Whiteboard Animation

Education · Astronomy lesson · 0:49

Phases of the moon animation for kids

Watch the eight phases of the moon drawn step by step in an arc, from new moon through full moon and back to a thin crescent. A hand-drawn whiteboard animation made from one illustration.

Length
0:49 · 2 chapters
Aspect ratio
4:3
Colour starts at
0:31
Style
Lines + colour
Formats
16:9 · 1:1 · 9:16

Opens Studio with this picture, ready to draw.

Your own picture? How to prepare one

Phases of the moon animation for kids

The picture it starts from

This finished illustration is all the drawing started from. Upload a picture like it and Studio draws it stroke by stroke; we don't generate pictures from text.

Phases of the moon animation for kids: the finished picture

1920 × 1433 px · WEBP

The prompt behind the picture

Image prompt
Hand-drawn diagram of the phases of the moon: exactly eight round moons of the same size in a gentle arc across the paper with a few small scattered stars between them, a small grassy hill at the bottom. From left to right: a new moon (a dark grey disc with a thin outline and no light), a thin waxing crescent lit only on its right edge, a first quarter moon with its right half lit, a waxing gibbous moon mostly lit with a dark sliver on the left, a fully lit bright full moon, a waning gibbous moon mostly lit with a dark sliver on the right, a last quarter moon with its left half lit, a thin waning crescent lit only on its left edge. The lit parts are pale yellow with soft grey craters, the dark parts are dark grey. Nothing else in the picture. Coloured pencil and watercolour marker, clean black ink outlines, warm off-white paper, no text.

The picture came from an image model; any finished illustration works the same way, including one you drew. Use the prompt as a starting point for your own topic.

Phases of the moon, step by step

A script to read over it, timed to the drawing: the lines go down first and the colour arrives on the last beat.

  1. 0:00Line artThe moon doesn’t make its own light. It shines because sunlight bounces off it.
  2. 0:06The sun always lights up half of the moon. As the moon travels around Earth, we see different amounts of that bright half.
  3. 0:13At new moon the bright side faces away from us, so we can hardly see the moon. Then a thin crescent appears and grows to a first quarter.
  4. 0:19The bright part keeps growing, or waxing, through a gibbous moon until the whole face shines: a full moon.
  5. 0:25ColourThen the bright part shrinks, or wanes: a gibbous moon again, a last quarter and a thin crescent.
  6. 0:32Then it is new moon once more. The whole cycle takes about 29 and a half days.

Where this phases of the moon animation for kids fits

Use it in a science lesson on the moon and the night sky, to start a topic on Earth, moon and sun, or as a short clip in a kids’ space video. The same process turns your own diagram into a clip.

Questions

About this example

Pro includes a commercial licence: use your whiteboard animation clips in client work, explainer videos, ads and paid courses. Free and Starter clips are for personal and non-commercial use.
One finished picture — PNG, JPEG or WebP, up to 10 MB. Illustrations, diagrams and flat artwork work best: the kind of picture a doodle video or explainer video is built from.
About fifteen seconds before your hand-drawn animation starts to draw. The video is as long as you choose, and saving it takes a few seconds more.

Your picture is one upload away from moving.