Free 2D Animation Drawing Software – Pencil

Last updated on June 4th, 2014 at 02:17 pm

Pencil, a free 2D animation drawing software makes traditional style of  hand-drawn animation (cartoon) using both bitmap and vector graphics.

This free 2D animation drawing software doesn’t comes with a lot of tools, just a simple drawing toolbox with the usual tools like brush, pencil, coloring tool, eraser and the like. There is a color selection tool, pen width tool, a layer tool and simple timeline at the bottom.

With timeline features, you can add layers such as a Bitmap Layer, Vector Layer, Sound Layer and Camera Layer. As it’s an animation application you can also add and remove KeyFrames. On the Time Line you can also choose to use onion skinning to see the previous frame and the next frame so that you can trace what you drew to animate it. The default FPS is 12 but on the Time Line you can choose up to 50 FPS. When playing your animation you can also decide to loop it so that you don’t have to keep pressing play over and over again.

Meanwhile, the entire animation viewing windows can be defined using the camera layer, and you can even add music to your animation using the sound layer. Once you’ve have finished your 2D animation creation, you can export it either an Image Sequence, X-Sheet, Quicktime Movie or a Flash Movie (.swf). You can also import and export your Color Palette.

Overall Pencil is really a good free 2D animation drawing software to produce simple 2D graphics as well as animation. Meanwhile, this free cartoon animation drawing software supports Windows, Linux and Mac platform. Worth to tryout if you’re interesting draw cartoon animation

More information: Pencil Website | Download Pencil | Pencil User Manual