How to create this image?

I'd like to create an image of a treefrog in a rainforest, where an animated image darkens slowly into nightfall, and as the image darkens, the frog's eyes start to glow or sparkle red.

I am fairly new to animations and plugins, but intermediate at PSP.

I would duplicate the main layer a few times. Make your edits to each layer. An animated gif is just a bunch of frames. Each frame change in the animation is a new movement in the animation/frame. You can use gradient, hues, contrasts (whatever you like best) to set the day to night. You can make subtle changes to the eyes of the frog with each change of the sky. You can edit the eyes by selecting them with the freehand selection tool and while standing on the proper layer you can go and add some noise to the eyes (each time you add noise to eyes on the layers you want to increase the noise ratio or decrease it as this will give you the sparkle)

Remember each change has its own frame. It is easier to number or label your frames. I would assume an animation such as this to be "smooth" would be over 15 frames. Depending on which version of PSP you are using if you are using X2 you can export each layer as a jpg (jpg if you're using gradients) and number them in order. SAVE your work as a PSPimage, and do NOT close it. NOTE: Use the eye icon in the layer palette to close other layers before you export the current layer. Be sure you are standing on the correct layer during export.)

Open up Animation Shop, go to File, animation wizard, it will ask you some questions (default is fine at this point) then it will ask you to select the frames. Choose your frames in reverse order (this way they will be in 1, 2, 3 ... order... just the way Animation Shop 3 works I guess)

Then you can view the animation. If you feel it needs a frame rate change you can go to Select all, and then increase the frame rate to slow down the animation or decrease the # to increase the speed of the animation.

If something just doesn't look right you can always go back to PSP and your image should still be there. Make edits to the layer you feel needs changes, then export it again, and just save it to overwrite the last attempt because you want to keep your file-names the same. Go back into animation shop and then remove the frame that you didn't like, then go to the menu and you will see where you can add new frames.

Once you are happy you simply save the animation. Then head back to PSP and save that (as a pspimage) ... I name my workable files like this pspanimationWO.pspimage where the WO means WORK ON. This tells me that it is a workable file in my collection (just a personal choice)

Also another option is you can finalize each frame and have each frame on its own layer (like usual) but when you go to save the file you can save it to be compatible with PSP 7 in the PSP save options. This will allow animation shop to open that image and you will not have to import that frames as explained above.

Good Luck ... sorry this isn't a complete step by step, but the basic idea is here. I have some video tutorials on how to animate at my site.