Hi Ruby! Very kind words and music to my ears 😉 Thank you!
Yes, colouring is coming as a free update first thing after our main release. We already worked quite a lot on it – and it is going to be great.
As you want to learn, I encourage you to focus on the actual animation. I mean, do rough key drawings as you get your timing and basic movement working. Then do breakdowns and then refine doing a tie down pass on a new layer – and so on. All this is the most important for training your animation skills.
If you want to color your work at some point, we have made Animation Paper so it is easy to export to other software. There’s plenty of options. And when it comes to choice of colouring software, pretty much anything goes. Photoshop and Krita would both be excellent choices (until AP is ready for colouring of course! ;)).
For Photoshop you can export your frames as numbered drawings and layers. This way, if you have drawings that are reused, you only color one of the copies. After colouring you can assemble the complete animation. For Krita I would export as OCA (Open Cell Animation) format. Krita will import this format directly and thus keep track of your held or reused drawings (clones) as well as layers. You’ll find out. And if something turns out to be confusing, let me know. 😉
I wish you the best of luck with you learning to animate! You will need a little patience to do animation, but it is sooo exciting to watch your work come to life!
Cheers,
Niels