First and foremost, what would be a program some people recommend to do pixel art and animation? I've been using Gimp, which I'm fairly comfortable with and works really well for static images. In trying to do animation, though, I've found that Gimp's "animation" tools are really lackluster and I couldn't figure out a way to export my animation as a gif without changing a bunch of things around and even then it was a really jumpy, broken mess. (So right now I just have links I found to a renderer, not actual files for the animations

) It also is surprisingly hard to find a program which cuts an image with frames in a grid and exports them to an animated gif, or at least I couldn't find one. That seems like a basic thing you'd want to be able to do, but I digress. Most of the tools I found wanted you to upload separate images for each frame, which doesn't work with how my game engine handles sprites. Basically software recommendations would be highly appreciated ^_^
So after multiple attempts, I've given up on making something good and just vomited what I have currently on here to hopefully get some feedback on how to make it good

I initially tried to make her bob in place in something like a fighting stance, but with her hand on her hip it looked awkward. So now I'm trying to make her shift her weight slightly onto her right leg and then back to the front, which causes the dress to sway a little. Needless to say my results haven't been very good.
Right now the upper body's movement is really jerky, as is her hip movement, and the hip movement seems really out of sync with the movement of the dress. The movement of the dress seems sorta okay to me though?
(Links to the animations actually playing, hopefully:)
DressNude
