Blender 2D animation?

Hello guys, I’m new here and I need some help.
I have painted a semi-realistic portrait of an anime girl and I wanted to animate her.
I wanted to make her blink, smile… I have watched how you can do this in After Effects, but I was wondering can you something like that in Blender?
I have tried to add her on a plane and sub divided the plane like 100 times and used keys to animate the blinking, and I don’t really liked the result.
I even tried adding armatures…
So any help is appreciated, thank you.