Creating my First GIF

I had fun creating my first GIF with my character Timby.  I just wanted to do a simple GIF to put on my blog and website.

So I came up with these rough sketches:  I wanted Timby to appear dancing.

And here they are with color:

After I colored/photographed them, I edited my illustrations in PICMONKEY and decided to keep the background dark so you could see the snow I added.  

Then I opened the images in GIMP.  For those of you who don't know what GIMP is, it is a cross platform image editor.  They say you can do wonderful things in GIMP that are comparable to Photoshop.  I'm not sure about that because one I am still learning GIMP and two I've never worked with Photoshop.

Anyway, this is how it came out.   

For me, it ended up being too dark.  I did not like it, it looked too mechanical or something.  So then I decided I wanted to make my background transparent but, I just couldn't get it to work right. I still have lots to learn in GIMP. Thank goodness for YouTube and all those wonderful artists out there who post their videos.

Anyway, I ended up painting my background white using GIMP and came up with this one.

I like the look of the image better with a white background but, I still think it would look even better without a background.  I'm thinking with a transparent background it would look more like an animation.  I will definitely try it on my next one.  My goal is to create an animation with one of my characters.    

Until then...It's back at the drawing board for me!