are usually drawn at a larger size and later displayed much smaller, so starting with a comfortable canvas helps maintain clarity.

In Simple Mode a new animation file comes with a preset of 12 frames per second, which is more than enough for emotes and helps keep movements clear and readable.

If you want to change the frame rate, however, follow these steps:

1- Switch to Studio Mode

2- Go to Animation → Timeline → Change Frame Rate

3- Set the frame rate you want and click OK

With the Pro version of Clip Studio Paint, you can create an animation of 2 seconds max regardless of the frame rate.

📁 Minimal Layer Organization for Animation

Keeping your layers organized from the start makes small adjustments and animation easier later on.

✨Place facial features such as eyes, mouth, and eyebrows on separate layers or folders.

✨Group elements that move together

💡 Avoid splitting layers unless they need to move independently

✨If you’ve worked on the Lineart using Vector layers, make sure to rasterize the layers before animating, as you can’t animate using vector layers on simple mode.

🧅 Onion Skin

Onion Skin displays the frames before🟣 and after🟢 the current one.

This is especially useful when animating emotes, as it helps you:

1️⃣ track small movements

2️⃣ keep animations consistent

3️⃣ check that transitions feel smooth

Turning it on while animating makes it easier to judge timing and spacing between frames.

You can change the color and opacity of your Onion Skin if you want:

1- Switch to Studio Mode

2- Go to Animation → Show animation cels → Onion Skin Settings

3- Choose the colors you want and the opacity of the before/after images

4- Alternatively, you can choose to display the previous and next frames in their actual colors

With the setup ready, we can now start animating using simple techniques that build expression step by step.

🧩 Basic Animation Techniques

These basic techniques focus on small, readable movements that work well for emotes and are easy to animate in Simple Mode.

Each technique uses only a few frames and builds toward more expressive motion later on.

⚙️ Basic Animation 1 – Simple Movements

Even a slight shift in position can make a character feel more expressive and responsive.

This animation uses 2 drawings played at 12 FPS.

1️⃣ Base Pose

Start with your emote in its neutral position and hold this pose for six frames to establish the expression.

2️⃣ Shifted Pose

On the next frame, slightly move the stars using the Transform tool. Hold this position for six frames.

Preview the animation directly before exporting by clicking the play button, you can adjust as you like at this stage.

🎨 Basic Animation 2 – Color Change

Color changes are a simple way to add emphasis and emotion without adding extra movement.

This technique works especially well for emotes that need to communicate a reaction quickly, like embarrassment, anger, or disappointment.

1️⃣ Base Color - 3 Frames

Start with your emote in its normal color state and hold this state for three frames to establish the default look.

2️⃣ Color Shift 1st Transition - 1 Frame

On the next frame, change the color of the area you want to emphasize.

To add a shy expression, I added a midtone desaturated red layer on top of the body folder and set it to 54% opacity with Color Burn layer mode.

3️⃣ Color Shift 2nd Transition - 8 Frames

On the new frame I adjusted the opacity to 100%. This makes the transition smooth and dynamic.

Hold this state for 8 frames to emphasize the emotion.

4️⃣ Color Shift 3rd Transition - 1 Frame

Go back to the 1st transition frame and duplicate it

then drag it after the 2nd transition frames

This makes the transition back to normal state smoother.

5️⃣ Settle - 2 Frames

End the animation by returning to the base color and holding it briefly for 2 frames.

This makes the animation easier to loop and prevents it from feeling abrupt.

 

📌OPTIONAL📌

You can add blush strokes randomly on the cheeks like I did, the way I animated them is simply by manually drawing the strokes on every single frame, so that each one is different from the previous or next one.

This is basically how I do the blush, just follow my hand motion!

Then I duplicate the layer, erase the previous blush and draw new one

And that’s how I obtained the variation in the blush animation.

🧩 Intermediate Animation Techniques

With the basic movements in place, we can start adding more personality to the emotes.

These intermediate techniques focus on facial animation and timing, using only a few drawings to create more expressive reactions.

The goal here is not complexity, but control, small changes in timing and shape can make a big difference.

🟨 Intermediate Animation 1 – Blinking Eyes

Blinking is one of the simplest ways to make an emote feel alive.

You only need three drawings, played with different timing, to create a natural blink.

For simplicity, I will only adjust the eyes on the same animation as earlier, so we’ll have both the color shift and blinking animation.

Keep the same order and number of frames as earlier and only change the eyes.

1️⃣ Eyes Open (3 Frames)

Start with the eyes fully open.

2️⃣ Eyes Slightly Closed (1 Frame)

Create a drawing with the eyes slightly closed.

TIP: Use the Free or Mesh transform tool or Liquify to adjust how open or closed the eyes are without redrawing them.

3️⃣ Eyes Closed (8 Frames)

For this you have creative freedom! Draw your closed eyes however you want them to be, I settled for this shape, but you can do it your way.

Now just finish it by duplicating the open and slightly closed eyes and placing them after the 8 frames of the closed eyes, exactly like the previous animation.

Adjusting the frames, shortening or lengthening one of the steps gives different results (see froggy bellow)

Normal Blinking

Happy Blinking

You can also change how the animation plays, you can make it faster or slower by changing the frame rate.

🟨 Intermediate Animation 2 – Mouth Movements

To make the animation livelier, lets add a simple animation to the mouth.

💡 The first 3 frames will remain unchanged; the change will only happen after those frames.

1️⃣ Slightly Bigger Mouth - 1 Frame

First, on the 4th frame, enlarge the mouth a bit to go with the emotion.

2️⃣ Different Mouth Shape - Closed 8 Frames

To make the animation livelier, I will draw a new mouth for the next 8 frames and slightly adjust it on each frame to give it some movement.

TIP: You can create 2 variations of the mouth and alternate between them by duplicating the frames alternatively.

When you’re done changing all frames, you will get something like this!

🟨 Intermediate Animation 3 – Zoom & Shake

Zoom and shake effects are a powerful way to add impact and intensity to an emote.

In Simple Mode, this effect can be created using scale and rotation, without any complex tools.

1️⃣ Zoom-In

On the fourth frame transform and scale the drawing a bit to make it larger.

After the first four frames, zoom in at roughly the same rate for the next 8 frames.

You can do this frame by frame with onion skin enabled and try to match the previous frames.

A little mismatch is okay as it will give a slight shake effect.

TIP: To do this quickly, switch to studio mode and select all the animation frames you want to zoom in, then, simply transform and scale them to your liking. This will get the job done faster but all frames will look the same, which is boring!

2️⃣ Shake

To make it shake, we’ll use the rotation transformation.

Alternate between left and right rotations, for the 8 zoomed in frames make 2 frames of each so that it’s like this:

2 Left - 2 Right - 2 Left - 2 Right

And this is what it finally looks like!

🟨 BONUS Animation - Puppet Warp

Puppet warp is a feature introduced in version 4.0, you can use this feature in simple mode, and it’s a fun tool to mess around with!

Remember how we separated the layers?

We can use that to our advantage now, for example, we can make the hair flow dynamically using puppet warp!

For smooth results, make sure to draw hidden parts such as the full head, ears, and hair underneath.

Puppet Warp moves the artwork, so unseen areas may become visible.

Add the previous motion, eye blinking, and slight mouth movements and you’ll make you character look like they’re being blown at with a hair dryer!

Now that you know the basics, let’s create a new emote together in the next section.

🧩 Advanced Emote Animation

Now let’s create an angry or mad emote animation together!

🟨 Download Practice Asset

For easier following in this section, download the ready-made emote and animate along.

🟨 What We’ll Animate in This Emote

For this angry emote, we’ll combine several small animations to build a strong expression:

✨ Head zoom & shake

✨ Expression Change

✨ Angry symbol movements

✨ Fire background loop

There are 2 versions of expressions included in the pack to make things easier, neutral mad and extremely mad.

🟨 Animation Concept

Advanced emote animation is about layering simple motions together.

Each element is subtle on its own, but when combined, they create a powerful result.

1️⃣ Head zoom & shake

The head motion creates the main sense of force behind the emotion.

We will use a quick zoom and shake pattern:

Base → Zoom In → Shake Right → Shake Left → Shake Right → Settle

✨ Slightly scale the emote up for the zoom - Frame 2 & 3

✨ Apply small left and right rotations for the shake - Frame 4 to the left → Frame 5 to the Right

✨ End with a small zoom-out to settle - 1 Frame

Preview your animation like earlier

Adjust timing by making duplicates of the frames and find your best pace! This is what worked for me:

1 Base frame → 3 Zoomed in frames → 3 left frames → 3 right frames → 2 Zoomed out frames

Resulting in a total of 12 frames.

You can also adjust the rotation further and test things out.

This makes the emote feel powerful without using complex effects.

Once you’re satisfied, we can move on to the next phase!

2️⃣ Expression Change

Now we can alternate between the 2 expressions, mouth changing shape and eyes becoming red and slightly larger.

✨ Since the file I provided has both versions, you can just hide the previous face and show the new one - Starting from Frame 4

✨ We will activate those layers for all zoomed in and shaked frames, so starting from Frame 4 and until Frame 10

✨ Now we can make it more fun by applying a slight zoom on the eyes and mouth on Frames 5 and 9

✨ And preview the animation!

3️⃣Angry Symbol

For this animation I want the anger symbol to appear and zoom in and out. We will do this using Layer Transperancy and scaling.

✨ Draw the symbol. It’s a simple ‘separated’ plus sign

I added a black border effect to make it more pronounced.

You can add one by clicking on the layer, scrolling down on the menu until you find Border, enable it with the button then select a color and thickness.

✨ Now we’ll make it appear by reducing its opacity on the current frame then restoring it to 100% on the next frame

✨ When redrawing the anger sign, it’s okay if it’s not perfect, the sign being imperfect on each frame actually adds value to the animation by making it move slightly.

✨ You can ofcourse work around this by switching to Studio Mode and copying the symbol and pasting it on each frame, it will remain constant, if that’s better for you.

✨ Finally you will end up with this animation!

4️⃣ Fire background loop

To make it spicier, we’re going to add a fire BG! The fire background supports the emotion without stealing attention.

To do this we can choose from 3 different approaches,

➡️ Alternate between 2–3 fire drawings

➡️ Scale and adjust opacity of a single fire drawing

➡️ Or simply import a fire image we drew before!

Let’s take the 3rd approach, simply because I wanna draw a long horizontal fire drawing and then move it across the animation!

You can grab the BG file here,

If you want a personalized fire, you can follow the next steps and manually draw it yourself!

✨Save your current canvas and open a new one, choose a 16:9 canvas

✨ Draw your fire BG on this new canvas, make it simple, with a maximum of 3 colors, we don’t want it to overpower the actual emote.

✨ Remove the white paper BG and save as PNG to your Image folder.

✨ Close this canvas and go back to the animation one. we’ll now import the fire BG into this animation.

✨ Import the fire BG on every frame, slightly move it to the right until the end of the BG and then move it back to the left for the remaining frames; this is optional, you can do it however you want!

5️⃣ BONUS animation!

Let’s add more emotions by making the face become red from top to bottom, to emphasize the anger!

✨ On the 3rd Frame, on top of the body folder, create a new layer and clip it to the folder. We’ll add a red paint over the face.

✨ Lower its opacity a bit and set the layer to Multiply.

✨ On a new clipped Multiply layer add vertical darker lines.

✨ On the next frame, increase the opacity to 100% and add the same layer to the frames up to frame 10. Move the red and line layers slightly down so that they’re lower than the first one.

✨ On frame 11 lower the opacity a bit and make the red and line layers move upwards.

And that’s it! We now have a fully functional angry emote! What do you want to try next?

Don’t forget to try it out on different sizes to see how it looks in actual use!

Can you still tell the emotion from afar? Let me know!

Conclusion!

Animating expressive emotes doesn’t require complex tools or advanced software.

With a clear design, simple timing, and a few reusable techniques, you can create lively animations entirely in Simple Mode.

By focusing on small, intentional movements and layering them together, you can bring personality and emotion into even the simplest drawings.

Keep experimenting, combine techniques, and most importantly, have fun with the process!

If you can animate expressive emotes in Simple Mode, you have what it takes to animate anything you want!

If you want me to cover a specific topic next let me know! You can also check out my Instagram where I post my art <3

👇👇👇👇

Linda (@scribling_art)