Procreate Animation Assist: A Beginner's Guide to Animating

You already have an animation tool on your iPad. It's hiding inside Procreate, and most people who own the app for years never switch it on. Animation Assist turns your layers into frames, and once you understand that one idea, you can make a moving drawing in an afternoon.

This walkthrough comes straight from Freya's Procreate Masterclass lessons on Animation Assist, so every step here is exactly how she teaches it.

Where to Find Animation Assist

Tap the Actions menu (the wrench icon), choose Canvas, then switch on Animation Assist.

A toolbar appears at the bottom of your screen. Freya describes it as a timeline: each frame is a slot, and whatever you draw on that frame is what shows at that moment. A frame doesn't have to hold one letter or one picture. You decide what happens in it.

Your First Animation: One Letter Per Frame

Freya's first exercise is writing a word, one letter at a time.

1. Write the first letter on your canvas.
2. Tap Add Frame in the Animation Assist bar.
3. Write the next letter on the new frame.
4. Repeat until the word is complete, then press Play.

Your letters move. That's the whole mechanic. Every layer in your layers panel is one frame on the timeline.

The Settings That Matter

Tap Settings in the Animation Assist bar and you'll find a few controls worth knowing.

Frames Per Second controls speed. Higher is faster, lower is slower. In her flower exercise, Freya plays the animation back, decides it moves too fast, and drops it to around 7 frames per second. Judge it by eye, not by a number.

Onion skin settings control how faintly the other frames show through while you draw. Those ghost frames only appear inside Animation Assist mode, as a guide. They disappear when you exit or export.

Since Procreate 5.2 you can also set onion skin colors: one color for the previous frame, another for the next. Freya sets the previous frame to green and the next to purple so she always knows exactly which frame she's working on. She points out this matters most when you're drawing lots of similar-looking frames, where it's easy to lose your place.

The three playback buttons choose how the animation runs: One Shot plays it once, Loop repeats from the beginning, and Ping-Pong plays it forward and then backward.

The Duplicate Trick: Making Things Stay on Screen

With the basic method, each letter appears and then vanishes, because each frame only contains its own drawing. If you want the letters to appear one by one and stay, Freya's fix is simple: instead of adding an empty frame, duplicate the previous layer and draw the next letter on the copy.

Each new frame now carries everything that came before it, plus one new thing. Press play and the word builds up without disappearing.

Exercise: A Growing Flower with Symmetry

Freya combines Animation Assist with the drawing guide for an exercise that looks far harder than it is.

1. Go to Actions > Canvas > Edit Drawing Guide, choose Symmetry, set it to Vertical, and turn on Assisted Drawing.
2. Turn on Animation Assist (it's right next to the drawing guide toggle).
3. On layer 1, draw a short stem line pointing upward.
4. Duplicate the layer and extend the stems a little in the new frame.
5. Keep duplicating and extending: stems, then leaves, then simple pink flowers with a darker pink for petal shadows.

Because symmetry is on, every leaf you paint appears on both sides. Freya laughs about it mid-lesson: you can see four leaves on the canvas but you only painted two.

"The more frames you add, the more beautiful it gets, because the movement will be better and more detailed. If you have time, add as many frames as you can."

Freya, in the Masterclass lesson "Make a Moving Image With Symmetry + Animation Tools"

Two finishing touches from the lesson. The background color applies to every frame at once, so you set it once instead of fixing each frame. And when the drawing is done, switch the drawing guide off so the grid lines don't show.

Exporting Your Animation

Go to Actions > Share. The animation formats are the last options in the list.

Animated GIF is Freya's usual choice. She recommends the Web Ready option, which adjusts the file size for websites, then Export and Save Image.

Animated MP4 gives you a video file. It plays like any video, so you tap play to watch it, and it's the right pick for platforms that want video uploads.

Animated PNG exists, but Freya is blunt about it: she doesn't recommend it, because the file sits still in your photo album. If you want a moving image, use a GIF.

There's one more option she likes: exporting PNG files saves every individual frame as its own image, which is handy if you want to rework frames elsewhere.

Where to Go From Here

Freya is upfront in the lesson that she's not an animation specialist and treats this as an introduction. That honesty is useful: Animation Assist is genuinely this simple, and what she teaches here (frames, onion skin, the duplicate trick, exporting) is enough to make growing plants, blinking characters, or moving lettering.

These lessons sit inside her full Procreate Masterclass, alongside the drawing guide, gestures, brushes, and every other tool the animation exercise builds on. If you tried the flower exercise and enjoyed watching your art move, the course walks the same way through the whole app 🎨