Finding ways to boost wellbeing and feel good at home are imperative towards maintaining healthy bodies and minds.

Getting creative with the kids is a great way to keep them entertained for hours and help their imaginations continue to run wild while staying at home. Over the course of our closure, we'll be sharing quick and easy-to-follow guides for fun family crafts using bits and pieces from around the house.

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Flipbook animations are fun, easy and very creative! Learn how to make them with us in this step-by-step tutorial. What will you draw?

Equipment needed:

• Pencil or pen 
• Notebook or at least 20 pieces of paper you can bind together with staples to make a book
• Colouring pencils – optional

Before you start, have a think about what you're going to draw. We suggest you choose something simple as you are potentially going to draw this 20 times or more, and the last thing you want to do is spend a very long time on one drawing and then not want to finish! Simple animations are usually the most effective.

Note: If you are using more than 20-30 pages, you may find that staples will not go through the paper.  You can then holepunch and use string to hold all the pieces in place, before using tape to bind the whole thing together and keep the pages from moving around.

1. Decide whether your animation is going to start on the front page or the back page of your flipbook. Then draw your first item.

Top tip: Make sure that you keep to the right-hand side of the page, or perhaps if you are left-handed, you will want to flip the whole thing and work on the left side of the page.

2. Draw the first and the last drawing of your animation in either end of your flipbook. This will help you plan how many pages you need to fill and decide what you should draw on each page.

The basic principle of flipbook animations is that there should be slight, small movements on each page. Check out our stopmotion animation tutorial for some tips on how far to move something from one page to the next, depending on whether you want the movement to be fast or slow.

We decided that our character would find it so hot, they dream of ice cream - which magically appears!

For each page, we kept our character in the same place as we wanted the movements to be in the speech bubbles and then later, the ice cream, rather than the character. But you can move the whole character if you want to. It is totally up to you what you want to animate. Copy us - or make your own!

3. When you've finished drawing, flick through the pages from either the front or the back of the book, depending on which end is the start and finish. How does it look?

Share your flipbook animation videos with us on social media - we'd love to see them!