Artweaver rawks

Where has Artweaver been all my life?! I've had a monkey with the brushes and was impressed by how different and useful a painting program can be compared to a photo editor. There are lots of shape, fill, cut, transform abilities that seem more intuitive to Photoshop, but the artistic brushes and colour wheel make actually drawing so much easier! So this was the result of a doodle that went so well I thought I should try and colour it too. Not fantastic, but I was being very rough and still learning the tools and brushes so I'm very happy with it!
This was done after a period of concept drawing for an animation I am working on. All I really have is an idea and a deadline at the moment. The Triple J Pixel Freaks competition closes in only a month and I'm going to try if I can see if I can get my idea off the ground. It has to be a 30 second animation which is pretty daunting but I've been looking at a few programs and changed my idea to fit in. AnimeStudio uses a simple skeletal animation system that I think will serve my purposes well enough, however it won't output unless I buy it. The first program I found was Project Dogwaffle, also known as PD Pro. It's free version also has an output phobia. Finally I found MonkeyJam which will output to avi! Also it has the ability to import a soundtrack which is also necessary. Betweeen these 3 programs I could produce an animation in pal standard quality to a soundtrack. However it would have to be frame-by-tedious-frame. This might be achievable if I had a program with an onion-skin animation feature, but that is disabled in Dogwaffle too! It could be done via layers in Photoshop or Artweaver
but I think time constraint is too heavy to attempt that esp. given that I start work in 2 weeks. My current plan is to buy the cheap version of AnimeStudio once I produce enough material that I can be reasonably certain I will succeed in completing my entry.