Pixel Art Software

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.

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.

Aseprite exposes a Lua API, and the community maintains large collections of scripts for outlines, palette tricks, exporters and more. This page collects the best known collections.

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.

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.

DragonBones was one of the first 2D skeletal animation tools, and for years the free alternative to Spine, with runtimes for the major engines and an export format several of them read directly. Development stopped some years ago, but the editor still runs and the runtimes are still around.

FontStruct builds fonts by snapping shapes together on a grid, which makes it a natural fit for pixel and bitmap lettering. Finished fonts download as TrueType, and the site is also a large public gallery of fonts other people have built, most of which can be opened and taken apart.

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.

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.

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

LDtk is a level editor with auto-tiling rules, entity definitions and a clean JSON format with loaders for most engines.

Laigter builds normal maps and other lighting textures from 2D sprites so they can be lit dynamically in a game engine.

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.

A basic web-based editor made to be simple and intuitive, which can load any palette from the Lospec palette list. It is no longer in development and may contain bugs.

The simple painting program included with Windows XP. Later versions of Paint anti-alias their tools and are not suited to pixel art, so the XP version is the one artists keep around.

Multipaint paints inside the real limits of 8-bit machines. Pick a target - Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, MSX, Amstrad CPC and others - and the canvas enforces that machine's resolution, palette and attribute rules while you draw, so what you see is what the hardware could actually display. It exports in native formats.

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.

A standalone program for building isometric and top-down assets by extruding pixel art into 3D.