Pixelation problem, beginner, custom brushes

Question

As a complete beginner, I'm using Gimp for animated gifs. I created lots of custom brushes for universal in-betweens: faces, eyebrows, arms, lips, etc.. I find it very time-saving.

In scenes where I make characters only half smaller, all shapes already appear very pixelated in gif and mp4 formats... The smaller I make characters, more pixelated they become. They are pixelated no matter what the size.

The sizes of the brushes when created vary between 100x50 px, and up to 700x600 px - maybe this could be a factor?

Are there any solutions for pixelation within Gimp?

I couldn't find any other software also for animation with custom brushes option except Gimp. Are there any?

Answer 1

If you work in color-indexed mode, this is normal. Scaling down requires interpolation of pixels, which usually means colors that may not be in the full-scale image. In indexed mode, you are constraining the colors to those of the color map, in other words to those of the original image.

And even if you work in RGB, when you export to GIF you restrict your image to 256 colors (across all frames), which is very tight if you need to include all the blending colors used in the pixels on the edges of things.