If you are an animation lover and want to get started with something very simple, then this animation application called Pencil is for you. Animation is now a fairly simple and standardized task with the advancements in development tools. Visual effects, special effects, and 3D graphics applications are available from many vendors, but they require some serious skills and cost a lot.
Pencil animation & cartoon software for PC
Pencil is a simple, plain, and easy-to-use application with many options under the hood. In fact, it is very quick to get started with it anytime, even though you may not have had any experience with drawing and effects software before.
Pencil animation tools
Pencil has many tools that can assist you in making drawings and filling colors. They are:
- Paint Brush
- Polyline
- Eraser
- Modify Curve
- Select Tool
- Clear Button
- Pen Tool
- Color Picker
- Paint Bucket
- Move Tool
- Zoom Canvas
Pencil animation features
Pencil, though a small application, has quite a few features that can come handy at times.
- Layers
- Drawing
- Bitmap drawing
- Vector drawing
- Zoom and rotation
- Animating
- Adjusting keys
- Importing images
- Cameras
- Sound
Under the TimeLine tab, it is possible to 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.
Animation
Pencil allows you to create cartoons, animate images, and add audio. Animation, as usual, is done by adding multiple images or frames and then playing the sequence. The playing speed is set using the frame per second (fps) speed. A camera layer lets you define a particular view with a certain aspect ratio within your unlimited canvas. What’s more, you can define a view for each key of the camera track, and the view is linearly interpolated between the keys.
Pencil is a portable application that is 5 MB in size and doesn’t require installation. Its well-documented user manual teaches all the basics and advanced features of the application. You can download the Pencil application here.
What is pencil animation called?
Before computers, animations were hand-drawn. It means every movement, keeping in mind what will happen next, was drawn. Once done, it was then played as a sequence to make it appear like a movie or cartoon. One such example is Anime, which is entirely hand-drawn. Now that we have moved to the digital era, it has become cheaper as you can do it on computers. So, even if there are mistakes, they can be corrected with less effort.
