Software with Animation

Aseprite is a pixel art editor built around sprite work: an indexed-color workflow, onion skinning and a timeline for animation, tilemap layers, custom brushes, and export straight to sprite sheets. Extensions and Lua scripts add anything it lacks. It is the editor most Lospec artists reach for first.

Krita is intended for digital painting, but its pixel brush presets, indexed color filter and animation timeline make it a capable pixel art tool once configured.

A general purpose image editor that can be set up for pixel art: nearest neighbour scaling, pencil tool, indexed color mode. Animation is awkward, but the flexibility lets you mimic advanced tools such as index painting.

lvllvl is a browser editor for character-based art. It covers PETSCII and a long list of other machines' character sets, with layers, animation frames, custom tilesets and palettes, and it can generate frames from an uploaded image or video. Projects save to the browser, to GitHub or to Google Drive.

Blender is the free 3D suite, and it turns up constantly in low-spec work: modelling and texturing low-poly assets, rendering 3D scenes down to a pixel-art sprite sheet, and building the turnarounds that hand-pixelled animation is traced from. Its add-on ecosystem covers most of the rest.

Blockbench models boxy low-poly meshes with pixel textures painted directly on them, plus animation, and exports to game formats.

Deluxe Paint was the paint program of the Amiga era and the tool a great deal of 1980s and 1990s game art was made in. Its custom brushes, palette cycling and animation features set conventions that pixel art editors still follow, and its keyboard-driven workflow is why so many later programs feel the way they do. It is no longer sold; the versions that survive do so through archives and emulation.

DragonBones was one of the first 2D skeletal animation tools, and for years the free alternative to Spine, with runtimes for the major engines and an export format several of them read directly. Development stopped some years ago, but the editor still runs and the runtimes are still around.

GrafX2 was made for DOS and has been ported everywhere since. It has tools no other program does, constraints for retro platforms, and an antiquated interface.

GraphicsGale has been in use since 2005 and excels at animation, with onion skinning and frame-by-frame preview. It was made freeware in 2017. The interface shows its age but the tools are precise.

LibreSprite continues the last GPL version of Aseprite as a community project. It keeps the familiar layers, animation timeline and palette tools, and adds its own scripting and a browser build.

Hexels paints on hexagonal, triangular and square grids with vector output, sitting between pixel art and vector illustration. It also animates.

Marq's PETSCII Editor is where most Commodore 64 character art gets drawn. It runs in a browser or on the desktop, covers animation and several C64 screen modes, and exports the data in the forms a real C64 program expects.

Novaboard runs in the browser and as a desktop app, with layers, animation and effects.

Piskel is an open source editor that runs in the browser, with layers, animation and a public gallery. Development has stopped, but it still works and is a common first editor.

Pixaki is a full pixel art studio for the iPad, built for drawing with the Apple Pencil rather than a mouse. It has layers, a proper animation timeline with onion skinning, palette tools and tiled preview, and exports sprite sheets, GIFs and layered files.

Pixel Composer builds effects, animations and generated art from node graphs, so a change to one input flows through the whole result.

Pixel Studio is a pixel art editor that runs on desktop, phone and tablet with the same project open on all of them. It covers layers, animation with onion skinning, tilesets and palettes, and reads and writes Aseprite files, which makes it a practical way to keep drawing away from a desk.

PixelOver turns existing artwork, 3D renders and photographs into pixel art, with control over the palette, the dithering and the outline. It can rig and animate what it produces, so a single drawing becomes an animated sprite without pixelling every frame by hand.

Pixelmash takes high-resolution artwork - painted, photographed or rendered - and pixelizes it through a stack of layers whose settings stay editable. Change the output resolution or the palette at any point and everything downstream re-renders, which makes it a way to try pixel sizes rather than commit to one.

Pixelorama is a full featured free editor: layers, animation with onion skinning, tile mode, palettes, and an active development pace. It runs on every desktop platform and in the browser.

Pixen is a pixel art and animation editor built as a proper Mac application, with the same project openable on an iPhone or iPad. It is aimed at low-resolution bitmaps and 8-bit sprites: layers, palettes, an animation timeline and the system features a native app gets, like versions and autosave.

Pixly is a game-oriented pixel art and animation editor for Android, with the gestures worked out for a touchscreen: two fingers to pan and zoom, three to change the brush size. It covers layers, onion-skinned animation, symmetry, real-time tiling and cloud sync. Its own site is still up and still points at Google Play as the only way to get it, but that listing no longer resolves.

Pixquare is a pixel art editor for iPad and iPhone with a deliberately dense feature set: layers, animation, palettes, tiled preview and pressure-aware Apple Pencil drawing. It reads and writes the formats desktop editors use, so a drawing started on a tablet finishes anywhere.