How to make pixel art sprites and animations on Windows, offline

Start with Paint (built into Windows)

Paint is a fine place to learn the basics.

1. Open Paint and choose Resize (Ctrl+W). Untick Maintain aspect ratio, pick Pixels, and set a small canvas such as 32 x 32.
2. Zoom to 800% or more (Ctrl + mouse wheel).
3. Turn on gridlines: View > Show > Gridlines (older Paint: View > Gridlines).
4. Use the Pencil at 1 px. Don't use the brushes, because they blur the edges.
5. Pick 4 to 8 colors and stick to them. Use Edit colors to enter exact values and keep them consistent.
6. Save as PNG. JPG smears pixel edges.
7. To show it bigger, resize by an exact multiple (200%, 400%) so every pixel stays square.

Where Paint stops: it has no layers worth relying on for sprites, no frames, no onion skin, no palette files and no sprite-sheet export. As soon as you want a walk cycle or a tile set, you're copying files around by hand.

What a real pixel-art editor adds

• Pixel-perfect pencil that removes the stray "L-corners" on diagonal lines.
• Indexed palettes so a color change updates every pixel that uses it.
• Timeline with frames and layers, plus onion skinning, which shows the previous and next frames faintly behind the one you're drawing. That's how animators keep motion smooth.
• Tile modes so you can see a tile repeat while you draw it.
• Export built for games: PNG, animated GIF and sprite sheets with JSON that list each frame's position, so a game engine can slice them.

A five-minute workflow for a 4-frame idle animation

1. Make a 32 x 32 canvas and draw frame 1.
2. Add frame 2 and turn on onion skin. Shift only what moves, such as 1 pixel of squash.
3. Repeat for frames 3 and 4, then play it back at about 6 to 8 fps.
4. Export a GIF to share and a sprite sheet + JSON for your game.

Doing it with Solace Pixel

Disclosure: Solace Pixel is our product. SolaceSoftware makes and sells it.

Solace Pixel is a full pixel-art and animation editor for Windows. Here's what we verified in our Oct 10 trial:

• Animation timeline with onion skinning. A 4-frame animated PNG opened as 4 timeline frames at the right speed. Adding frames and the onion-skin toggle both worked.
• Game-ready export. The 4-frame animation exported to a looping GIF and to a sprite sheet with a JSON file. We used the built-in command line, which can batch-export projects. Add --quit so it exits when done.
• Palettes. A 32-color palette loads by default, and clicking a swatch sets the color.
• Fully offline in our test: zero network connections across seven launches. There's no telemetry, account or update check. It only goes online when you ask, for example to import a palette.

Per the product page it also has pixel-perfect drawing tools, mirror symmetry, custom brushes, indexed colour mode, tilemaps and tiled drawing, and non-destructive layer effects (outline, drop shadow, gradient map). It opens PNG, PXO, Aseprite (.ase/.aseprite), Photoshop (.psd) and Krita (.kra) files, and exports PNG, sprite sheets + JSON, GIF and APNG.

Not tested yet: drawing on the canvas by hand (our automated trial can't move a real mouse) and the GUI export dialog. Try a few strokes in your first minute. If it can't start, the 14-day refund in the purchase terms covers you.

Before you buy: You need Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit, with a graphics driver that supports OpenGL 3.3 (almost every PC from the last 10 years). It's a ZIP of about 41 MB with no installer or admin rights. Keep SolacePixel.exe, SolacePixel.pck and the solace_pixel_data folder together. It's unsigned, so on first launch click More info > Run anyway, then check the ZIP against the SHA-256 on the product page.

Price: $18.39 once, with 12 months of best-effort email support. No subscription.

Which route?

• Learning, single images: Paint with gridlines and a 1 px pencil.
• Sprites, animation, tiles for a game: a dedicated editor with a timeline, onion skin and sprite-sheet export.

Get Solace Pixel, $18.39 once. Questions before you buy: solacesoftware@smilingface.cloud.