Brushee documents can have frames. Each frame is a picture of its own; play them in order and you have an animation. You can draw the frames with any tool — paint, shapes, text, imported images — and export the result as an animated image (GIF, PNG, WebP, AVIF or JPEG XL), as an MP4 or WebM video, or as one PNG per frame.
Your first frames
Draw something, then press Alt+N (or Animation ▸ New Frame).
Brushee adds a copy of the frame after the current one and switches to
it, and the Timeline opens between the canvas and the Properties
panel.
Change the copy a little — move the ball, repaint the arm — and press
Alt+N again. That's frame-by-frame animation: copy, change, repeat.
When you'd rather start a frame from nothing, Alt+Shift+N adds a
blank one.
Moving around
- Click a thumbnail in the Timeline to work on that frame.
,and.step back and forward;Shift+,andShift+.jump to the first and last frame.- Drag a thumbnail to move a frame. Right-click one for the full list of frame commands: copy, paste, reverse, delete and more.
Shift-click a second thumbnail to select a run of frames. Delete, Copy, Reverse and Play then work on just those.
Playing it back
Press Enter or the play button. Playback loops until you press
Enter again, press Escape or click the canvas, and it stops on the
frame it was showing. The ping-pong button plays forwards then
backwards.
The fps box sets the speed for every frame. To hold one frame longer — a pause before the jump — double-click its thumbnail and give it its own duration in milliseconds.
Onion skin
Turn on the onion button and the frames either side of the current one show faintly underneath it: earlier ones tinted red, later ones blue. It makes in-betweens much easier to place. The small arrow next to the button sets how many frames show, how faint they are, and whether you see every layer or just the one you're drawing on.
Layers and frames
Switch the Timeline to Layers to see layers down the side and frames across:
- a filled dot is a keyframe with something on it, a hollow dot an empty one;
- a grey bar is a frame that holds the keyframe before it (made with Insert Held Frame);
- a long blue bar is a layer that's the same in every frame.
That last one is what you want for a background. Click the link button next to the layer and it shows the same thing on every frame, so you only draw it once. Click it again to give each frame its own copy.
The + at the top of the layer list adds a layer, and the bin deletes the one you're on. Double-click a layer's name to rename it, or right-click it to duplicate, rename or delete it.
A new layer starts as one empty keyframe held over every frame, so what
you draw on it shows all the way through. To make it change, click a
later frame in its row and press Alt+K (Convert to Keyframe): that
frame gets a copy of its own to move or redraw. The outlined cell is the
layer and frame you're working on.
Tweens
You don't have to draw every frame of a movement. Put a ball on one
keyframe, press Alt+N and move it somewhere else, then go back to the
first frame and click the curve button on the Timeline (or
Animation ▸ Create Tween). The keyframes are next to each other, so
Brushee asks how many frames to put between them, then fills those
frames in: the ball glides from one place to the other.
A tween moves, resizes and turns things, and blends their opacity, colours, stroke width, corners, colour effects and filter settings. Shapes change shape too: reshape a path on the second keyframe, or put a circle there in place of a square, and the frames between morph from one to the other. In the Layers view a tween shows as a violet span with an arrow.
Click the span and its settings show in the Properties panel, in place
of the document's (the curve button and Animation ▸ Tween Settings
do the same for the tween on the frame you're on). They stay there until
you select something, click the canvas or press Escape, and they
change how it moves:
- Ease makes the motion speed up, slow down, overshoot, spring or bounce. Pick a preset, or drag the handles on the curve to make your own; the dot underneath plays it.
- Rotate picks which way things turn, and Extra turns adds whole spins.
- Fade objects in and out fades things that are only on one of the two keyframes, instead of having them pop.
To change the path halfway, go to a frame in the middle of the tween and move the ball. That frame becomes a keyframe of its own, and the tween now passes through it.
The same works on a layer of its own: put a ball on its first frame,
click a later frame in its row, press Alt+K and move the copy, then
click the first frame and the curve button. The frames are already
there, so nothing is added. Empty keyframes between the two are skipped:
the tween goes to the next keyframe with something on it.
Motion paths
For a curve, draw one. Add a layer for it with the + in the Timeline, click its link button so it's the same in every frame, and draw the path the ball should follow with the Pen or the Pencil. Select the path, click the tween in the Timeline and click Use Selected Path in the Properties panel.
The path turns into a dashed violet line, a motion guide. It's there while you work and left out of every export. The ball now travels along it from the keyframe at one end to the keyframe at the other. Edit the path and the frames follow. On a closed path, such as a circle, a ball that starts and ends at the same place goes once round.
Orient to path turns the ball as the path turns: a car following a road, or a plane banking through a loop. Turn it on each keyframe the way it should face there. To use the guide as an ordinary path again, untick Motion guide in the Properties panel.
Exporting
Animation ▸ Export Animation… (also under File) offers:
- Animated GIF plays everywhere, with up to 256 colours. Tick Dither for smoother gradients.
- Animated PNG (APNG) keeps full colour and soft transparency, and is often smaller than the GIF. Every current browser plays it.
- Animated WebP is usually smaller still. Turn the quality up to 100 for lossless frames in Chrome and Edge.
- Animated AVIF and JPEG XL squeeze hardest but take longer to encode. Every current browser plays animated AVIF; animated JPEG XL is still rare, so keep it for apps you know read it.
- MP4 and WebM video are what social sites and video editors want. Video can't be see-through, so the background is filled in, and Play the frames can repeat a short loop to make a longer clip.
- PNG sequence saves a ZIP with one PNG per frame, ready for video editors and game engines.
Pick the frames (all, or the ones you selected), a size, how many times it loops, and whether the background is transparent. The preview plays the actual file you'll get. File ▸ Export Frame As… (Export As… on a document without frames) saves just the current frame as a still image.
Opening animated files
Open an animated GIF, PNG, WebP or AVIF with File ▸ Open and every frame comes in as a frame of its own, with its timing and loop count, so you can retouch a GIF frame by frame and export it again. Drop one on the canvas (or use Place…) and Brushee asks whether to add its frames to the timeline on a new layer, from the current frame on, or to place just the first frame.
Saving with Ctrl+S keeps every frame in the .brushee file.