Education · Science lesson · 1:16

Tsunami animation

Watch a tsunami form step by step: the sea floor jumps up along a fault, the water above it rises, and a wave races towards a beach with houses. A hand-drawn whiteboard animation made from one illustration.

Length: 1:16 · 2 chapters
Aspect ratio: 4:3
Colour starts at: 0:58
Style: Lines + colour
Formats: 16:9 · 1:1 · 9:16

Use this picture Use this style Upload your own picture

By Deniffer AlanPublished Oct 24, 2026Tested Oct 24, 2026 by Deniffer Alan

Opens Studio with this picture, ready to draw.

Your own picture? How to prepare one

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.

1920 × 1433 px · WEBP

The prompt behind the picture

Image prompt

Hand-drawn cross-section diagram of how a tsunami forms, seen from the side: along the bottom the sea floor is split by one slanted fault line, the right block of rock pushed up a step higher than the left block. There is exactly one short red arrow, drawn on the right block next to the fault, pointing straight up; there is no arrow on the left block. Deep blue sea water fills the space above the sea floor. Directly above the fault the sea surface has a low wide bulge. To the right of the bulge one tall wave travels towards the right, with one red arrow above it pointing right. At the far right a sandy beach slopes up out of the water with three small houses and one palm tree on it. 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.

How this clip was made

The picture above was made with an image model from the prompt above; WhiteboardAnimation.ai then drew it, stroke by stroke, as the clip at the top of this page.

Drawn: Oct 24, 2026
Credits used: 1

Notes from making it

The first picture put an up arrow on both sides of the fault, so it was made again with one arrow on the rising block only. The narration was checked against NOAA’s tsunami pages.

Tsunami, 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.

0:00Line artA tsunami is a series of huge waves. It starts with a sudden push on the ocean, most often from an earthquake under the sea.
0:12Deep under the water, the sea floor can crack along a fault and suddenly move up or down.
0:23When the sea floor rises, the water above it is lifted too, making a low bump on the surface.
0:35The water moves up and down to settle again, and waves spread out in every direction.
0:47ColourOut in deep water the waves are not very tall, but they can travel as fast as a jet plane.
0:59Near the coast the water gets shallow. The waves slow down and grow higher and higher, and they can flood the land.

Where this tsunami animation fits

Use it in an earth science lesson on earthquakes and oceans, to start a topic on natural hazards, or as a short clip in a geography 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.