I recently finished doing a series of animation workshops. For this we were using Macs and lots of preinstalled software. As an experiment we decided to try out Pencil for doing digital drawings. Here’s what the website has to say about it:
Pencil is an animation/drawing software for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. It lets you create traditional hand-drawn animation (cartoon) using both bitmap and vector graphics. Pencil is free and open source.
I’d stumbled across Pencil earlier in the year when I was trying to find other similar software. What I like about Pencil is a drawing tool is that everything you create is in vectors and the interface is simple and easy to use. The children using the software picked it up quite quickly without much assistance. Another user tried using it in the classroom with great success.
On the other hand Pencil does have its shortcomings. There’s no file format so you have to open files via the program’s interface. It is beta software so there’s always a few bugs to iron out. I think the biggest hurdle to overcome is .jpg export. At the moment I’m getting a few errors and instead have to export to .png.
If you’re looking for a free/open source solution for doing simple animations you could definitely give Pencil a try. If you’re after something just to do drawings try Inkscape instead.
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