... wtih a huuuge cherry cake:

And a small present for you all, my experiences with a tiny and lovely piece of software: a warm welcome to Pencil... [...] I wrote this introduction to a kind of tutorial I wanted to write. This was before I tested the possibilities of the software in detail. Weeell. No. I'm not going to share my pencil experiences because they were very, very, very annoying. My friend Nils introduced me to this little piece of software and it works fine with his Linux system. He played around a bit and had nice results within short time and I wanted to do this, too.

Okay, I do share them.

It seems as it wouldn't run properly on my Mac system. It crashed for the first time when I had six vector layers and while using the filling bucket, which - following their documentation - is not the best yet. From that moment, it felt like crashing about 100 times, I guess... No, really, it was very often. And although I saved the file after every change I did, it somehow lost my modifications. But I would be really glad if the developers'll go further. The current release is version 0.4.4b, so I think that's an acceptable excuse... But I was so much looking forward to use it... Disappointment can hurt so badly... This wasn't great fun and that's why I had to bake my blog's birthday cake with Flash. And no, there is no dynamite in the cake.... It's just badly animated...

Here is a screenshot I did when it was working with Pencil. (Click on the small image to get a larger view.)

It's too cool to keep it away from you. The basic idea is to have a simple animation software which contains a light table, paper and pencil. You can use the tools in bitmap and vector layers and the whole programme is like a classical and simple 2D environment: drawing, inking, animating with keys. I love the idea of taking my pen tablet and just start playing. It's amazingly sensitive to my Wacom Graphire. I loved that part most... Have a look at their gallery website to see what is possible if it runs somehow stable...

Einfachanimation got one year old today. What has happened? It's a bit of a rhetorical question because you all have read it. But there were some funny things which happened you don't know, like this guy who sent me his CV and his portfolio asking for a job. I didn't know if I should feel honoured but it was a weird feeling... I must seem to be a real professional now. And that's extremely cool. Hopefully, I'm going to be one after my oncoming final exams... That would be great.

My dear friends and all you strangers out there, keep on reading! I will keep writing because I really enjoy sharing my experiences. On the other hand there are so many nice "behind the scenes" things happening since I've started to write this blog: getting in touch with animators from all over the world, making new friends sometimes, bumping into really funny situations, finding penis enlargement comments on my blog (somebody must think the blog could be important...) ... It's like life itself, isn't it?

And yes, you are all allowed and invited to send me animation birthday presents, but no dynamite cakes, please!