The stronger your drawing skills are, the more believable you can make your animations. Using Adobe Animate, I want to show you the most basic tools so you can start experimenting and drawing with the software. Try following along with the steps as you read.

Get Started with Adobe Animate

You will always start by opening the Adobe Animate program application. The application icon in this version (24.0.1) is a purple square with “An” inside. Double-click this icon to open Animate. I recommend saving a shortcut to Animate on your taskbar or desktop for easy access. A new window will open with several preset options. For now, we will just make our own new file. Click the blue “New File” button on the left to start creating a new file to work in.

A new window will then open. Here are additional presets you can use, but for our purposes, we will enter our own settings. Width and Height control the size of our canvas. Frame Rate controls how quickly the file will play. Working at 1920 x 1080 pixels for size and a Frame Rate of 24 will be the default for this class. Once you change these fields, hit the blue “Create” button to begin. This will open the new file document. The file extension for Adobe Animate files is .FLA. These files can only be opened in Adobe Animate.

Many programs, Animate included, will allow you to customize the layout to suit your needs and preferences. This is the default layout in Adobe Animate. The File Menu will allow you to navigate to almost anything the program can do as long as you can remember where to find it. Here, you can save your document, open a new document, make changes to the document's size or frame rate, apply effects, and open or close additional specialized menus. I recommend saving the document immediately and frequently to minimize the chance of losing any work. You can save the document with the shortcut CTR + S on Windows, CMD + S on Mac, or by navigating to “File” > “Save” using the top menu.

If you need to change the size of your document or how fast it plays, you can change those at any time. Click on “Modify” > “Document” in the top menu or CTR + J/CMD + J to open this window.

The File Window directly below the File Menu shows you the name of the file you are currently looking at and will display a new tab for any other document you currently have open. You can have multiple files open at the same time. To close one of these, click the small “x” at the end of the file name. Below is a similar window displaying the Scene you are working on. We will go over Scenes later, but for now, just know that one animation, one document, can have multiple scenes.