This is a task where I really miss the old Animo software. You could colour a character once, then have different color sets based on the first one so you could have a completely new coloring without having to assign colours again.

Depends on your character design. If you want to change each shape into a certain colour: no, that's only possible in the tedious way of changing one by one. If you want your character getting darker for being in shadows or a night scene: put it into a group folder and create another layer with a sh...

There's books about that, I recommend to check your library.

Looks a lot like my very first smart bone attempts ... The trick is to have more than just start and end keys for the different face parts, and to set those right you need some guide. I do my head turns in a bitmap program first, correct a lot until each and every frame looks right. Only then I impo...

The cage and bar outlines are much fatter than the cat's outlines. If anything, they should be less prominent. Shadow and highlights are essential to show the cylindrical shape of bars. Also there sould be stronger contrast in the shadows inside the cage. In life action you'd film this with a long l...

I tried to google "shatter" which is the term I learned for the effect of jittery/blinky BG elements in a camera pan, but Google doesn't let me do it anymore - it's only offering "shutter" which is not what I want. Enshittification if internet in full action! More googling only c...

This is normal behaviour. There's nothing wrong with the first version.

Bigger productions may give the fastest moving plates a motion blur pass. Since those characters don't move you could give the 2 layers some treatment with directional blur.

Hm, can you test with different settings of scale compensation on that layer?

Affinity is the maker, its programs are called Photo, Designer and Publisher, and are able to replace Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign (the unholy Adobe Trinity).

Don't fret about that. Although new versions of programs are nice, I find that I still can do (and do) about 90% or more of my jobs with 10 yr old versions or even older. My Photoshop is from 2010 and still works fine (but I own Affinity already).

Project view is not to trust in delicate stuff like this, oly the rendered result counts.

That said: you can test your setup by writing down the RGB values for some of your shapes in Moho, then open the rendered image in Photoshop or the like and check if the values are the same.

Next weekend I will introduce a 9 yr old to animation. For a start he wants to know how to get images/drawings into the computer, and then how to move them.

Can any of you recommend some sofware for Mac, besides Moho?

Photoshop does a good enough job itself to export layers as single image files (in any format). See under File > Script.

One quirk with more complex masks is that they may not display correctly in project view. If you find something wrong, always do a quick render cmd-R to check.

Anything you put into the same group can be masked by the same mask.