Draw eight equally spaced dots on the oval. This will act as a guide for animating the legs. To help us, you can draw an oval shape with a stroke and no fill. First of all we will animate the character’s leg. However, for this tutorial we will use 8 frames. A walk cycle can generally have between 4 and 12 frames. For example, the arm is above the body, head and leg.Ħ – Now we can begin animating our character walking. It is important that you get the layering of objects correct. Press Page Up on your keyboard to raise an object above another or press Page Down to lower the object.

This will make it a lot easier to animate the joints.ĥ – Once you are happy with the look of each body part you can arrange them together so that it forms your character. It is important that on the arms and legs you add nodes at the joints as seen below. If you want to make the animation more complicated you could add more parts to the body, however for this tutorial we will stick to a fairly simple character.Ĥ – When drawing each body part you should go into edit mode so you can see the individual nodes. This will make the character a lot easier to animate. You don’t need to double up on the arms and legs at this point, as it will be easier to do it later. For example, you should perhaps draw a head, 1 arm, body, and 1 leg. The best way to do this is to draw each body part separately. This will come in very useful later on when we export each frame.ģ – The next step is to start drawing our character. Change the id to ‘frame1’ and click ‘set’. Ensure there is no stroke/outline on the square and change its colour to something fairly easy to see.Ģ – Now right click on the rectangle and click on object properties.

This will act as the background for the first frame of the animation. Gimp 2.6 will lastly be used to join together each frame to make an animation of the character walking.ġ – In a new Inkscape document, draw a rectangle anywhere on the workspace. This tutorial assumes you already have a basic knowledge of the program and are capable of selecting objects, changing fill and stroke colours, layers, and editing nodes. It will then be used to export the individual frames. Inkscape v0.46: Inkscape will be used to create and animate the frames of the character.

Animation inkscape tutorial