Help with Selection! Please!

I am a new animator and I was working on a new project when an issue came up: Is there a way to select and then resize the selection? Thanks! CartoonUtopia.

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@cartoonutopia Hi Nick, welcome to the forum. To give you a short answer: yes there is.

  1. You have to use the Marquee Selection tool from left to right to create a box selection over the area you want
  2. Then change to the Move Tool (Black Arrow) and pick one of the four corners to resize your selection.
  3. Click outside the selection to finish the operation

Note: If you press Ctrl + Z while having the marquee selection ON, drawing transformation will undo, but you will retain the marquee so you can attempt to resize again.

Also note that currently there is no “proportional contraint” transformation so you’ll have to resize by hand if you want to preserve the proportions of your image, so be careful.

To counter this meanwhile there’s something else you can do. If you have a different free bitmap editing program like Krita (http://krita.org) open at the same time you can:

  1. Create a selection on Pencil over the area you want to transform
  2. Copy the contents of your selection with CTRL + C or APPLE + C on MAC
  3. Paste it on Krita and resize it there properly
  4. Afterwards select the portion you need and paste it back into Pencil, without having to export between software.
  5. Move accordingly.

You can paste things inside the marquee tool, which will try to fit it inside the marquee, or allow for Pencil to “calculate” the relative position if you don’t have the marquee selection active.

If you require more help let us know. For now we have to propose for the transform tool to have proper behaviour but this is not an easy task so I don’t know how much time it will take before we can have all the “expected functionality” it should.