2D Animation Tutorial

(Hand drawn animations are multiple images shown rapidly for the illusion of movement)

Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images in order to create an illusion of movement. Animation goes back as far as documented history.

EASYTOON

Easytoon is a simple animator for creating great black and white only animations that can be saved as animated GIFs.

Download Easytoon and extract the zip file into a new folder

You can run Easytoon right away without installing

After drawing your first line hold the control key while pushin the right arrow on your keyboard. This will take you to your next frame, page, or what is called a keyframe in animation terminology. Also you should see your previous lines grayed out since they are on what would be your previous page. This grayed out effect is called "onion skin" because years ago animators used onion skin thin paper to see-through their current page to draw from what they'd already worked on with the previous pages in the animation.

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Click here to Download Easytoon V1.9.1 by Setaguya
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PENCIL

Pencil is a little more advanced animator for creating color animations that can be synchronized with sound and even vector layers and output as a movie.

Download Pencil and extract the zip file into a new folder

You can run Pencil right away without installing

After drawing your first lines push ENTER on your keyboard. This will take you to your next frame or page in the animation. Also you should see your previous lines grayed out since they are on what would be your previous page. If you have more than one page the grayed out lines are from only one page back.

To the far right is the FPS or frames per second and the familiar triangle for playing the animation. The FPS controls how fast your animation will play back. Try lower this to 8 fps or slower to test out your drawing. Realistically movies run at 30 fps and choppy animations can run at around 15 fps and still hold some realistic movement.

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Click here to Download Pencil 0.4.4b
by Pascal Naidon & Patrick orrieri - 2008
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Written March10 by Tracy Rose