Pencil for traditional animation

Traditional animation is probably the best way to learn how to animate for complete beginners, because you're only limitation is your drawing skill. Of course, you'll need some hardware to do that properly. The next best thing is a software program that lets you draw like traditional animation. Of course, you'll need some hardware as well to do this properly (computer and graphic art tablet).

There are some programs out there, some of them free, some of them rather expensive. A neat little program I found was Pencil, first developed by Patrick Corrieri, and taken over by Pascal Naidon, as an open source program for both 32-bit Windows and Mac OS X 10.3.9 and higher (both programmers are also character animators).

The program is currently still heavily in beta (version 0.4.1b) and has some bugs, but it seems to be pretty stable. It can do what I want to use it for, which is draw individual frames with rather efficient drawing tools. It is based on Trolltech Qt, which is included in the application, so you don't need to install that separately (the install file is all-inclusive).

This isn't about creating animation fast, as with Anime Studio, but doing it proper. You need to sharpen your drawing skill and use the techniques of traditional animation to create a descent looking animation. I'm not there yet, but I feel my skills improving while I'm using this program. It is quite intuitive and therefore simple to use. An ideal tool for developing animation ideas.



I created this animation in more time than I would have needed if I had done it in Moho or Anime Studio, but the learning experience was so good. I can now try to implement some ideas more easily than with Moho or Anime Studio and do some Preston Blair exercises.