Simple animation in WinForms

I've created a library that might help with this. It's called Transitions, and can be found here: https://github.com/UweKeim/dot-net-transitions. Available on nuget as the dot-net-transitions package

It uses timers running on a background thread to animate the objects. The library is open-source, so if it is any use to you, you can look at the code to see what it's doing.

In some situations, it's faster and more convenient to not draw using the paint event, but getting the Graphics object from the control/form and painting "on" that. This may give some troubles with opacity/anti aliasing/text etc, but could be worth the trouble in terms of not having to repaint the whole shabang. Something along the lines of:

private void AnimationTimer_Tick(object sender, EventArgs args)
{
    // First paint background, like Clear(Control.Background), or by
    // painting an image you have previously buffered that was the background.
    animationControl.CreateGraphics().DrawImage(0, 0, animationImages[animationTick++])); 
}

I use this in some Controls myself, and have buffered images to "clear" the background with, when the object of interest moves or need to be removed.