Pixel Art Editors

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.

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.

LBIT is Extremely Lightweight

• a single 3.3 MB exe file
• uses ~2400KB of ram
• starts in 200 miliseconds

LBIT is Extremely Minimal

• No text or menus
• No buttons or windows
• Controlled with mouse / hotkeys
• No duplicated tools

LBIT Simplifies Pixelling

• no saving (instant autosave)
• no canvas sizes (infinite canvas)
• infinite history (undo all the way to the beginning)
• easy export of current selection / zoom level

LBIT has Cool Features

• tweak a color everywhere on the canvas live
• generate a gif of your entire piece from start to finish
• comprehensive mouse/keyboard shortcuts / combinations
• control the cursor with keyboard arrow keys

LBIT is Smooth

• - smooth transitions between zoom levels
• - drawing strokes optimized for smooth lines even at high resolutions
• - simple / clean cursors and background grid

But why? 

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.