So it’s been a week since the trailer for the short film HERO is out. Hero is a 2D animated short film on a 3d environment created completely inside of blender, 2D and 3D animation all together live inside of Blender’s viewport.
Daniel Martinez Lara, who you probably remember because of Alike, has been hard at work on this project full on for about 6 months but It’s a project that was born a long time ago with the grease pencil improvements and the idea of introducing 2D artists to the 3D environment in blender.
If you haven’t seen the Trailer check it out here:
All of what Daniel has done with the grease pencil is really inspiring and I want to be able to help you learn this tools and enjoy using them as I do, though Im not at all a 2D animator, i’ve used the grease pencil for doing quick 2d studies, planning animation with the ease and quickness of 2D in the 3D environment, done animatics for projects, and so on…
So here it is my quick and easy intro to using the grease pencil!
To get started, just hold the D key with your mouse left mouse click or pen’s tip on the viewport and click and drag, Wooot?! your first lines just came out!
If you’re a terrible draftsman as me, you’ll do shit like this… but hey now you can draw in blender so no excuse not to practice!
So we’ll got directly headed towards animation and talk about things along the way like you’ll see these yellow markers in each frame that you make a drawing
It’s that simple to get started, make a drawing, move a frame or two forward (with the arrows) and make more drawings…
And then when you play it 
Aaaaaalright, I lied, didn’t make all those drawings by hand, my skills don’t allow me to be so consistent… so I actually only made one drawing, and then deleted the eyes (hold D and instead of LMB use RMB to delete), redrew them again and <Sculpted> the rest of them to get the squash and stretch.
To do this is very easy, first hold D and E and you’ll get a pie menu, with different tools, the one I most most most use is the “push” one
And then you have to hold E to actually sculpt while holding the tip of your pen or the LMB… if your brush is too small or too big hit F and adjust at will.
Cool huh?, give it a try and show me what you can do!
And when it’s at a more ready state… like merged into 2.8 at least I’ll go through it and help you get on to it step by step!
Also, let me know what you think, and what you’d like to learn to do with the grease pencil!
Happy animating!
The Adventures of LollypopMan 