Pencil animation & cartoon software for PC
Pencil is a simple, plain, and easy-to-use application with a bunch of options under the hood. In fact, I should be saying; it is very quick to get started with it anytime even though, you may not have any experience with any drawings and effects software before.
Pencil animation tools Pencil has many tools that can assist you in making drawings and filling colors. They are:
Paint BrushPolylineEraserModify CurveSelect ToolClear ButtonPen ToolColor PickerPaint BucketMove ToolZoom Canvas
Pencil animation features Pencil, though a small application, has quite a few features that can come handy at times.
LayersDrawingBitmap drawingVector drawingZoom and rotationAnimatingAdjusting keysImporting imagesCamerasSound
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 application is a portable application of size 5 MB and doesn’t require installation. It has a well-documented user manual that can teach all the basics and the advanced features of the application. You can look at the user manual here and 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.
