I’ve seen this animation around for a while – mostly with little doodles in pen and ink of stick people with this silly horn and cymbals music. I don’t like replicating “trends” as-is when I know I can change-up what’s been done, so here it is, with help for you to try it!

Watch the animation below — or click HERE to watch it on YouTube 

Special announcements:

My normal Monday tutorial will be up tomorrow – had a little bug this weekend and took some time to heal.

ALSO: I’m going to try moving to 6am Pacific uploads instead of 3am. Just to see what that does for views – the general advice for best upload times is much later in the day and I may try that at some point but for the moment I’ll just try for when at least all of America is awake instead of just the east coast. 🙂

Tips

If using this tuba audio, it needs three illustrations:

1. One for the first few bars (the original is a dancing girl)
2. One for the horn section
3. One for the cymbals
4. Then let them all play together for the rest of the audio

The way I approached it was drawing the SECOND page in my sketchbook FIRST. Whatever motion is desired on the downbeat, that’s the second image. ie the clashing of the cymbal, etc.

Then hopefully your paper is a little bit see-through, or you can put it up against a window to trace the main elements from the second drawing onto what will be the FIRST page. Then they’ll line up when being flipped. In my case the pumpkins needed to stay in the same spot, and I wanted their facial features in the same place.

For the first pumpkin, the top of the pumpkin is bouncing on his head; in the second frame since the top is UP, the eyes are open. in the first frame the eyes are closed because the top is slamming down.

For the second pumpkin, the trumpet moves left to right and the rest of the pumpkin remains as is.

For the third pumpkin, the cymbals are apart on one and together on the downbeat.

To film this, I did it in three parts; I’ve seen a lot of shaky cameras with the person filming while flipping the paper and that’s just too hard – I simply put my phone on a stand and filmed the first bit, then backed the phone up to include the second image, then further to incorporate the third

Replicate my pumpkins

If you want to replicate my pumpkins the two sketches are below. They’re pretty simple! Do leave room on the left side of the sketchbook for your hand to hold the page to lift it up and down.

Or make it your own!

Come up with your own simple theme. Maybe it’s snowmen. Cats. Anything you can draw! Make them dance left and right, roll their eyes back and forth, or do that dance move they used to do in old tapdancing films: arms holding the hat on the head then holding it high above the head!

Get your kids in on the fun, and whoever makes the best one gets filmed for an instagram reel! You can use the audio that’s already there, or have the kids “sing” a tuba or trumpet song to use for your own audio. (Great idea for teens who beatbox, too!)

What other ideas would be cute with a simple 2 frame animation like this? Leave them in the comments so others can try this too!

Supplies

• Stillman & Birn Gamma sketchbook
• A pencil!