As requested by JohnnyBoyC;
Flame animating tutorial as used in Faeden's avatar
OK, first up, here's Faeden:
Step one: Save the image as "01"
Step two: We need to animate the flame, it's a candle so a slight flicker is best. To acheive this effect simply cut out part of the flame and move it to the right, like this:
Fig.1
Now save as "02".
Step three: Repeat this process, except this time take image 01 and move the flame to the left, then repeat again and move the flame upwards.
Now you should have four frames, each with a slightly different flame, stick them in your animator, and they should look like this:
Fig.2
I had to do a bit of jiggling with the frames to get it to look right, so play around with the order till it looks natural. For this animation I used a timing of 0.2 seconds per frame.
Step four: Now we need to add the shadows. You can do this with pretty much any program you like just find the "Brightness" or "Contrast" option, I used Microsoft Picture Editor. Take each frame and add a little bit of brightness or take it away, leave one the same, then your frames will look a little bit like this:
Fig.3
Step five: Stick them all together, play around with the order, duplicate some frames if necessary and it might look something like this:
Fig.4
...and that's that!
