A mere 6 months after my first emoticon tutorial, and I've finally finished the second part. Sort of.
Due to the fact that it was looking to drag on for a while longer, plus the way the raw file was eating memory on my laptop and bringing everything to a grinding halt I cut it a little short.

This is nevertheless a basic first look at animation of emoticons using only freeware, following on from part 1, found here: [link]

Sorry for the very wordy section in the middle, but there's really no way around it as you have to understand some of the basic concepts of the animation before you can really do it properly. As an extension of that, it's hard to teach how to animate well, so I'm just going to put forward examples containing various techniques and largely leave the rest up to you to experiment and find your own style.

Part 3 will look at more complex animation, how to speed up the animating of the final emote, and finishing off the example emote I began here.