Regardless of my personal lack of sketching skills, Pencil has functionality far beyond the tools in simple computerized drawing applications. My rickety hand added the pencil scratchings to form a new single image. I lack the artistic skills required to produce sketches by moving the mouse pointer around Pencil’s virtual canvas.ĭon’t think so? Take a gander at my hand-crafted letters scratched around the image drawn by the developer and imported into a Pencil frame I created for this review.Ĭlearly, a talented hand created the multicolored cartoon image. I can only assess the performance of this software. Trying to do justice to the hand-drawn images for which Pencil is capable is a fool’s errand, at least for me. Despite that, it is very stable and usable. Its current version, 0.4.4b, is a beta package released on January 21, 2008. This particular open source project does not appear to be actively supported. However, getting it installed was no easy task. It imitates hand-drawn animation techniques, is easy to use and produces high-quality output. Pencil is a very impressive drawing tool. Animated sketches can be exported in several handy Flash or Movie file formats. Finished animations can be exported as a PNG image. Pencil creates both bitmap and vector images.

Pencil animation moving one frame