I am a game animator (Unity/2D) that only started animating two years ago, before that I mostly did digital art. When I was still a teen and young adult, if I wanted to learn animations it would cost a lot just to learn some basics, but now days there's more free resources and software out there. I decided to open a blog to talk about animations, share some of my notes and organize resources.
Where I find resources:
The Art of Aaron Blaise, you can learn a lot from his videos. Although I don't make frame by frame animations at the moment I do find a lot of the tips help with animation in general.
Also Andrea Gerstmann has many amazing tutorials
You can also look for walk/run cycle sheets on Google
If you need some video references, I look up the thing I'm animating on Youtube and add "in slow motion", or find the movements I need and set the speed slower.
Free Software
Software and apps can be very pricy if you are just a student or work a basic minimum wage job. If you google free animation software you can find many list
Software and apps can be very pricy if you are just a student or work a basic minimum wage job. If you google free animation software you can find many list
My personal first free software/ app was FlipaClip, it's available on both iOS and android. FlipaClip is a frame by frame animation tool that has onion skin for the last frame.The downside of the free ver is you get a watermark, but it's still good for beginners and practice
