Pixen For Mac

Pixel art has a timeless appeal, and it’s a style that tends to be easy to work with. You can create various types of graphics, characters, or textures with relatively little effort, at least when compared to high-resolution raster art.

Pixen is an app that can take your art to the next level, or at least help you get started. It features simple drawing tools, which are used via a similarly straightforward UI. What’s more, it can be used to create frame-by-frame animations just as easily.

Once you have the canvas in front of you, you can start drawing individual pixels, with mice, trackpads, and graphic tablets supported. The pencil size can be increased for larger elements, and you can even draw patterns.

You’ll find your tools on the left, and you can use separate ones for your left and right click. They’re the standard ones you would expect from a relatively simple drawing tool, and they’re more than enough for pixel art.

Like all serious graphic tools, Pixen allows you to use multiple layers. You can activate and deactivate them freely, change their opacity, and choose which layer should be edited at any given time.

The app adds its own tab in the macOS color picker, where you can save the ones you commonly use and organize them as needed.

After creating your artwork, animating it is simple — just open the Animation menu and create an animation using your image. Then, you can duplicate the image as many times as needed and edit the following frames so that they turn into a smooth animation.

Finally, you can export your work as a sequence of images, a video file, or a sprite sheet. For the latter, you can customize the spacing, padding, and scale.

Made specifically for creating and editing pixel art, Pixen is perfectly suited for the job. It’s as easy to use as any drawing tool I’ve ever tried, and it’s more powerful than its simple interface might suggest at first glance.