Exploring Free Animation/Graphics Resources

Adobe products are great for art and animation, but they can also be pretty hard on our wallets sometimes. I want fellow animators and artists should know that there are great alternatives to these programs - and you don’t have to pay a dime to use any of them!

Krita

Krita is a program I use all the time. It’s an open source graphics editor, which in my experience can do pretty much anything Photoshop can (you can also make pretty good animations with it!) Luckily there’s plenty of official manuals and instruction videos to learn from on the official website and youtube.

Website: https://krita.org/en/

Example of animation done in Krita:

I use this program frequently, and definitely recommend at least trying it out if you're an artist/animator.

FireAlpaca

FireAlpaca is another program I’ve personally used in the past. It’s simple, but you can make nice art and animations with it.

Website: https://firealpaca.com/

Example of animation done in FireAlpaca:

I prefer Krita now, but this program was great for learning how to make simple animations.

Wick

Wick is another open source animation program. Unlike the others, this one is online (you can download your work for later though). Despite this, Wick is a decent alternative to Animate.

Website: https://www.wickeditor.com/#/

A nice video overview of Wick:

I've been playing around with this one, and it looks promising!

OpenToonz

OpenToonz is another interesting free and open source animation program. This one is well-known for being use by famous animation studios like Ghibli.

Website: https://opentoonz.github.io/e/index.html

Animation made with OpenToonz:

This is just a small sample of all the free programs out there. You can find all sorts of alternative software and other resources on the crowdsource website AlternativeTo:

https://alternativeto.net/