Pencil2D, create 2D hand-drawn animations in a simple way

In the next article we are going to take a look at Pencil2D. This is one tool for creating 2D animations in a traditional way. The program began its design and development on Mac OS 10.4 using Qt. Because the Qt libraries are cross-platform, versions for Gnu / Linux and Windows were subsequently produced. Pencil2D is under the GPL open source license.

With this program, the users, the users, will be able to create cartoons using traditional techniques (line drawings, onion skin, etc…), bitmaps and vector graphics. We will also have the possibility to easily switch between workflows raster and vector graphics in this 2D animation maker. Once the animation is finished, it will allow us to export our animations in video or GIF file, in addition we can also import sound into this software.

General characteristics of Pencil2D

• The program offers a minimalist design. Result Light and easy to use so that the user can concentrate on the animation.
• This program is completely open source and free to use. Its source code can be found available at GitHub.
• We will be able to seamlessly switch between raster flows and vectors, allowing you to draw and paint on the go.
• Pencil2D is cross-platform and it runs on Windows, macOS, Gnu / Linux, and FreeBSD.
• The program will allow us to use the color wheel available. With it, finding the colors for our animations will not be a problem.

• If you don't like labeling your colors, in this program you will be able to view our color palette as a color grid. In addition, now it will also allow us to change the size of the samples.
• The program It will allow us to use colored onion skins to make animation easier. We will be able to show the onion skins of the 'previous frames'in red and the onion skins of the'next frames'in blue to see them clearly.
• We will be able export the resulting animation to mp4, avi or animated gif. We will find this option in the Menu → File → Export.
• We will find this program available in different languages. To this day they can be found about 23 languages ​​available in Pencil2D. These include; Spanish, English, Czech, Danish, German, French, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Traditional Chinese.

May know all the features of this program in the project website.

Download Pencil2D as AppImage

We will be able to obtain the package of this 2D animation program for Ubuntu through the portable AppImage format. We just have to go to the Pencil2D release page and from there download the latest version of the .AppImage program based on the architecture of your operating system (32 bit or 64 bit).

Once the download is finished we will see that the downloaded file is'pencil2d-linux-amd64-0.6.4.AppImage'. The size of the downloaded file is around 40MB. We will have to open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and move to the folder where we have saved the file. Once in it we will execute the following command to make the file executable:

sudo chmod +x pencil2d-linux-amd64-0.6.4.AppImage

After changing the file permissions, already We can execute the following command in the same terminal to start Pencil2D:

sudo ./pencil2d-linux-amd64-0.6.4.AppImage

Install as Flatpak

While Ubuntu repositories only provide an older version of the program, the latest version available can be found as flatpak package. Obviously we will have to have the technology for this type of packages enabled in our system. A colleague told us about this in a article some time ago.

Once Flatpak is activated in the system, we can install Pencil2D from flathub repository. We will only need to open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and write in it:

flatpak install flathub org.pencil2d.Pencil2D

To execute it, in the same terminal you will only have to use the command:

flatpak run org.pencil2d.Pencil2D

It can get more information about using this program on the official documentation which can be found on the project website.