Freeware Tools: Pencil 0.4.4

Pencil is a traditional 2D animation portable software that enables you to create pencil sketches and animated them to create hand-drawn cartoon animations using both bitmap and vector graphics. The program provides several standard drawing tools, including pencil and pen as well as a coloring tool, eraser and a line tool. You can combine bitmap layers, vector image layers, sound and camera layers and manage each layer`s content from time line display. The finished animation can be exported to X-Sheet, PNG image series or Flash (SWF) animation.

Pencil is a simple application that provides you with some basic graphic editing tools.

This is a portable software, so you don't have to install Pencil. It means that it can be stored on a removable drive and used on any computer. Plus, your Windows registry entries will not be changed.

The interface of Pencil is plain and simple. You can start a new drawing from scratch or open an image via the file browser or "drag and drop" method (in the BMP format only).

So, you can use basic editing tools, such as sketch, coloring, draw, polyline, erase, clear, fill, color picker, select, zoom and modify curves.

In addition, you can configure options when it comes to color, size and feather, enable size with pressure, as well as preserve alpha, use a timeline, and others.

Furthermore, you can use the undo and redo functions, import images and sounds, create a new layer (bitmap, vector, sound, camera), import a palette and export a SWF movie, image sequence, and more.

But you can also configure general settings (e.g. window opacity, shadows, vector curve opacity and smoothing) and options regarding files (e.g. enable autosave) and the timeline (e.g. frame size in pixels, timeline size in frames).

The graphic editing tool requires a moderate amount of system resources, includes a brief online help file with snapshots.