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PixelArt Creator — User Guide

PixelArt Creator is a pixel-art editor built around an 8K-capable canvas, a non-destructive layer model, and a fast region-scoped compositor.

This guide covers the user-facing workflows shipped so far, from the core layer & canvas system through cloud collaboration and the asset library:

  • Layer panel — opacity, visibility, lock, blend mode, reordering, add / remove / duplicate, groups, masks, reference and smart layers. Every action is a single undo step.
  • Blend modes — the twelve BlendMode members and what each one does.
  • Multiple canvases — opening several documents / artboards as isolated tabs.
  • Floating selection — lift a selection and move (drag) or copy (Ctrl+drag) its colours as a non-destructive preview, committing on release / Enter / tool-switch, Esc to cancel.
  • Drag-and-drop import — drag a file from your OS file explorer into the app: an image opens as a new document, a .pixproj opens as a project (with an unsaved-changes guard), and a .gpl/.hex/.pal palette loads into the active palette (undoable).
  • Animation timeline — build a frame timeline (add / remove / reorder / duplicate, per-frame duration), play it back (loop / once / ping-pong / reverse), use onion skinning, and group frame ranges into named animations with frame tags.
  • Tilemap & level design — slice a source image into a tileset, paint a multi-layer, infinite tilemap with stamp / erase / fill, let auto-tiling resolve borders, flip / rotate tiles as you place them, and export / import the map as Tiled-compatible JSON.
  • Export & pipeline integration — export a project as a PNG, an animated GIF, a sprite sheet or a packed texture atlas with Aseprite-style JSON metadata and Unity / Godot engine presets, queue several targets with batch export, or run it headlessly with the pixelart-export command line — all byte-reproducible.
  • Automation & extensibility — record and replay macros (.pixmacro, deterministic), run bounded-DSL scripts (no eval/exec), extend the app with trusted, consent-gated plugins, batch-recolour many targets at once, generate content procedurally, and run any automation headlessly with the pixelart-run command line.
  • AI assistant — drive the editor in plain language over a model-agnostic chat panel: connect any OpenAI-compatible or Anthropic provider with your own key (kept in the OS keyring, never in the project), and let it run the same automation operations you can record and script by hand, with reversible edits auto-applying and destructive ones asking first.
  • Visual aids & UX — a live real-size preview, guides & rulers with snapping, isometric and perspective grids, a PureRef-style reference board, multiple synced views of one document, and reproducible timelapse recording — all non-destructive view aids.
  • Cloud, versions & recovery — connect a cloud provider, save a project to the cloud and open it again from any session, browse a full version history and restore an earlier save, and rely on background autosave with a crash-recovery prompt on restart — all behind one provider-agnostic interface.
  • Shared projects & comments — share a project with a named member roster (owner / editor / viewer roles), leave and resolve threaded comments, and see who else is present, with concurrent edits merged by a deterministic hybrid convergence model — real-time co-editing, other editors' live cursors, and git-like art branching (with an optional pre-merge diff review) all ship in this release.
  • Asset library — catalog your sprites, animations, tilesets, tilemaps and palettes as named, tagged assets and find them fast with search and filter by name, tag and kind, from the &Library menu.
  • Asset dependencies & break detection — a queryable graph of how assets reference one another (sprite → animation → tileset → tilemap) and a passive indicator that flags — never blocks — a reference broken by a missing or changed asset.
  • Asset versioning & cross-project reuse — an append-only revision history per asset (inspect and restore, restore adds a new head), reference-not-copy reuse of a shared asset across projects, export/import of a project's referenced assets as a self-contained bundle, and optional cloud backing of the shared blobs while still working fully offline.

Version & About

The main window's title always reads PixelArt Creator followed by the running version, with no extra step needed to find it. For the full picture — the app's name, its version, the licence, links to the source repository, the documentation site and the releases page, and an environment summary you can copy for a bug report — choose Help ▸ About PixelArt Creator (on macOS: the application menu, next to Quit).

For colour, palette and indexed-mode workflows see the Phase-3 material; for the canvas, tools and theming see the Phase-1 material.

Colour mode

The layer stack and blend modes described here apply to RGBA documents. An indexed document is single-layer by design (the compositor is RGBA-only). Converting a multi-layer RGBA document to indexed flattens the stack into one indexed layer, and the conversion is fully undoable. See the layer panel page.