09.Lois van Baarle has been drawing since before she can remember. Don't believe us? Take a look at its gallery (opens in new tab). TVPaint Animation is one of the pricier options included in this round-up, but it does offer a trial version, and from what we've seen so far, it's quite powerful and well worth the price.

It uses bitmap technology, so you can animate natural renderings, like gouache, watercolour, oil painting, crayon and pen, traditionally, image by image. Moving on to the more 'professional' set of tools, TVPaint (opens in new tab) lets you render fully animated scenes from start to finish. For Pro users, you get things like FBX support, motion blurs, frame-by-frame capabilities and more.Ĭheck out this free Introduction to Moho course (opens in new tab) to get you started. Or you can import your own images and use the autotrace option. With the Debut version, you can use a character wizard to dial-in things like body proportions and predesigned 2D components. Both come loaded with tons of pre-made content and characters to help get you started or spark your imagination. Moho (opens in new tab) is a vector-based 2D animation program for beginners (Debut) and professionals (Pro). If you're not sure which version of OpenToonz to go with, we'd recommend this one – especially as the documentation for the basic OpenToonz seems to be only in Japanese. And as well as OpenToonz, there's a further open-source version, the Morevna Edition (opens in new tab), which is also available on Linux and includes additional features such as assistant guides to make it easier to add perspective to your environments, integration with the MyPaint brush engine, a horizontal timeline and an advanced colour selector. The latest version, 1.4, was released for Mac and Windows last year, adding a new stop-motion panel with support for Canon DSLR cameras, and plenty more. It features all the tools you're likely to need, from drawing tools through to effects, scripting, tweening and more, and new features are added regularly.

Ghibli started using Toonz during the production of Princess Mononoke, and in 2016 this powerful animation tool was made open-source and renamed OpenToonz (opens in new tab) (there's still a commercial version – Toonz Premium (opens in new tab) – available, if you insist on paying).

Digital 2d art