Software with Sprite Sheet Export

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.

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

picoCAD 2 lets you make small low-poly models out of a handful of shapes and texture them with a single 128x128 texture sheet in a deliberately constrained toolset. Textures can be painted live in the program using a basic pixel art editor.

It also allows you to create simple animations and can be used to make larger and more complex models than the original picoCAD.

You can export renders, models and sprite sheets directly from it.

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.

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.

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.

Core Editing & Selection Tools

Drawing Tools: Includes Brush, Eraser, Flood-fill, Gradient, Line, Rectangle, Ellipse, and Pipette.

Pixel-Perfect Algorithm: Applies to drawing tools to ensure single-pixel-wide lines without unwanted extra pixels.

Selection: Supports copying, cutting, moving, pasting, rotating, and flipping selected image sections.

Layers: Supports layer management for organizing artwork elements.

Animation & Reference

Frame-by-Frame Animation: Includes dedicated tools for creating frame-based animations.

Onion Skinning: Displays overlay previews of preceding frames relative to the active frame.

Reference Images: Loads gallery images onto the canvas for comparison while drawing.

Color Palettes

Preset Palettes: Includes built-in palettes based on hardware profiles like Atari 2600, NES, and Game Boy.

Custom & Imported Palettes: Supports custom color palettes as well as importing palettes from Lospec.

Import, Export & Compatibility

File Import: Opens Aseprite project files (.ase, .aseprite) alongside standard raster formats (.png, .jpeg, .gif).

Export & Upscaling: Exports animations and images to formats including MP4 video, standard raster formats, or local storage/social sharing, with upscaling options to prevent interpolation blur on standard displays.

Kenney Shape builds chunky 2.5D icons and sprites by stacking flat shapes and giving them depth, rather than by modelling in 3D. It is a fast way to get a consistent set of game icons, and exports both flat images and models.

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.

rx is a pixel art editor for people who live in a terminal. It is modal in the way vi is - keys are commands, not tools on a palette - and everything is configurable from a text file. It handles layers, animation strips and palettes, and exports sprite sheets.

Juice FX takes a sprite and generates effects such as shaking, flashing, outlines, dissolves and bounces as animated sprite sheets.

A particle editor that renders effects with pixel art constraints: fire, smoke, explosions and magic, exported as animated sprite sheets.

•     3D low poly models (.GLB)
•     Normal maps & roughness maps for said low poly models
•     Voxel models (.VOX)
•     Spritesheets
•     (Doom II, Diablo 2, Advance Wars, RPG Maker, UI Icons, Red Alert 2)
•     Turntable animated spinning .GIF
•     and more.

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.