I wanted the player to have the use of a book UI in the game, a place to store spells, so I animated this page turn to the right with Gimp using frames. At some point this animation has to be mirrored for turning the page to the left as well. Animating generally is a challenge for me, I don't have a lot of experience with it, but I took my time and the page turn animation came out pretty nice.
Okay, so after animating the spell book UI, had to think about what I wanted to work on next. I need to start focusing on some individual spells, beyond the strawberries. Have an idea for a spell involving an oversized spider, this is where I'm going to start. Made a small sketch using tracing paper to get the proportions correct and I attempted to animated the spider by hand first but later realized I would have a much easier time using software so that I can work through the frames a bit more. Sometimes I just use the layers in Gimp and switch between them to visualize the animating but I may have to use something like Aseprite and make a "line skeleton", Aseprite has very easy to use animation frames and a simple line tool should do the trick for the "line skeleton". After the walk sequence looks smooth I will carry them over to Gimp or Photoshop and illustrate the legs in each frame, that's the plan.