Programs to create images

Hi everyone

Can anybody tell me what program or programs do you use to make the drawings?

Thanks for the help.

I use Photoshop but I’ve also heard good things about aesprite (currently on sale for $15).

Hi Luis!

There are some tools discussed in this thread: Convert color PNGs to 1 bit per pixel? - #3 by matt

Our team uses Aseprite on desktop for most drawing. @ryan.splendorr is our artist, and I know he has an iPad pixel art app that he likes drawing in, but I can't remember what it's called right now. Ryan, do you have anything to recommend?

Basically you can use any combination of things to wind up with black / white / transparent images. It'll probably be easiest to get nice results hand-drawing the pixels vs trying to convert them from images, but with tools like Ditherlicious, you could get cool results from other images. I know some folks have rendered 3D art in Blender, and used tools to wind up with dithered PNGs from that. So, whatever you're most comfortable with!

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Hey Luis,
I would like to throw out there the piskel app. It's free, open-source, and gets the job done for me.

thanks for your help

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thanks for your tip.

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@chase I just wanted to say thanks for recommending Piskel! I just used it to edit a rotating animation and it made everything super easy. So thanks!

Hey no problem! I really enjoy following your progress with your developments!

A couple more I am trialling:

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thanks for your tip matt

Another one!

https://beyondloom.com/tools/ditherpaint.html

DitherPaint: a 1-bit drawing application
========================================
DitherPaint is a browser-based art tool in the tradition of MacPaint and HyperCard. While it is purely concerned with black-and-white images, it offers a variety of tools for working with texture and animating patterns within the image.

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Right now, I'm using Affinity Designer (for Mac, Windows and iPad), which is perhaps more well known for it's vector editing but it has extensive raster drawing too, which can do pixel art.

I've tried Aseprite but was personally just very frustrated with it's old school interface and very raster-centric approach to things. Affinity Designer is very modern and flexible and allows you to mock things up into vectors before painstakingly making pixel art versions so you can play around with scale more effortlessly (which as a primarily vector artist I really appreciate). It also has slicing and export tools that are very good for making sprite sheets.

I wouldn't recommend it for beginners though because there are a lot of tools and things to get your head around.

The one thing it can't do is animation, so you'd need to pair it up with something like Aseprite realistically.

I also use Affinity for mockups @dzuk

You can define a Playdate screen size artboard, show pixels, then switch off smoothing to get aliased lines.

Obviously you can use the correct colours to match the Simulator/device.

Finally you can export your image and you're most of the way there.

Let me know if you need specifics!