2D Blender Grease Pencil Tutorial for Dummies

Blender Grease Pencil tutorial for drawing and doing 2D animation.

First thing is opening a new project file. We’ll select 2D Animation on start up.

In the Viewport there’s tons of things to click on and it’s quite overwhelming and not super intuitive.

Here’s what I found to be the bare essentials for jumping right into animating.

We can zoom in and out of our canvas with the magnifier glass to the right of the screen. And we can use the hand to reposition our view. You can also zoom in and out using the scroll wheel on your mouse.

If your camera view gets all crazy, push 0 on your number pad and you’ll be brought back to the canvas view.

On the top left we can see that we’re in Draw mode. Under Draw Mode there’s a Pencil Icon. Click on this and you’ll be able to select different brush types

We can tweak the brush parameters to our liking. Adjust the Radius for the line size.

The strength affects the pressure sensitivity of the brush. I usually keep the strength all the way up for clean line work so that there’s no changes in opacity. But reducing the strength for rough animation, background art, texturing, and shading can help get natural gradations in tone.

On this Icon that says Solid Stroke we can change what kinds of strokes the brush does, like square strokes which could be used for texturing, or solid fill which completely colors in whatever shape you draw. You can also pick these from the materials section.

We can change the colors of our brush by going to the Toolbar, go to Color, and click Color Attributes. Here we can pick any color we’d like our line art to be.

On this little squiggly green icon called Data, we’ll find our layers.

This works just like any other art program where you have layers stacked on layers, and whatever layer is on top will show first. For example, the line art layer would be on top and the layer for filling in flat colors below.

COLORING

After you’ve drawn your line art, you can color it in using the Paint Bucket tool. Select the Paint Bucket from the Tool bar.

Go to the squiggly Green Line on the Data section and select your fills layer.

Click on the Materials tab. Select the Material for Solid Fill.

Now when you click inside the line work, the entire section should be filled in as long as you don’t have gaps in the line work.

Transform and Resizing

To do things like scaling or resizing the drawing, go to Object mode.

In Object mode click your drawing. Now with your drawing selected, click S for scale to resize.

The cool thing about these vector drawings is that no matter how large you scale the image, the line quality is never reduced or blurry.

If you just want to scale something horizontally, click S then X. To scale something only vertically, click S then Z.

To Rotate, select your object then press R.

To move the drawing around, select your object and press G for grab.

We can click TAB to go back into Draw Mode.

To add new layers that you can manipulate individually, go to Add in Object mode and select Grease Pencil

By adding new Grease Pencil objects, you can keep multiple layers separated if you want to add camera movement or parralax scrolling to individual elements.

You can select the desired layer in Object mode, and move it around. Use the transform tool on the key frames, and the object will move to these locations when you hit play.

Press N to bring up transform options. Press G to grab your object and move it where you want, or enter the numbers in the transform box.

Press I to create a key frame of this location on the frame you’re on in the timeline.

Now the object will move from from one key frame to the next. And you can adjust how long or fast the motion happens by moving the keyframes closer or further apart on the timeline.

Animating

We’ve successfully made lines appear on the screen, which is pretty cool. But how do we animate?

Down here we have the Timeline. This is where animation frames will be shown in sequential order from left to right, as well as layers, shown from top to bottom on the left hand side.. In Grease Pencil and the Dopesheet option, we will see the frames in the timeline a depicted as these little diamond shapes.

To the right of your animation Player bar, you have your start and end frames. You can adjust this to any number to play these frames. This can be helpful if you only want to see a small section playing as loop. When you export, blender will only export from the start and ending frames you enter.

Select this little circle to turn on “Auto Keying”.

The Auto Key ensures that each time we draw a new frame, the canvas will be blank. If auto keying is turned off, then the new frame will retain whatever we drew on the previous frame. Use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move to the next or previous frame, and press the space bar to play.

Over on the Data section, we have a part that shows Onion Skinning. You can adjust the opacity of the frames here for inbetweening. You can also increase or decrease the number of frames you see on screen.

And you can change the colors you’d like the before and after frames to be in.

Modifiers & Effects

This little wrench is the the modifier section.

Modifiers can be used to alter how your art looks and behaves.

I’m interested in the Noise Modifier, which creates an animated line boil effect. In TVPaint, I would have to animate 3 to 5 frames to get a boil effect, but with the Noise modifier, you can get a line boil automatically

The Noise modifier can be really wonky and intense. You can adjust the intensity with the Position. I find that a Position setting somewhere between 0.10 and 0.15 looks nice.

The Thickness changes the variation of line width, and the Noise Scale changes how wiggly the lines look.

You’ll notice that the effect is applied to all layers. If you want to apply the modifier to only one layer, go down to the Influence tab inside the modifier.

Inside the Influence tab, you can apply the modifier to only one Layer or Material.

This concludes the introduction for the basics of animating frame-by-frame in Blender Grease Pencil!

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