

We’ve divided this guide into three sections, depending on what kind of pixel art project you’re working on. While plenty of people have used the venerable Microsoft Paint to create high-quality pixel art, there are also a number of open source and commercial tools that offer more advanced features to expedite and guide the process. Pixel Art Basicsīefore we get into the tools themselves, we should take a brief tour of what makes pixel art and what tools the digital artist uses to make it. That difference in philosophies means these image editing programs require a very different set of tools.
#Pyxel edit line tool software#
In contrast to high-powered image editing software like Photoshop or GIMP, the goal of these tools isn’t to doctor photographs or create realistic collages of images, but rather to create the most basic and obviously computer-derived art possible. The pixel art revival has brought with it a number of tools specifically designed to recreate the aesthetic. Pixel art’s influence is everywhere, visible in mega-popular games like Minecraft and celebrated in the Style section of the New York Times and the Museum of Modern Art, not to mention the official currency of Norway. That two-dimensional, deliberately low-res style associated with 8- and 16-bit video games has found a second life among retro enthusiasts, independent game developers, and graphic designers trying to capture the spirit of the early days of gaming. Here is the resulting pyxel document: old is new again, and such is the case with pixel art. When done you can export the mockup as an image, or export the tileset and the tilemap and import it into your game. The background is on a separate layer below the tiles. I went ahead and made tiles for the vertical faces and some transition tiles.

I'm erasing some pixels to make a nice edge tile.

This tutorial will show you the basic process of making a tileset using Pyxel edit.
