Pixel Art Animation Tools

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.