Hi Amy, kglad's suggestions are correct, though, it that really want you want? I mean creatively. It took me almost 5 minutes only to download kglad's warp example. And it just warps at the top-right edge and waves like a flag. So what? I think that's not creative and realistic at all. Your style of painting is too complex to work with it in Animate in this way. The result wouldn't be in any way exciting. Animate is not an application for complex animated bitmap manipulations. It's a vector animation tool. Let me explain the difference between bitmap resp. raster graphic and vector graphic. A raster graphic is basically a 2D plane like a very fine grid made of many pixels. And each pixel can have a different colour value. This makes it possible to display images of photographic quality. Let's take your image you've embedded in your post. It contains 1883 by 1371 pixels. If we multiply these numbers we get 2,581,593 individual pixels. Each one of them can carry a colour value of red 256 * blue 256 * green 256 colour tones (24bit). That are roughly 16.7 million different tones. If we ignore the possiblity that the pixels could also contain information about transparency or semi transparency (alpha channel) that would add 256 alpha values (32bit) which means 4,2 billion different possible colour values for each pixel. Although your image doesn't contain that many, the number of unique colours is already a whopping 243,761 (according to my raster graphic editor). A vector graphic is a completely different beast. It consists of paths (or vectors) and anchors (or anchor points). A vector can be a straight line between two anchors or a rounded one with many anchors. Basically an anchor is always there where a straight line changes direction. If a vector shape is closed, ends there where it started, like a square or a circle, it contains information about the fill, which can be either a solid color or a gradient. The advantage of a vector graphic is that it is quasi mathematically evaluated always when one enlarges the size of the graphic. Vectors get longer, the distance between anchors increases. But it will stay crispy with very well defined edges and outlines. A raster grid, when enlarged, can only increase the number of pixels, multiplies pixels with equal or similar colour values and, as a result, will become blurry. Now, if you want to trace your raster graphic in order to work in Animate with the advantage of a vector graphic (you were talking about an image trace in your original post), and you want it as "as close to life as possible", then all the intricacies of your hand painting must be translated into a multitude of vectors and anchors. I've tried that in Illustrator with your image and got this: You can see that it takes 19,752 paths (vectors) and 162,163 anchors. And with (only) 16,285 colors this is already a significant reduction of those 243,761 unique colours of the PNG raster version. These numbers a too many to work with them in Animate in order to achieve subtle animative effects. It would be like modulating an ants nest by moving each ant seperately. Well, okay, my conclusions: Either, you create something in Illustrator or Animate, which is truly vector oriented, meaning much more cartoon stylisch, or you work in a raster graphic editor (like Photoshop) with your scanned painting and maybe use the lasso or polygon selection tools to cut your image into segments and animate those in an interesting way in Animate. Sorry for this long 'essay', but I thought, it might help you to make creative decisions. Klaus
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