Pencil: Free Vector & Bitmap Drawing/Animation Software for Mac & Windows

Pencil Vector Animation Software - screenshot

Pencil is a free, open-source vector and bitmap graphics animation/drawing application. I have not had a chance to try it out just yet, but will do so in the near future and pop a review on the ol’ blog.

It’s available for Mac OSX and Windows.

Here’s a quick description from the “Why?” page on their website:

…there is surprisingly almost no free cross-platform software for traditional animation.
I was lucky to find “Pencil Planner” by Patrick Corrieri, a little program for pencil tests. I decided to improve it and use it as a basis to build a bitmap/vectorial animation program.

Pencil is not intended to mimic web-oriented vector-based animation software such as Flash. Its main purpose is to make traditional animation. Neither does it try to rival commercial software targeting the professional animation sector. Pencil is intended to be a simple program enabling anyone to make 2D animation.

Sounds pretty cool. I have noodled around with some very basic animation in Flash, mostly just moving things around, squashing them and such, no real character animation. It’s a real chore, despite the immense time-saving nature of creating them on the computer. Flash is great and all, but sometimes it seems just a bit too powerful, with many options designed with web programmers in mind (and rightly so).

I have seen other animation-specific software packages, but never had enough of an interest to actually buy any of them as I am sure they would eventually sit on my hard drive collecting virtual dust.

I’ll have to give this one a try and get that review up here. In the meantime, go check it out for yourself and see what it has to offer.

by George Coghill -
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