Paint here can turn the steps of a drawing into an animated GIF. It reads the undo history of the open picture, makes a frame from every change you made and ends the sequence on the finished picture. The command sits in a menu that stays out of sight until you switch it on, and it also has a keyboard shortcut.
Turn on the hidden Extras menu
A fresh copy of Paint shows only the usual menus. The GIF command lives in a separate Extras menu that has to be switched on first.
- Click View in the menu bar.
- Click Extras Menu, so a check mark appears next to it.
- Look for the new Extras menu, which now sits in the menu bar with the others.
- To put it away again later, pick View > Extras Menu a second time so the check mark goes. Your browser remembers which way you left it.
Render your drawing history as a GIF
The shortcut Ctrl+Shift+G runs the command whether or not the Extras menu is showing, so you can skip the steps above if you prefer the keyboard. GIF is the only animation format on offer.
- Draw your picture in a number of separate steps. Each stroke, fill or shape you add is a change Paint remembers.
- Press Ctrl+Shift+G, or open Extras and choose Render History As GIF.
- Wait while a window called Rendering GIF works through the frames. A progress bar and a percentage show how far along it is, and Cancel stops the job.
- When the title changes to Rendered GIF, the window plays the finished animation.
- Click Save to download the GIF to your computer.
What each frame of the animation shows
- One frame for every saved undo step in the open picture, in the order you made them, with the current state of the drawing as the final frame.
- Playback runs at 200 ms per frame.
- The GIF is as big as the canvas is at the moment you start rendering, so set the picture's size first.
- Only changes Paint can still undo count. Choosing File > New or File > Open, or loading a picture from storage, begins a new history, so render before you start over.
- A picture you have not changed at all gives a GIF with just one frame.
Save the file and know its limits
The downloaded file is named after your picture with its image extension dropped and the words history.gif added after a space, so a picture called sketch.png saves as sketch history.gif. There are no choices to make before saving: the frame delay, the size, the quality and the looping can't be adjusted. The finished GIF repeats continuously. If you would rather not keep the result, Cancel closes the window. Should something go wrong during rendering, Paint shows an error window that begins with Failed to render GIF:.
Plan your strokes so the animation plays well
Since the frames come straight from the undo history, the way you draw decides how the animation looks.
- Draw in many short strokes rather than a few long ones. Each one adds a frame, so the animation runs longer and builds up more gradually.
- A fill with Fill With Color, a shape or a block of text is recorded as a single step, so it appears all at once in one frame.
- If a step looks wrong, take it back with Ctrl+Z or Edit > Undo. Steps you undo drop out of the GIF, and F4 or Edit > Repeat brings them back before you render.