Animated Sparkles

This tutorial will show you how to add a sparkly effect to your graphics in Animation Shop.

Step 1

Open the text or whatever you want to add sparkles to in Animation Shop. Use the paintbrush tool with a width of 1 to add some white dots.

Step 2

Go to Edit > Duplicate Selected. You should have 2 frames. Select the second frame, zoom in, and use the brush tool to make some of your dots look like plus signs, like this:

Step 3

Click on the second frame and go to Edit > Duplicate Selected again. Select the third frame, zoom in, and make your sparkles look like this. Only edit the dots that you changed in step 2. If you can't remember which dots you edited and don't want to keep looking back at the first frame, enable Onionskin (View > Onionskin > Enabled). This lets you see changed pixels as partially transparent pixels in the next frame.

Step 4

Select the second frame and press Ctrl+C to copy. Select the third frame and press Ctrl+Shift+L or go to Edit > Paste > After Current Frame. Preview your animation (View > Animation) and it should look something like this.

It looks much better if all of the sparkles aren't moving at the same time. To do this, click on the third frame. Make some of the other sparkles on this frame look like the screenshot from step 2. Then click on the fourth frame and make them look like the screenshot from step 3. Click on the first frame and repeat exactly what you did on the third frame. This is what it should look like when you preview the animation: