Animation Source Forums

Beautiful job on the animation Keilidh.

Thankies. :3

Hmm... they don't really look much like "animations"... perhaps the blinking one, but otherwise, they're just some "gif images" which contain 2-3 frames. But like you said, they're your first, I think they are pretty "ok" at the beginning.
Okay, like most of you know an animation isn't made of just 5 frames, a real animation needs more than 25-30 frames in order to have a pretty movement. Then again there are stuff called "Keyframes" aka the main frames from the complete animation. And the tweening - frames between two keyframes. Without the tweening, your animation lacks smoothness and they will look "stiff". But again, I usually base animating in logic and motion "senses". Depends how well you can capture a movement and etc etc.

Regarding animation software: For beginners I suggest Jasc Animation Shop3. You can find a trial version on Google... and it's also the easiest software I know.
Or if you own Photoshop you can use that.

For something more complex/professional: Flash, Toonboom, Adobe Premiere, etc etc. But I say it's better if you start with something simple then go for more complicated things.

Otherwise... good luck!

PS: There are plentiful of good tutorials on deviantArt, Youtube and other sites about Animations. You should look up for them.

I would suggest using more frames and not taking so long between each frame. For the blinking ones, I usually use five frames in a blink rather than two. (open, halfclosed, closed, halfclosed, open again). When I animate, i use ToonBoom Studio, ( http://natticat8.deviantart.com/art/Nat ... -118074518 or http://natticat8.deviantart.com/art/War ... -120904714 ), but before I got that, I used just a normal art program and http://www.lunapic.com ( http://natticat8.deviantart.com/art/Run ... -104535451 ) which is open to anyone. Keep at it and you'll get better...there's already some improvement showing!