Software with Layers

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.

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.

Goxel is a free voxel editor with layers, a procedural renderer and unlimited scene size, available on every platform.

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.

Monodraw is a Mac editor for pictures made of text: box diagrams, flowcharts, trees and layout sketches that can be pasted straight into source code, a commit message or a README. It draws with real tools - shapes, lines, arrows, text boxes - rather than by typing characters into a grid.

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

Paint.NET is a free image editor for Windows with layers and plugins. It has no dedicated pixel art tools but is a common starting point.

A simple open source editor for the Mac with layers and a clean toolset.

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 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.

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.

PixiEditor is a free editor with multiple document support, layers and palette tools, including browsing the Lospec palette list from inside the app.

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.

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.

Pyxel Edit is a smaller pixel art program focused on tile editing: paint tiles once and every placed copy updates, then export the tileset and tilemap for your engine. It also handles simple animation.