Software with Gif Export

Flipnote Studio 3D allows users to create short animated sketches known as Flipnotes. Flipnotes can be made up of hundreds of frames, and can be played back at a variety of speeds. The software offers users the option to create 3D Flipnotes by drawing different parts of the animation on up to three layers. The main tools include a pen, an eraser, and a paintbrush. New to Flipnote Studio 3D are tools that draw shapes, fill enclosed areas (paint bucket), and insert text. The application features a limited color palette, including black, white, red, blue, green, and yellow. This is a slight improvement upon Flipnote Studio, which did not include yellow and green as selectable colors, but were still possible using color mixing. The selection tool is used to copy and manipulate parts of a frame. Users can also use the 3DS system's camera and microphone to add audio and photos to their creations. These animations can be shared by exporting them as GIF or AVI files.

The program is now discontinued and can only be used on a 3DS that already have it installed or a modded 3DS.

The image is resampled to an internal grid from 32 to 512 px, with optional color reduction to the Game Boy, NES or PICO-8 palettes, adjustable dithering, posterization, contrast, saturation and black crush. Extra effects include chromatic aberration, scanlines, grain and a wobble effect that exports a 4-frame looping GIF. Export at native size, x2, x4 or 1080p with nearest-neighbor scaling.

Images are processed locally in the browser and never uploaded. No account or install required. Interface in English and Italian. Built by a solo developer while making pixel art for his own game, as a quick way to test how a palette looks on a reference image. Bug reports and feedback are welcome.

The pixel art editor

Gribble is a pixel art and animation editor that runs in the browser (gribble.app) or as an Android or iPhone app. One account syncs projects between all devices.

Website: gribble.app
Android: Play Store
iOS: App Store

Layers with opacity and 15 blend modes. Frame-by-frame animation with onion skin, frame tags and playback.

Every stroke is recorded, so a finished artwork can be exported as a timelapse.

The community features includes a global gallery with museum frames, a profile page, followers, likes and achievements.

Tools

Brushes, eraser, bucket, dither gradient, color picker, global color picker, ellipse tool, square tool, line tool, square select, lasso select, magic wand, dither, shading, outline, gradient, symmetry, smudge.

Features

Autosave, cloud-storage, timelapse, image/GIF imports, image/video/GIF/code/spritesheet exports, unique 9-patch mode and export, palette lock, alpha lock, themes, pixel perfect, 512x512 grids, palettes, gribble files (.grbl), artwork forking.

Features include layers, frame-by-frame animation, onion skinning, indexed colour, custom palettes, selections and PNG export. The free version supports canvases up to 128 × 128 pixels, three layers and six animation frames.

An optional Pro upgrade increases these limits and adds workflows including editable Aseprite import and export, sprite sheets, animated GIF and WebP export, seamless tiled drawing, symmetry and dithering.

Its standout feature is built-in isometric tools: a 2:1 iso grid, pixel-clean lines that snap to iso angles, shapes that sit on walls and floors, and shaded cubes and cylinders drawn in a single drag.

It also has everything you’d expect for sprites and animation: a frame timeline with onion skin, per-frame timing and animation tags; pixel-perfect pencil, dither brush and dither gradient, symmetry and live outline; RotSprite rotation and free transform; custom brushes and shareable brush packs; a built-in pixel font creator with a Text tool; .hex palette import (works great with Lospec palettes); and export to PNG at any scale, sprite sheets with Aseprite-format JSON, and transparent animated GIFs.

One-off purchase on the Microsoft Store, with a free 30-day trial.

Simple Pixel Art Editor is a free pixel art editor that runs in the browser, with no install or account needed. It covers sprite drawing with layers, mirror drawing and selections, frame-by-frame animation with onion skin and frame tags, and exports to PNG, GIF and sprite sheets.

It also includes tools for game assets: a tileset editor that generates Wang-16 and blob-47 auto-tile terrains from a base tile and exports Godot 4 TileSet (.tres) and Tiled (.tsx) files, a tilemap painter with an isometric mode, a palette library and an image-to-pixel-art converter.

It suits beginners and hobbyists making sprites and tilesets for small 2D games. The source code is MIT-licensed.

Draw 

Pencil with Clean Stroke for crisp 1-pixel lines, brush, spray, fill and symmetry. The shading tool walks through your colour ramp, with a soft gradient from the centre or from one side. Turn any selection into a custom brush and save your favourites for every project. Tiled mode shows your image repeated around itself, so seamless patterns line up as you paint.

Colour

Load palettes straight from Lospec (.hex, .gpl, .pal or the PNG) and save your own. Replace a colour across a frame, a layer or the whole sprite. Reduce a photo to a palette, and add light and drop shadows on their own layer that you can change at any time.

Animate

A layer × frame timeline with tags, onion skin and linked cels. Play your animation right on the canvas.

For games

Tilemap layers: paint a tile once and it changes everywhere it's used. Export PNG, GIF, spritesheets with a JSON atlas, Godot 4 scenes, or code.

spritebit gets new features regularly and listens to feedback. The desktop app tells you when an update is ready and installs it with one click. It's open source (MIT), and what you draw is yours.

Available in English and German.