Software with Custom Brushes

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.

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.

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.

A multi-purpose image editor designed as a free replacement for Photoshop. It can be configured for pixel art with the pencil tool, indexed mode and nearest neighbour scaling.

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.

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

Pro Motion NG is inspired by Amiga Deluxe Paint and used in commercial game studios. It has a detached-window interface, deep palette and tile tools, and an animation workflow tuned for sprite production.

Resprite is a pixel art and animation editor for iOS, Android, Windows and macOS, built around a touch interface without losing the tools a desktop editor has: pixel-perfect lines, alpha lock, dithering patterns, custom brushes, gradients and symmetry. It imports and exports GIF, sprite sheets, PSD and APNG.