Pencil2D is a free and open source animation/drawing software for Windows, macOS, Linux, and FreeBSD. It lets you create traditional hand-drawn animation (cartoon) using both bitmap and vector graphics.
Pencil2D is a community-driven project developed entirely by volunteers and we are always looking for more helping hands! There are many different ways to contribute, so anyone can help regardless of their background. For more information, please see the Contributing section below.
Don’t forget to check out our official website: https://www.pencil2d.org/
User Showcase Reel 2022
You can download Pencil2D from the Official Website or Github releases.
Nightly builds are the bleeding edge versions of Pencil2D, which contains the most recent fixes and features. We currently do not offer legacy mac or 32-bit linux nightly builds. If you have one of these systems, you will have to wait for official releases or build the program from source.
Note that the following guides and documentation are outdated.
Pencil2D comes with a Quick Reference that you can use to familiarize yourself with the tools and functions at your disposal. After opening Pencil2D, you can access it through the main menu: Help > Quick Reference Guide.
We encourage you to visit our User Manual for a quick guide for novice users, then play around with the program – it's fun!
After you feel a little more comfortable with the basics, check out these tutorials provided by Pencil developers and users. While some of these resources might reference previous versions of Pencil2D, the underlying concepts are still the same.
If you encounter difficulty or have additional questions, we have a large community of users who are glad to help out. View the FAQ on our website or visit our discussion forums to post a new question.
Interested in contributing to Pencil? There are many ways to help. Take a look at our issues and see what you can help out with, check out the developer guide, or help out with making Pencil2D available to more people by contributing to translation.
- Issue Tracker - Report bugs or request features.
- Developer Guide - Learn how to compile Pencil2D yourself.
- Transifex - You can help translate Pencil2D, too.
- Documentation contributions - Guidelines for contributing to documentation.
- GitHub: https://github.com/pencil2d/pencil (Primary)
- Bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/chchwy/pencil2d (Mirror)
- GitLab: https://gitlab.com/chchwy/pencil2d (Mirror 2)