Creating and Animating Skipping Stick Man

Start by creating an ellipse using elliptical shape tool.

Create another ellipse for the body of the stick man using elliptical shape tool.

Press Ctrl+T. Right click the layer and select warp. Adjust nodes to get the shape as shown.




Using line tool create arms as shown.

Create ellipse for hands and distort to get a shape as shown.

Using line tool create legs with a little higher thickness than arms.

Also create feet using ellipse tool. Select all layers and press Ctrl+G to group in a new group.

Duplicate group. Hide the original group. In this group adjust the arms and legs to get a posture as shown.

Duplicate the group. In this group adjust the arms and legs to get another posture as shown.

Create a skipping rope shape using pen tool.

Create a new layer. Select a five pixel solid brush. Click stroke path with brush in path window.


Duplicate rope layer. Press Ctrl+T. Right click the layer and select distort. Adjust nodes to get a shape as if the rope is in air.

Duplicate rope layer. Press Ctrl+T. Right click the layer and select distort. Adjust nodes to get a no motion shape.

Select a particular rope layer and shift select the respective stick man posture group. Press Ctrl+E to merge. Similarly create two more stickman and rope merged layers. Now we have three layers in all. Select these layers. Scale down vertically.

Press Ctrl+T. Right click the layers and select perspective. Adjust nodes to get the shape as shown. Reduce the opacity to create a perspective shadow.

Open animation window. For the first frame keep the first posture with it's respective shadow visible and hide the rest of the layers.

Duplicate frame. Keep the second posture with it's respective shadow visible and hide the rest of the layers.

Similarly for the third one.

Press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+S to save an optimized animated GIF.