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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.
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.
Novaboard runs in the browser and as a desktop app, with layers, animation and effects.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pixel Composer builds effects, animations and generated art from node graphs, so a change to one input flows through the whole result.
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.
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.
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.
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.
BitFontMaker2 is a bitmap font editor that runs in a browser: draw each character on a small grid, set the widths, and download a TrueType file. It has been around a long time and stayed simple, which is why it is still the quickest way to get a pixel font out of an idea.
PixelForge is a font editor built for pixel fonts: draw each glyph on a grid, set the spacing and kerning, and export a TrueType file that installs like any other font. It can also import an existing TTF - if it is genuinely a pixel font it detects the size and loads the glyphs back onto the grid for editing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A standalone program for building isometric and top-down assets by extruding pixel art into 3D.
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.
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