A few days ago, I decided to learn to animate. I am always looking for new skills to master and new ways to make myself interesting. Content creation is great for both of those things. Plus, the skills obtained learning to animate can lend a hand in product advertisements, Kickstarter projects, and other necessities of the modern world.

I started off with a Google search for “Free 2D animation software” and came across this article. At the top of its list was Pencil, an open-source 2D animation program. It is claimed to be comparable to many of its paid counterparts (what those are, I do not know). After downloading Pencil and using it for less than ten minutes, it crashed. I immediately restarted the program and gave it another go. Same result. I did a little bit of online research and found a few other people that were having the same problem. Pencil obviously has some improvements to make.

At this point, I turned towards Blender. Although Blender is mainly known for its majestic 3D animation abilities, I had read a while back that it could also be used for 2D animation. I used this tutorial video to get started.

Within 20 minutes, I had the basics down and was able to create an animation. It is crude, simple, and a great starting point: