Animations are not created simply for art's sake, either. They are also used in video presentations, embedded in multimedia creations, and employed in the format of transfer animations, for Web browsers.

Although early versions of PPaint didn't have much in the way of animation support, this has all changed. Personal Paint now includes a number of excellent animation tools, among which is the impressive storyboard feature.

The storyboard will give you a thumbnail preview of each frame in the animation that you are working on. This enables you to perform various global editing functions, such as duplicating, inserting or cutting frames and changing the colour palettes.

Creating a good animation takes a lot of work and there is no avoiding the fact that you're going to have to generate every frame yourself. All this requires a lot of time and patience, with cunning use of PPaint's spare page and brush functions, we can at least cut out a sizable chunk of the labour...