How do you do that?

[Razerfang]

             So I want to put a animation of my fursona as my profile picture. But I don't know how to make an animation. So I thought maybe you guys would know. So if you do please tell me.

[Mylo]

That depends...what type of software do you currently use for making pictures (Photoshop, GIMP, etc...)?

With Photoshop, you can follow this tutorial.

With GIMP, you can follow this tutorial.

A longer route would involve using Pencil to create the frames of the animation, export each frame, and then use Picasion (or some other GIF maker) to compile them into a GIF.  But considering GIMP is free, that's just an alternate method...

Hope that helps!

[Amy]

Or, you could do vector art in Flash, and export it as an animated GIF.

[Jet]

the most difficult obstacle I had in creating an animation (I am in NO way an expert by the way) was the idea of an animation. It took me a while to wrap my mind around what exactly an animation is. I describe it to myself as drawn stop-motion. Stop-Motion animation is where you take a picture of something, like a soda can, then move it slightly and take another picture. After tons of pictures and slight movements, you string the pics together and they look as if the can is moving you move from one image to the next rapidly. It's the same concept here. Draw your fursona, then draw it again, but moved slightly, then again and again. Each image shows a small movement each time. String it together using an animation program (I know Photoshop CS5 has the ability to do this) and you have a moving icon. Then you have the headache of file type, size, resolution, and all that blah. That's the real fun part of animation

[redpaw]

My first animation was made on fireworks and it consisted of about 10 frames that showed a fight between 2 stickmen. It was more of a slide show really but it was super easy to make. I just had to draw what I wanted in each frame then save as .gif, thats it .

Now I use flash as my main animation software; it has more tools but the idea is basically the same.

[Old Rabbit]

I use photoshop imageready for the animations I have on furtopia.  You
build the animation with layers in photoshop, then port them to the
animation software in Imageready. Gives one a lot of options for timing
and frames.

Nice thing is it has the option to compress the animation down to a
reasonable file size, and display size too.

I imagine Gimp can do it pretty much the same way.

All that's left is the hours of work.