Pixen is a professional pixel art editor designed for working with low-resolution raster art, such as those 8-bit sprites found in old-school video games. Pixen packs all the tools pixel artists need in an intuitive, native interface including support for high zoom levels, animation editing, color palettes, and a lot more.
Take advantage of the flexibility layers provide when working with complex pixel art. Change opacity, blending modes, and more to compose creative effects.
Use filters to adjust colors, create effects, and post-process your artwork.
Leverage Pixen's wide array of tools when composing pixel art: Pencil, Eraser, Brightness, Text, Eyedropper, Zoom, Rectangular Selection, Magic Wand, Lasso, Move, Fill, Line, Rectangle, and Ellipse. You can even assign a different tool to the left and right mouse button. For example: pencil on the left; eraser on the right.
With Pixen, you can add and organize commonly-used colors into palettes. Pixen can even import color palettes in the Adobe Color Table, Microsoft Palette, JASC Palette, and GIMP Palette formats.
Create and arrange image frames in the filmstrip view to piece together animations. Pixen can import animated PNGs and GIFs, and it can export animations as animated GIFs, QuickTime Movies, or even sprite sheets!
Take advantage of Pixen's grid tools to guide you in placing pixels just where you want them.
Define custom patterns to use while drawing with the Pencil, Line, or Eraser tool (instead of a single pixel).
While editing at high zoom levels, use the Preview feature to view the canvas scaled out. You can even play back animations and tile small images when working on patterns.
Pick a flat, striped, or checkered background to be drawn beneath the canvas. You can even set a reference image as a background.
Sync with Pixen for iOS over iCloud.
Pixen supports pressure-sensitive drawing tablets and Force Touch trackpads, mapping pressure to color opacity.
Customize tool hotkeys to ease the transition from other image editors.
Export your artwork in PNG, JPEG, GIF, ICO, BMP, TIFF, RGF, and SVG file formats.
Share your creations quickly and easily via AirDrop, Messages, e-mail, and more!
Work with all your favorite tools in full screen mode.
Pixen is built with native Mac technologies such as Core Animation, Core Image, and AppKit to take full advantage of what macOS has to offer.
★★★★★
Amazing for a new artist, deserves your attention
I just recently got into pixel art. As a software developer I've always wanted to make games but felt lost when it came to creating assets. Pixen takes that fear away. It provides a great workflow when switching between the mobile and desktop versions, and all of the tools you need are just right there.
- App Store review
We hope you enjoy using Pixen on the Mac! Be sure to also check out Pixen for iOS.