What you can do
This is a small pixel art editor that runs in your browser. Draw with the pencil one pixel at a time, fill areas, draw lines, boxes and circles, and pick colours from the drawing. Mirror drawing copies every stroke to the other side, which helps with characters and symmetrical items. Clean lines removes the extra corner pixels a quick stroke leaves, so outlines stay one pixel thin. Dither paints a checker pattern for shading and soft gradients. Shade makes pixels one step lighter or darker along the palette, which is a quick way to add light and shadow without picking new colours.
Layers and selections
Keep the outline, the colours and the shading on separate layers. Hide a layer, lower its opacity to sketch under the final lines, move it up or down, or merge it into the layer below. Select pixels with a box, a lasso or the magic wand, then move them with the mouse or the arrow keys, copy and paste them, delete them or crop the canvas to them. Pictures copied in other apps paste in too.
Palettes
Start with a palette made for small sprites: Sweetie 16, PICO-8, Endesga 32, four Game Boy greens, an NES-like set or plain greys. Edit any colour with the colour box, keep your own set under My colours, or list the colours already used in the drawing. Import a palette file from Lospec or another editor (.hex, .gpl, .pal or .txt), or a picture, and every colour in it lands in My colours. Save any palette as a .hex file. Working with few colours keeps sprites readable and makes them look like they belong together.
Animation
Add frames, copy a frame and change it a little, and watch the loop play beside the canvas. Onion skin shows the frame before in faint red so you can see how far each part moves. Export the frames as one sprite sheet with a JSON file, as separate PNG files in a ZIP (with one strip per layer when you use layers), or as an animated GIF to share.
Practise pixel art
There are 37 lessons. Easy ones are small items such as a heart, a coin, a key and a gem. Medium ones are 12 to 16 pixels across: a sword, a slime, a tree, a chest, a cat and more. Skills lessons each practise one technique: shading a ball from light to dark, a brick tile that repeats without seams, and a dithered sky. The 24, 32 and 48 pixel lessons are harder: weapons, potions, monsters and characters with up to 32 colours, made with our item, monster and character generators. The sprite shows faintly under your canvas so you can trace it, or you can turn that off and copy it from the picture beside the canvas. Press Check to see how many pixels match, and Show mistakes to mark the ones that are off. Each lesson has one tip, such as where to put the outline and which side the light comes from.
Fixing AI pixel art
Pixel art from image models is usually not on a real grid: the pixels have different sizes, the edges are blurry and there are thousands of colours. When you open a picture like that, the editor offers to send it to the AI Pixel Art Fixer first, which finds the hidden grid and rebuilds every pixel at its real size. Its Fix the rest by hand button brings the result back here. Then use Clean up: Snap to palette moves every colour to the closest one in your palette, Reduce to merges similar colours down to the number you choose, and Remove stray pixels clears lone specks and one-pixel holes. Details in a clearly different colour, such as an eye, stay as they are.
Opening and sending your art
Open a PNG to keep working on a sprite from another tool or from your game. A strip of square frames can open as an animation, one frame each. Other images larger than 256 pixels are shrunk to fit. Tile preview shows copies around the canvas so you can check that a ground or wall tile repeats without seams. Load a reference picture to draw over it at the opacity you like. Animate it in Character Rigging sends the current frame to the rigging tool, where you can add bones and make it walk.
Sharing
Share GIF makes a 480×360 GIF of your drawing or animation, ready for a social post. Copy a link packs the drawing itself into the link, so the person who opens it sees it here and can keep editing. Nothing is uploaded. Links work for drawings up to 64×64 pixels with up to 62 colours.
Is my art mine?
Yes. What you draw is yours to use in free and commercial games. Nothing is uploaded: the editor runs on your computer, and your drawing is kept in this browser until you start a new one.