How to draw animations on top of winforms controls?

Question

I'd like to create some animations to make my (old) winforms app look a little nicer. The basic premise would be something like this:

I have a button I can press, and when I do, a random letter appears on top of the button and "flies" over to a textbox. Once the letter arrives at its destination, the letter vanishes and is appended to the text in the textbox.

This should be async, meaning there can be multiple letters on the way at the same time.

My problem is that I do not really know how to accomplish this. I know I can draw things on top of my controls by creating a graphics -object and drawing with it, but unless I force a redraw (Invalidate, or something else), the previous drawing is not cleared. However, if I do force the redraw, things tend to go all flickery (with or without DoubleBuffered set to true).

So I'm a bit at a loss in here, and despite my best efforts at googling, I wasn't able to find a suitable solution. Probably because drawing animations on winforms isn't all that popular (wpf would probably suit this ten times better), but I'd still like to at least learn if it is possible to accomplish.

Answer 1

What if you first draw it on a bitmap, then bitblt it to the screen/form. Look at the accepted answer in: Simple Game in C# with only native libraries