{"id":2569,"date":"2021-03-01T10:53:17","date_gmt":"2021-03-01T09:53:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/barbaramarini.com\/create-a-simple-digital-animation-with-your-vector-illustrations\/"},"modified":"2025-12-12T12:50:11","modified_gmt":"2025-12-12T11:50:11","slug":"create-a-simple-digital-animation-with-your-vector-illustrations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/barbaramarini.com\/en\/create-a-simple-digital-animation-with-your-vector-illustrations\/","title":{"rendered":"Create a simple digital animation with your vector illustrations"},"content":{"rendered":"

How to Animate Your Vector Illustrations with Adobe Animate and Illustrator<\/h2>\n

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Today we’re going to talk a little about digital animation<\/strong>, starting with the basics. With this tutorial and others that will follow, I’d like to create small and simple animations of vector illustrations<\/strong> made in Adobe Illustrator, thus providing a starting foundation for anyone who has never ventured into this field.<\/p>\n

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To animate my vector illustrations, I use Adobe Animate<\/strong> (formerly Adobe Flash), which allows you to create animations while keeping them in vector format<\/strong>, and then export them in different video<\/strong> formats and even different sizes without loss of quality. There are many digital animation software options, including very complex ones, but to start, I think Animate is relatively simple and allows you to acquire the basic concepts that are also found in other more advanced software.<\/p>\n

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Frame-by-Frame Digital Animation<\/h3>\n

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What we will look at today concerns the simplest type of animation, called ‘frame-by-frame’<\/strong>; it recalls the old cartoon animation techniques when the various frames (instances of the animation) were drawn one by one, each with a small difference (different poses, object movements, color changes, …).<\/p>\n

\"animazione-Disney-frame-by-frame\"<\/p>\n

To make a subject\u2019s hand move, for example, the same subject was drawn and traced onto transparencies in the same pose, but with the hand positioned slightly differently in each step. To achieve smooth movements, many drawings with different poses had to be created, tracing the previous pose and modifying the position with small variations. There were many steps.<\/p>\n

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Now, with digital technologies, it is possible to speed up the creation of movements using specific techniques such as ‘motion tweens.’<\/p>\n

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In the next tutorials, I will explain other types of digital animation that can be used in Adobe Animate but also in other software; even with Photoshop, you can make the same simple animations that we will see today and in the upcoming tutorials. The other two types of animation after the ‘frame-by-frame’ method are: ‘motion tween<\/strong>‘ and ‘shape tween<\/strong>.’<\/p>\n

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The first, as the name suggests, is useful when we want to make an object move, and the second when we want to make an object change shape or color.<\/p>\n

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The same shape and color animations can clearly be done simply with frame-by-frame animation, but the tweening speeds up these processes.<\/p>\n

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I’ll start by showing you what the final animation we will create today will look like.<\/p>\n

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