If you are interested in animation, there are a number of different animation styles you can use, including 2D, 3D, and stop-action. Each requires that you have skills in different kinds of technology. All require that you have artistic skills, either in drawing, or, for 3D styles, sculpting or building models.

2D animation is the traditional animation style, used in classic cartoons. It's also used on many Web pages. If you are a 2D animator, you create a frame-by-frame representation of a character or scene, manually creating the image in each frame. If you're creating a cartoon, you will likely draw each image using pen and ink. The images are then converted into film or video by a photographic process.

If you are creating an animation for a Web page, you can draw each image and scan it into your computer, you can draw each image using a graphics tablet stylus, or you can create images onscreen using graphics software. Once you have created the images, you can use software such as Flash for tying the images together into an animation that is deliverable over the Internet.

In 3D computer animation, you create a character using software. You move the character through a computer-generated three-dimensional world, tracking the character with an imaginary camera that can create a still image of the character from any angle that you determine. These still images are tied together to create the frames of the animation.

In stop-motion animation, you also create a 3D character. But this character inhabits the real world, not a computer. Stop-motion characters can be puppets, dolls, or clay figures (clay animation). For each animation frame, you must move the character, then shoot a picture of it with a movie camera or a digital camera. With a digital camera, you use software to tie the images together into an animation.