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Pencil2D is a bare bones, lightweight animation program for Linux, Windows, and MacOS that is completely free and open source. It's also my preferred animation program!
Download & Install
Pencil2D can be downloaded from this page. If you run one of the operating systems shown, simply click the icon and the installer will be downloaded to your computer.
If you run a different OS, scroll down to the "Other Ways to Install Pencil2D" section, click your OS's name, and follow the instructions provided.
Once you've downloaded the installer, simply run it (generally by double clicking, if you run linux mint like me you'll have to grant it permissions) and it should install on its own. there may be an install wizard, just follow the instructions provided by said wizard and you should be golden.
Program Overview
Now that you've installed Pencil2D, search it on your OS's search bar or locate the shortcut or executable and run it! (I am stuck on Windows 11 at the moment for school reasons, so screenshots will be of that system, but it should be the same on Linux or Mac.)
This is how Pencil2D should look upon first loading in.
Buttons abound! No one panic, its intuitive, I promise! We'll go through them section by section.
1: Tools
Pencil2D comes pre-loaded with 11 different tools:
- Pencil -> always feathered, good for sketching
- Eraser -> configurable feathering/anti-aliasing, erases
- Select -> creates a rectangular selection to be moved with the Move tool
- Move -> lets you move selections made with the Select tool, you can also scale them by dragging on the corner handles (hold shift to keep the ratio consistent) and rotate them by holding ctrl
- Pen -> draws without feather, toggleable anti-aliasing
- Hand -> lets you move the canvas, you can also do this by holding space
- Polyline -> creates straight lines. Press ESC to cancel, enter to confirm.
- Paint Bucket -> fills an area with selected color, configurable color tolerance
- Eyedropper -> picks the color of the pixel the mouse is over when clicked
- Brush -> configurable feather, no anti-aliasing
- Smudge -> smears strokes
I encourage you to experiment with each tool to get a feel for which ones you prefer to use and how!
2: Tool Options
Each tool will have different options, most will have a width setting (how many pixels wide their marks will be), pressure checkbox (whether or not to use pen pressure to determine size/opacity), and anti-aliasing checkbox (make lines smooth and non-pixely looking). play with the settings to learn about how they affect each tool!
3: Onion Skins
"Onion Skin" is an animation term referring to allowing other frames to show while drawing the current one. Checking the "previous frames" checkbox will show frames before the current one, "next frames" will show those after. The lightbulbs next to these are toggles, they control if the previous frames show their true color, or pure red (previous) and blue (next). the numbers can be either written in or adjusted via the on-screen arrow buttons, these numbers control how many frames ahead or behind the program will show; this is individual preference and needs will likely change from animation to animation and even shot to shot, so feel free to adjust it!
Distributed opacity is how transparent the frames show up, minimum will be the transparency of the frames furtherest from the current, maximum that of those closest. Adjust these to your liking.
"Show keyframes only" will skip blank frames when counting how many frames away to show onion skins. "Show during playback" will keep onion skins visible when the animation is being played.
4: Timeline
The timeline lets you view and select your frames and layers, as well as preview your animation. This one's a little more complicated, so you get another diagram!
- Layer buttons, the left-most button adds a new layer, the middle deletes the selected layer, and the right copies the selected layer
- Layers, shows you your layers and their names, as well as letting you select them. double click the camera layer to change the resolution of your animation!
- Keyframe buttons, left button will create a new frame where your cursor (the vertical blue highlight in the main timeline) is, middle will delete the currently selected layer and/or scroll the cursor one frame back, right button will copy the current frame one frame forward.
- Play buttons, left arrow will send the cursor to the first frame of the animation, play button will play the animation from the cursor's current position, right arrow will send the cursor to the last frame of the animation, and loop button will toggle looping the animation (using for making gifs!)
- FPS, sets the frame-rate of your animation. Standard is 12, but feel free to mess around.
- Range, sets the frames that will play (first on the left, last on the right). useful for looping portions of an animation.
- Sound options, left button toggles sound on and off, right toggles binding sounds to frames
- Timeline, shows all your frames on each layer and what number they are.
5: Color Palette
click any color in this box to set it as the current color. Plus button adds the current color to the palette, minus button removes the currently selected color from the palette, center button lets you add a color via color your systems color dialogue (click it an learn).
6: Color Box & Inspector
The top area (the color box) lets you select a color via color wheel, if you've used any drawing program it should be familiar to you. The lower area (the color inspector) gives you a more detailed view and lets you set the opacity of your current color ("alpha"). It can be switched between HSV (hue, saturation, value) mode and RGB (red, green, blue) mode.
7: Topbar
The topbar contains all the extra options not contained in the other boxes. Each item explains gives its name (and purpose by extension) when hovered over. The last section gives you various helpful overlays; i almost always keep Thirds and Center active.
The Nitty Gritty
Almost every action in Pencil2D has a keyboard shortcut. Each tool has one, which shows when the tool is hovered over.
- Ctrl+Z -> Undo
- Ctrl+Shift+Z -> Redo
- Ctrl+C -> Copy selection
- Ctri+V -> Paste selection
- Ctrl+S -> Save animation
- R -> Rotate canvas clockwise
- Z -> Roate canvas counter-clockwise
You can also use the scroll wheel to zoom in and out on the point of the canvas where your mouse cursor is, try it!
If you want to have synced sound in your animation, you can create a sound layer through the "new layer" button, select it, and go to file > import > sound. You can also use file > import > movie audio to pull audio from a video file.
That's all for now, have fun animating!
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