Most of the tasks in Pencil2D have shortcuts, and you can see the shortcuts in the menu or in the Preferences. That could be to change from the Pencil tool to the Eraser tool and back. When you animate, you often need the same tasks done. In the following illustration you can see that this is no help. If you press this button on the timeline: the onion skin doesn’t show the previous and next keyframe, but the previous and next frame. Here is how a simple ball-animation looks like with red and blue onion skin. Here you can also set the color of the previous drawings to red, and the next drawings to blue. In the Display Options dock, you can turn onion skin on and off. Values between 15 % and 50 % seems to be a good choice. You can choose to have up to 60 keyframes shown as onion skin, but we recommend that you choose one or two drawings. In the Preferences you can set the number of drawings to show and their transparency. Onion skin is the ability to see the previous and/or next keyframes. To help your animation process, you can turn onion skin on or off. Now, every time you go to an empty frame and start drawing, a new key-frame will be created on that frame. Where it says “When drawing on an empty frame:” you choose the first option “Create a new key-frame”. If you find it cumbersome to press Add key-frame every time you want a new key-frame, you can make your life easier. Press the Play icon, and hooray! - you’ve made your first animation. Draw a small circle a little to the right of the second one. Draw a small circle a little to the right of the first one. Draw a small circle in the middle of the field. Select the pencil tool, and set its width to 4 or 5. Here you can Add, Remove and Duplicate key-frames.īe sure you are on the bitmap layer and on frame 1. Right above the time-line you’ll find these buttons. Remember that the bigger camera field you choose, the more RAM and computer power you use and need. When you open Pencil2D the first time, this size will be 800圆00 pixels, but you can change it by double-clicking on the camera layer.

The white rectangle in the middle of the canvas, is the camera field. To the left and right you’ll find dockable windows, where you can select tools, colors, choose settings and more. In the bottom you’ll find the time-line, that keeps track of your key-frames. Here you can load and save files, import images, add layers and much more. The user interfaceīefore we go to animation, let’s have a quick glance at the user interface.

Until then you can rely on our recommendations.

There is no right or wrong way to do things in animation, and when you get more experiences, you will develop your own habits and methods. The guidelines we give here are just that. If you don’t find the answers you need here, please ask at our Discord server or our forum. You want to animate - and we are here to help.

Import audio into pencil 2d