Grease Pencil in Blender: 2D drawing and animation in 3D

Grease Pencil lets you draw directly in a 3D scene, then animate those drawings frame by frame, as on paper. This is what makes Blender a 2D animation tool as well as 3D software. This guide covers creating an object, drawing, layers, animation and rendering, in the current version of the tool.

What is Grease Pencil?

Grease Pencil is a Blender object, just like a mesh or a camera. It takes what you draw with a mouse or a pressure-sensitive stylus and places it in 3D space as points joined into strokes. Each point stores its position, thickness, opacity and weight; the stroke you see in the render comes from these points and from the Grease Pencil material assigned to it.

The manual lists its uses: traditional 2D animation, cut-out animation, motion graphics, storyboarding. Since the drawing lives in the scene, you can mix it with 3D objects, light it, and give it modifiers and visual effects.

What changed with Blender 4.3

Grease Pencil was rewritten for Blender 4.3, to lift long-standing limitations and improve performance. The rewrite first aimed to restore the features of version 4.2, but it brought new ones: layer groups, brushes handled as assets, and a choice of unit for the brush radius, relative to the view (in pixels) or to the scene (in metres by default). Older tutorials remain useful for the principles, but some menus have moved or been renamed.

Getting started: blank object or 2D Animation template

• In an existing scene: in Object Mode, Add > Grease Pencil > Blank. Create a keyframe or turn on automatic keyframe insertion (Auto Key), switch to Draw Mode and draw in the 3D Viewport.
• For a 2D project: File > New > 2D Animation. The template opens the 2D Animation workspace, sets the world background to white, sets colour management to the Standard view transform and the drawing plane to the front view (X-Z), prepares Line and Fill layers with stroke materials, and automatically creates a keyframe when you draw on an empty frame.

The manual points it out: drawing in Draw Mode requires a keyframe on the object's timeline. It is the first surprise for beginners. With no keyframe on the current frame and no Auto Key, the new stroke is added to the active keyframe, which may be several frames earlier.

Drawing: modes, layers and materials

A Grease Pencil object is worked on in several modes, like a mesh: Draw to draw strokes, Edit to modify points, Sculpt to reshape strokes, Weight Paint and Vertex Paint to paint weights and colours.

Layers are managed in the Object Data tab, Layers panel. Each stroke belongs to a single layer, and a new stroke always goes into the active layer. Each layer corresponds to a channel of the Dope Sheet in Grease Pencil mode. A layer can mask others, and layers can be sorted into groups since version 4.3. A useful habit, taken from the 2D Animation template: one layer for the line, another for the fills.

Materials are assigned stroke by stroke. Each Grease Pencil material has two components, Stroke for the line and Fill for the filled area, and the active material is used for new strokes.

Frame-by-frame animation

Traditional animation relies on keyframes that hold the strokes of one frame or of a range of frames. With Auto Key turned on, each stroke drawn on a frame without a keyframe creates one on the active layer.

• Insert Blank Keyframe (Shift+I) adds an empty keyframe on the active layer, so you can draw the next pose on a blank sheet.
• Duplicate Active Keyframe copies the strokes of the last keyframe onto the current frame, so you only retouch what moves.
• Delete Active Keyframe (Alt+I) deletes the current keyframe.

Onion skinning shows the previous and next drawings as see-through overlays. Its main switch is in the Overlays of the 3D Viewport, but it is turned on layer by layer. It offers three modes (Keyframes, Frames or Selected), an opacity setting, different colours before and after, and the Show Start Frame option, which shows the first frame as a ghost over the last one: useful for a looping animation.

Interpolating between two drawings

The Interpolate tool, in the Draw Mode toolbar, creates an in-between drawing from the previous keyframe and the next one. Place the playhead between two keyframes, then click and drag from left to right in the 3D Viewport to choose the interpolation factor: Blender adds a breakdown keyframe with the intermediate shape. The result is clean between two similar drawings; between two very different drawings, it needs touching up.

Line Art: strokes from 3D objects

The Line Art modifier generates Grease Pencil strokes from the whole scene, a collection or an object (meshes, text, curves, surfaces). Strokes are only generated on the parts visible from the active camera, which is therefore required. You choose the target layer and material, the radius and opacity of the strokes, and the types of edges to detect.

It is a common way of giving a 3D scene a drawn outline, alongside a stylised material: see the guide cel shading in Blender. Each Line Art modifier runs its own occlusion calculation, and several modifiers on a large scene slow down evaluation. The Use Cache option reuses the data of the first Line Art modifier in the stack.

Rendering a Grease Pencil animation

Grease Pencil renders with EEVEE as well as with Cycles. In Cycles, the Render > Grease Pencil panel sets stroke anti-aliasing (SMAA threshold, SSAA samples) and the number of motion blur steps for Grease Pencil objects, with 0 turning that blur off. More SSAA samples smooth the strokes but lengthen the render.

Visual effects (Blur, Glow, Pixelate, Shadow and others) treat the whole object as an image. The manual presents them as a quick way to preview an effect; for precise control in the final render, it recommends the compositor.

Export a sequence of PNG images rather than a video: the guide on how to render an animation in Blender goes through the output settings. To accentuate a fast movement of a drawn stroke, see also smear frames in Blender.

Common mistakes

• The stroke is added to another drawing: there is no keyframe on the current frame and Auto Key is off. The stroke went into the active keyframe.
• The drawing is on the wrong layer: a new stroke always goes into the active layer. Check the selection in Object Data > Layers.
• The drawing comes out at an angle in the scene: the drawing plane is not the one you expected. The 2D Animation template sets it to the front view (X-Z).
• Colours look dull in the render: the view transform is AgX or Filmic instead of Standard.
• Line Art produces nothing: the scene has no active camera.
• The brush is no longer its usual size since 4.3: check the brush radius unit, View or Scene.