Animate drawings with Pencil2D

Tutorial – Pencil2D

Article from Issue 229/2019
Author(s):

Pencil2D, an easy-to-use painting and 2D animation program, lets you create small animations quickly. Despite the simple user interface, you might need a little help getting started.

If you want a hand-drawn ball to drop elegantly from the ceiling in a YouTube video, Pencil2D [1] is the program for you. Thanks to this drawing program, artists can do more than just paint pretty comic figures, balls, or other objects on virtual paper; they can also animate these objects. If required, the tool imports bitmap images or photos for use as backgrounds.

Pencil2D is primarily intended for cartoon artists, but the software also lets you quickly create animated illustrations or diagrams. All you have to do is add a little of your own artistic talent. An impressive YouTube video [2] shows what professional animators have created with Pencil2D. The program is licensed under the GPLv2; the source code is available from GitHub [3].

Some distributions have Pencil2D in their repositories. Arch Linux users will find the tool in the pencil2d package in the Arch Users Repository (AUR). On current Fedora systems, you can fetch and install the package by typing:

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