Animation does not really require a set of sophisticated materials. A simple sketchpad and few sheets of paper can already jump start your animation drawing experiments. Below are tools and equipment used by professional animators.

PENCILS

Speaking of 2B pencils, it's always good to have a set of drawing pencils around. For animation work, usually a regular wooden pencil is best. Eberhard Faber set is good, but Sanford and Tombow also make some good collections of pencils in various lead hardness’s.
When you're retracing animation, 2B is usually the best hardness to use; it's soft enough to have enough give for a varied line, but hard enough to make good dark, clean lines.

Blue Pencils

Soft blue pencils help you get a feeling of movement as you draw, that is why they are more ideal for ‘roughing out’. Local art shops usually stock both the ordinary pale blue pencil-crayon and the special designer’s non-reprographic blue pencils.

Black Pencils

After roughing out, you will now need a black pencil to ‘clean it up’. Lead varies in different ways but an HB is most preferable. You can also try a B in the same range if HBs do not work for you. Black lead pencils designed for animation are not really necessary.

Clutch pencil

This pencil saves you time as it does not require sharpening and it produces a clean, even line required for computerized animation. The drawback is that one must first master the technique of using this type. An HB or B grade with a 0.5 lead is the most suitable

PAPER

Drawing Pad

Sketch artist's drawing pad is where you draw up what you wish to animate in rough form (clean-up comes later)
Remember that an opaque paper is not ideal for the animation process. You will need to work on several layers of drawings at a time and a lay out pad will aid you through it. Start at the back and work you way forward, laying one drawing over the other and developing them as you go.

Animation paper

One second of animation will take you anywhere from 30 to 100 sheets of paper, allowing for duplicates for retracing and for mistakes, so you'll need quite a bit of paper. 20-lb copy paper is heavy enough to make a good copy, but light enough that you can see through several layers of it with a light table on beneath it.
This is denser than layout paper and rather more durable because it gets more handling. The most widely used size is the ’12 field’, which is approximately 266 x 330. It is made for use on a light box.Acetate or cel is translucent enough for you to check the essentials of the next drawing through the top sheet.
*Tracing paper is not suitable for animation because it is transparent and is flimsy.

PAPER AND CEL PUNCH

For an animation to be registered, each punched piece of paper or cel must be placed on standardized registration pegs so it does not move in relation to the other sheets. If you do not use ready-punched animation paper and cel, you need to have a peg-hole punch for registration.
For professionals, however, there are two standard systems existing. Each of it consists of a round hole in the middle of the animation paper or cel. Two long holes are also placed on either side to steer clear of any movement of the paper.
Beginners and amateur filmmakers may construct a system using an ordinary office hole punch, which can be bought from office supply stores.

OTHER ITEMS

Pencil Sharpener

A pencil sharpener (also referred to as pencil parer) is a device for sharpening a pencil's point by shaving one end. Pencil sharpeners exist in both electric and hand-powered forms.
Having an electric sharpener would be of great advantage specially if you do a lot of drawing

Eraser

While animating you're going to make mistakes and for that you'll need an eraser. Art gum erasers are far superior to your standard erasers because they rub out lead cleanly without eroding away the actual paper surface or leaving behind smudges from either past lead rub-offs or the eraser itself.

Color Pencils, Watercolors, Markers, and Pastels

For a bit more manual work, there are color pencils, pastels, watercolors, and markers; these are used for creating backgrounds. Backgrounds are done on the same size paper as your animation, and static backgrounds for a single motion sequence only have to be drawn once so that you can lay transparencies over them.

Masking Tape

Masking tape is a type of adhesive tape made with an easy-to-tear backing (usually paper) and a removable pressure sensitive adhesive. It is used mainly in painting, to mask off areas that should not be painted. The adhesive is the key element to its usefulness, as it allows the tape to be easily removed without leaving residue or damaging the surface to which it is applied. The tape is available in several strengths, rated on a 1–100 scale based on the strength of the adhesive.
In animation this is used to tape down your paper or peg-bar.

Ruler

Metal ones are more preferable over woods and plastics which usually produce ‘chewed’ results and incomprehensible gradations.

Mirror

"An animator is an actor with a pencil", goes the oldest and truest animation cliché. Not "a draftsman that acts", but first and foremost - an actor. If you're trying to tell a story through a character, inevitably you're an actor. The only question is whether you are a good actor or a bad one. While you are acting, you can see in the mirror the expressions and transfer it to your animation characters. It can be of great help if you want to make characters ‘speak’. Animators usually make faces in front of a mirror to encapsulate subtle expressions and movements.

Graticule

A graticule is often mistakenly called a "field guide" by professionals and amateurs alike (and certainly a graticule has a field guide printed on it), but it is itself the plastic sheet laid over a drawing to determine precise layout.

A field size graticule provides a reference guide to the area of the drawing that the camera will pick up. A field size is the chosen area to be covered by the camera in any piece of art. 12 inches and 15 inches are the standard field sizes for animation.

Bar Sheets, Dope Sheets

Bar sheets hold the entire soundtrack information which is then transferred to the dope sheet which contains all of the instructions for the animation and filming. Animators are advised to ensure the compatibility of their dope sheet grid to the editor’s bar sheet grid. For non pro’s you can draw or photocopy a simple dope sheet arrangement to suit your needs.
A dope sheet is a traditional animation tool that allows an animator to organize his thinking and give instructions to the cameraman on how the animation is to be shot. It consists of five sections and is a bit longer, and a bit narrower, than A4. Every eighth line down is marked thicker than the rest and shows half a foot of film. One second of animation would take three of these sections. The dope sheet is also referred to as a camera instruction sheet or an exposure sheet.

Layout

The typical dope sheet is divided into five sections which are separated by many vertical and horizontal lines, the horizontal lines represent one frame of film while the vertical ones separate the sections:

1. The column on the far left is used by the animator to jot down notes on the path of the action and their thoughts about how the action should be visualized.

2. The next column is used to write down any dialog that may be happening in the scene. The sound is split up into its phonetic components and marked down in the frame that it appears in in the film.

3. The central section is split up into six smaller columns, each one representing one level of animation. Animation should never exceed five levels of acetate, any more and it will be too thick to see through. The numbers of the drawings are marked down in the order they are to be shot in while the sixth column is for the background.

4. The final column is for camera instructions, giving information for panning, trucking and field size.

5. Finally, at the top of the dope sheet, the animator writes in the sequence number, page number, scene number and scene name.

Production Folders

Large-scale studio productions find production folders very essential. Dope sheet instructions must be well organized to avoid being muddled up. Outside the folder, you can also include information including title, sequence number, scene number, scene title, footage length, animators’ names, etc. Production folders also come handy as they ease the filing and finding of sheets.

On a small production however, a production folder is not really necessary, especially if the animator is organized enough.

This is merely a unit of closely ranged shelves which is designed to hold in a selection of animation paper, and

cel, production folders, scenes to animate and have been animated and visual reference materials. An average rack measures 20 inches (50.8 cm) wide, 20 inches deeps and stands about 30 inches (72.6 cm)

Cassette Player

The animator must be able to play the soundtrack over and over again to identify the main emphasis points in a dialogue or a music track.

Movie or Video Camera
After all the pencil drawings are done, it is important to test the movement of the full animation. Professional studios have rostrum camera facilities, but for amateur animators, stop-frame-super-8 or 16 mm cameras, as well as the means to project the film when processed are some of the requirements. But if you are really serious in animation and would like to save time in testing, you might want to invest on a single-frame video camera unit.

Your Work Station

Once your tools are ready, you now have to find a quiet space in the house, large enough to accommodate a work top which will cater to your drawing board. You can buy one or build your own. A good desk lamp or an adjustable clip on type will also be highly needed. A chair is another vital part of your work station. Be sure that it can provide comfort and support on your back. You wouldn’t want to get an ‘animator’s hump’.

Peg Bar

This little bar is a plastic strip the length of an 8.5"x11" piece of paper, with three small pegs on it spaced along the same intervals as the holes in a three-hole-punch sheet of paper. You can tape or glue this to the top of your light table, and lay your copy paper over it to hold it securely in place. When you're working on a character animation sometimes it's hard to get your paper to line up again after you've removed it from the light table, so having one of these helps you get everything in its proper place again

If you feel like buying a purpose-made peg-bar, you can get it at your neighborhood art materials shop for a cheap price. Ready-punched animation paper and paper reinforcements for animation pegs are also available but may cost a little expensive. This is because they meet the professional ‘ACME’ specifications for standard peg bar system.

Animation Disc

This revolving glass or Perspex disc, set into a slope, over a light-box is indispensable precision equipment for a professional animator. This disc can be easily rotated to bring the various parts of the drawing closer to the artist as he works. The registration peg-bar is either taped to, or fitted into the disc. The animation disc can also include a pair of sliding peg-bars at the top and bottom, which enable the animator to practice his camera moves and shift his drawings to right or left as necessary.

Light Box

To save you from the expense of buying a light box, you can in fact make one. You will need the following:

• 50 x 100 cm (20 x 40 in) sheet of MDF (medium density fiberboard) or plywood, 15 mm thick for the wooden frame; from the DIY shop
• 30 cm (12 in) cold neon strip light, with fitting, wire flex, switch and plug from an electrical or lighting shop
• Sheet of 6mm (1/4 in) thick opaline Perspex, cut to size; a glass supplier can help you with this and in cutting extra thumbholes for the disc
• Wood-glue, tacks and screws for assembly. Components and Assembly Guidance for Light-Box

1. Cut 4 strips of off-cuts for the inner recessed lip that will support the opaline Perspex. Screw or glue the strips onto the reverse side of the board.
2. Assemble the box leaving the back open for air. Ensure that all joints are glued and screwed.
3. Lastly, stick the peg-bar in position on the opaline Perspex. You can now plug it in and get started. You can also use this set-up to improvise a rotating animation disc. Cut a circle 30 cm (12in) in diameter in the surface board and the Perspex, and another smaller circle out of a piece of MDFor plywood which will be a supporting inner rim, glued firmly to the back of the surface board. For smoother disc movement, run some candle-grease around the inner rim of the light box.

Line Tester Unit

This tool is used in line testing. It consists of the following:

• a camcorder with a single frame capacity
• a couple of adjustable lamps with white 1000kw bulbs
• a sturdy table top where you can tape your pegbar
• a clean sheet of glass slightly larger than the paper to hold the drawing

These materials are also clamped together in rigid support.