Stick, Stick, Cucumber: Drawing Character Animation in CSS
summary
Shows how to recreate a looping Viking character animation entirely in CSS by slicing a GIF and redrawing key frames as shapes (no images). Uses a GIF splitter and Chrome PixelPerfect to reduce 72 frames to 24, selects key frames (6, 12, 19, 24) and interpolates between them, then builds the character from many absolutely positioned divs and ::before/::after pseudo-elements using gradients, border-radius, transform-origin and keyframe animations to keep the full cycle around 1 second; code and assets are provided.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:48Setup tools
- 5:13Split GIF into frames
- 13:19HTML structure
- 20:56Viking drawing layers
- 1:03:10Break
- 1:05:54Detail drawing
- 1:36:12Keyframe animation
- 1:50:07Final animation tweaks
- 1:53:31Use cases








