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 have always loved animation. As a child, I tried to make some animation by drawing in notebooks but the result was somewhat unsatisfactory. Nowadays, computers make animation much easier. However, there is surprisingly almost no free cross-platform software for traditional animation.

I was lucky to find "Pencil Planner" by Patrick Corrieri, a little programme for pencil tests. I decided to improve it and use it as a basis to build a bitmap/vector animation program.

Pencil is not intended to mimick web-oriented vector-based animation software such as Flash. Its main purpose is to make traditional animation. Neither does it try to rival commercial software targetting the professional animation sector. Pencil is intended to be a simple programme enabling anyone to make 2D animation.