Intro to Looom: Create Playful Looping Animations on Your iPad

What it actually teaches

This class is a tool tutorial dressed up as an animation class, and it is upfront about that trade. The bulk of the 68 minutes walks through Looom's interface: weaves (projects), reels (looping layers), and the frames within them. The teaching method is demonstration-first. Rich Armstrong builds a bouncing ball, a set of triangles, and an abstract chaos piece live, narrating each tap and hold as he goes, rather than lecturing on concepts first and applying them later.

The core lesson worth singling out is how Looom's reel system behaves. Change the color, opacity, or stroke style on a reel and it applies retroactively to every frame in that reel, a decision that feels alien coming from frame-by-frame tools but becomes the app's main shortcut once it clicks. Onion skinning, bookmarking a frame for reference, and the rotating pulley-style scrubber for previewing forward and backward all get individual treatment, and each is shown solving a real problem (matching a start and end frame, avoiding drift) rather than existing as an abstract feature list.

Where the structure holds up and where it thins out

The progression from single-reel animation to multi-reel work with independent frame rates is logical and well-paced for a beginner. Each new capability, drawing while playing, working with up to five reels, offsetting frame rates between layers, builds directly on the one before it, and the three worked examples (triangles, a chaotic scribble piece, a splitting heart synced to a Joy Division lyric) function as a genuine capstone, showing the techniques combined rather than just repeated.

Where it thins out is the animation theory. The class name-drops the 12 principles of animation and demonstrates two or three of them (easing, squash and stretch, exaggeration) on a bouncing ball, but this section is brief and treated as a bonus rather than a fully developed unit. Anyone hoping for a real grounding in animation fundamentals will find only a light dusting here, not a foundation.

Honest assessment

The class delivers exactly what its scope promises: a fast, hands-on orientation to a specific, unconventional app, not a general animation education. It succeeds because the instructor animates in real time and narrates his own mistakes and workarounds, which models the actual working process rather than a polished, edited-down version of it. That authenticity is also a minor weakness: a few of the live demo segments meander through trial and error (redrawing a triangle, hunting for a stray element) in a way that a tighter edit could have trimmed without losing the instructional value.

The project structure is refreshingly low-friction: sketch on paper, animate in Looom, export, post to Instagram or YouTube, embed in a Skillshare project. There is no gatekeeping around technical skill or equipment beyond the app itself and, ideally, an Apple Pencil.

For the stated audience, illustrators curious about animation and animators wanting a quick, playful side tool, this lands well. For anyone seeking transferable animation theory or a path toward more traditional, linear storytelling animation, it will feel thin, since Looom itself is built for endless loops rather than beginnings and endings.

What you will learn

• ·How to navigate Looom's reel-based interface: weaves, reels, frames, and onion skinning
• ·Drawing and erasing within Looom's non-standard system, where changing a reel's style or color updates every frame on that reel at once
• ·Building seamless looping animations using bookmarks and the rotating pulley-loom frame navigator
• ·Drawing directly onto a playing animation to create quick stop-motion style movement
• ·Layering up to five reels with independent frame counts and frame rates for effects like offset motion or varying speed
• ·Applying a handful of animation principles (easing, squash and stretch, exaggeration) to a bouncing-ball example