Free digital art, animation and storytelling activities for your class

A first lesson for younger students: zoom into a picture until the squares appear, mix a color from red, green and blue, and compare how LCD and OLED screens arrange their pixels.

Zoom into any image and discover the tiny squares that make up everything you see on screen.

Light up a grid of LEDs as pixels, mix RGB, and change the frame rate to see persistence of vision. Connects screen art to stadium boards and LED sculpture.

Mix RGB colors, paint on an LED grid, and explore persistence of vision by adjusting frame rates.

Students mix RGB light, compare it with CMYK printing, find harmonies on a color wheel, and check a palette through a color blindness simulation before building their own.

Mix light and pigments to understand how screens and printers create millions of colors.

Warm against cool, and the same color on different backgrounds. It ends with a mood board students build and then defend: what feeling were they going for?

Discover how colors shape our emotions and influence our behavior.

Pick two colors and slide through the gradient between them, watching each RGB channel change. Shows why too few steps create bands, and how easing reshapes a blend.

Discover the mathematics behind beautiful gradients.

How the Game Boy faked shading with four greens. Students compare ordered, error diffusion and pattern dithering on the same banded gradient and judge which hides the steps best.

Discover how dithering creates the illusion of more colors.

Motion aftereffects, same-color squares, the Muller-Lyer lines and afterimages. Students guess first, then measure or reveal, and talk about why the brain gets it wrong.

Why your brain lies to you - explore the science behind visual tricks.

Draw a sprite one square at a time and animate it frame by frame. It opens on a walking mushroom that every student can turn into a creature of their own.

Draw a character one square at a time, then make it walk.

Paint with a brush that stamps shapes along the stroke, stack layers, and try Multiply, Screen and Overlay. Good before any project in a painting app.

Paint with adjustable brushes, toggle layers on a landscape scene, explore blend modes, and learn RGB vs CMYK color mixing.

Every filter is pixel math: students push brightness, contrast and blur on the same picture, read the histogram, and see that blur is just averaging neighbors.

Inspect pixel RGB values, adjust brightness/contrast/saturation with live histograms, and apply convolution kernels (blur, sharpen, edge detect, emboss).

Change viscosity and flow speed and watch smooth flow break into swirls. Explains the simulation behind wet-paint apps and the water in animated films.

Push particles with your mouse, adjust viscosity from air to honey, watch vortices form around obstacles, and learn the Navier-Stokes equations.

The zoom test: the same image as pixels and as a vector, side by side. Students predict which goes blocky, then compare file sizes and decide which format suits which job.

Watch what happens when you zoom into two identical images.

Bezier curves and paths, the math under every logo and font. Follows naturally from the zoom test, and explains why a logo scales from business card to billboard.

Compare raster vs vector zooming, drag Bezier curve handles, build paths point by point, and learn why vectors power fonts, logos, and maps.

Name the parts of a letter, sort the font families, adjust kerning, and match fonts to a mood. Students finish by drawing a letter of their own on a pixel grid.

From Gutenberg to Google Fonts - discover the art and science of typography.

Students redraw letters of a complete pixel font and type their name in it. Have them restyle one word so the letters alone carry its mood.

Free, no account. Change a letter, type your name, and read it back in a typeface you drew.

Slide the frame rate from 2 to 60 and watch a bouncing ball smooth out, use onion skinning, then draw a short flipbook. A first lesson in any animation unit.

From flipbooks to Pixar - discover how still images create the illusion of motion.

Goes further than the first lesson: where motion breaks down below 12 frames per second, how spacing changes timing, and squash and stretch.

Discover how a series of still images tricks your brain into seeing smooth motion.

How games animate: frames packed into a sprite sheet, and idle, walk and jump states the game switches between. Pairs well with a PixelArt project.

Adjust frame rates on a pixel character, see how sprite sheets work, and switch between animation states with a state machine diagram.

Try to make a 3D arm wave, then add a skeleton and see why it moves. Covers parent bones, weights, and poses played in sequence as animation.

How a still 3D model gets a skeleton of bones so it can move: bones, weighting, and turning poses into animation. Then rig a real model yourself.

Set two keyframes and let the computer draw the frames between. The same ball drop with different easing settings makes a good class comparison of which looks real.

Free, no account. Change one setting and a ball that fell like a brick bounces like a real ball.

Switch a shape between solid, wireframe and vertices to see what it is made of, then compare low-poly with high-poly and see how a flat texture wraps around.

Peek inside the polygons - see how vertices, edges, and faces build virtual worlds.

Sculpting compared with polygon modeling, then the brushes themselves: inflate, smooth, crease and flatten, with symmetry and lighting. It ends with a first SculptGL challenge, a character head.

Learn how digital sculpting differs from polygon modeling, explore brush types, symmetry tools, and how lighting reveals surface quality.

Push, pull and inflate a model like clay, with both sides mirrored. Give every student the same plain ball and a time limit to make an animal.

Free, no account. Push and puff up a sculpted owl, then start your own creature from a ball of clay.

A voxel is a pixel with depth. Students build with cubes, then weigh voxels against polygons and see where voxel data turns up beyond games, from CT scans to 3D printing.

Explore how voxels work, build on an isometric grid, compare voxels to polygons, and discover voxel uses beyond gaming.

Build 3D models from colored cubes, starting from an island cottage. A tight cube budget for the same object makes students decide what to leave out.

Free, no account. Open a little island cottage made of 2,116 cubes, turn it around, and add your own.

What virtual reality is, a tour of ready-made worlds, and placing shapes with X, Y and Z coordinates. A starting point before students build a VR scene with blocks.

Step inside a world you create with code.

Drop paint on a spinning disc and see rotation turn splatter into symmetry. Brings in angular speed and why paint at the edge flies farther, for an art and math crossover.

Drop paint on a spinning disc with centrifugal physics, explore rotational symmetry, and watch particles fling outward at different speeds.

Draw one stroke and it repeats around the center like a kaleidoscope. Try the same stroke at 3, 6 and 12 folds and compare the results to flowers and snowflakes.

Free, no account. Add a line to a glowing mandala, change the number of folds, and see what one stroke becomes.

From Fibonacci numbers to phi, then the golden spiral drawn step by step. Students lay spiral, grid and triangle overlays on a composition and judge its balance.

The divine proportion hidden in nature, art, and design.

Change one number and the whole shape changes. Spirals, Lissajous curves, rose patterns and Voronoi cells show students that a formula can produce forms no hand would draw.

Explore how parameters drive geometry, see constraints in action on a bracket design, and watch math create spirals, waves, Voronoi cells, and Lissajous curves.

Three acts, archetypes, four types of conflict, the hero's journey and plot twists, then a story framework students build or randomize. A planning step before writing or animating.

Heroes, villains, and plot twists - master the elements that make stories unforgettable.

Read the same short story as a straight line, then with choices, and watch the map of passages grow. Students sketch their own story map before writing interactive fiction.

How a story becomes interactive: a single choice splits the path, passages form a map, and clever writers merge and loop paths. Then write your own in Twine.