# How to Turn a Video into a Hand-Painted Animation > A full walkthrough of the analog animation workflow: upload a video, print a contact sheet, paint the frames by hand, scan the sheets, and export an MP4. Source: https://mixd.uninspired.app/blog/video-to-hand-painted-animation Author: Uninspired Studio Published: 2026-09-08 --- Hand-painted animation used to mean spending a lot of time on boring-ass setup for one afternoon of drawing. You extract frames, lay them out for print, paint, scan, straighten every page, crop every frame, and rebuild the sequence in the right order. The painting is the reason you started, not aligning something by hand. This is the workflow we use with [MIXD](/): upload a video, print a contact sheet, work on paper (aka doing the cool stuff), scan the sheets, and export the finished animation as an MP4. What makes MIXD cool is that we can just do the boring things in a few clicks. Honestly you don't even need to adjust anything in MIXD. The default settings are good for 99% of cases. ## What you need - A short video. Start with two to four seconds. - A printer, and paper heavy enough for whatever you plan to put on it. Ink and light washes are fine on ordinary paper; heavy acrylic or water is not. - A flatbed scanner, or a phone camera on a tripod (or a steady hand). ## Step 1: Upload the video and print a contact sheet Upload your clip and MIXD extracts the frames and lays them out as a printable contact sheet. Two things on the sheet matter later. The frames sit on a fixed grid. Each page carries registration markers in the corners, which is what lets the scan be matched back to the layout afterwards even if the paper shifts, bends, or goes through the scanner crooked. Print the sheets. Keep them in page order. The order is recoverable later anyway, but this saves you a check. Frame rate, paper size, and a worked example are in [how to print video frames to paint on](/blog/print-video-frames-to-paint-on). ## Step 2: Work on the sheets by hand This is the part no software should touch. Paint the frames, ink them, cut them up and collage them, run them through a photocopier, tear the edges. Whatever the piece needs. How each material scans back, and how to keep it off the markers, is in [what can I paint or print on printed video frames](/blog/analog-animation-techniques-on-paper). The painting side specifically, and why it looks alive at 6 fps, is in [how to paint over video frames](/blog/paint-over-video-frames). One thing before you start: - **Leave the corner markers alone.** Paint over them and the scan loses its reference for that page. Everything else on the sheet is yours. ## Step 3: Scan the sheets Scan each finished sheet as a whole page. One scan per sheet. Scans do not have to be neat. MIXD corrects perspective on pages that were scanned at an angle, aligns each page back to the original layout whatever order the files arrive in, and finds each frame on the page, including on bent or rotated sheets. A phone photo on a tripod works too, as long as the whole sheet, corners included, is in shot and reasonably lit. ## Step 4: Export the MP4 Upload the scans. MIXD repairs and aligns the pages, crops every frame out of the grid, puts the frames back in their original order, and rebuilds the animation. Export it as an MP4. If a frame looks wrong at this point it is almost always a scan problem rather than a painting problem: a page photographed too close, or a corner marker cropped out of shot. Rescan that one sheet and export again. ## How long it actually takes The making is as long as you want it to be. Everything around it is short: | Step | By hand | With MIXD | | -------------------------- | ----------------- | ------------ | | Extract frames | Manual export | Upload video | | Build contact sheets | Manual layout | Generated | | Align and straighten scans | Page by page | Automatic | | Crop frames | Hundreds of crops | Automatic | | Rebuild the sequence | Manual assembly | One click | An afternoon of technical work shrinks to about five minutes, which leaves the afternoon for painting :) ## Where to start Take a two-second clip of something moving. This can be a hand opening or a face turning. If you want some inspo, here are ten ideas: [what can I make with mixed media animation](/blog/mixed-media-animation-ideas). Print one sheet, do cool shit with it, scan it, export it. You can [generate contact sheets for free](/#pricing) and see how the sheets print before you buy anything.