Animation Desk

Some people like to draw animated cartoon characters, others like creating videos, but for the few who prefer to design video animations, Animation Desk is a good tool to get started. It's simple, welcoming and has some useful features.

When creating a new project, you can appoint a background picture, enter the desired length (number of frames) and tell the app how smooth you want the video to be (frames-per-second). Depending on the specified settings, you can create animations up to 100 seconds long.

Each brush can be customized in opacity and size, and drawing mistakes can be fixed with an undo button which, unlike other graphics editing tools, has no limit to how many steps can be taken. The application can create animations that support both the standard 4:3 and 16:9 screen sizes.

"Onion Skinning" allows you to see adjacent frames overlay for easy drawing, while the powerful frame manager permits duplicating, moving or deleting frames for a smoother experience when dealing with projects that require the same body.

Whether you are a three-year-old or a graphic designer, the program's interface provides useful tools. One example is choosing a picture as a background, or just leaving it blank, or picking which brush to use when drawing. The brush panel is simple, containing the basic pen, pencil, marker and spray-paint brushes in addition to the color-fill and eraser.

Projects are automatically saved and can later be visited for further editing and, in case you create an account on the developer's website, you can use cloud storage for better safekeeping of your projects. To share your projects, the application gives the option of exporting animations in MP4 and GIF formats.

Animation Desk has many of the tools needed by any aspiring cartoonist and can be a good starting point for your first animated shorts. Draw and publish to your heart's content while mastering the art of animation.