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GUIDE

Pixel Art

October 21, 2026

Brushee has a pixel-art mode for drawing pixel by pixel: sprites, tiles, icons and game screens. Pixels stay hard-edged at every zoom, the brush lays whole pixels, shapes come out as pixels, and the document keeps its own palette.

Starting a pixel-art document

Open File ▸ New Document Type… (Ctrl+Alt+N) and pick Pixel Art & Games:

  • Sprites from 16 × 16 to 256 × 256, with a transparent background.
  • Game Boy Screen (160 × 144, with the Game Boy's four greens) and SNES Screen (256 × 224).
  • Widescreen 320 and 480, which scale to 1920 × 1080 at ×6 and ×4.
  • Tilesets of 8, 16 or 32 pixel tiles, with the tile grid showing.

Any other size can be pixel art too: tick Pixel art in the dialog. For a document you already have, tick Pixel art under Document in the Properties panel (with the Pointer tool, click an empty part of the canvas to see it).

Zoom and grids

A pixel-art document opens at the largest whole zoom that fits — a 32 pixel sprite fills the window. Zooming in and out (Ctrl+=, Ctrl+- or the mouse wheel) steps through whole zooms only, 200%, 300%, 400%, 600%, 800% and on up, so every pixel is the same size on screen.

From 800% a fine grid outlines every pixel. A blue tile grid marks tiles; set its size under Document (Tile, width × height, 0 for none). View ▸ Toggle Pixel Grid and View ▸ Toggle Tile Grid hide and show them, and Snap to Grid snaps to the tile grid as well.

The Pixel brush

The first time you open a pixel-art document, Paint (B) and the Eraser (E) switch to the Pixel style. It's in the Paint flyout and the Style list too, and works in any document.

  • It lays whole pixels, 1 to 64 wide, with a Square or Round tip, and fills in every pixel between pointer positions, however fast you move.
  • Pixel-perfect (off by default) leaves out the extra pixel at each corner of a 1-pixel line, so freehand lines step cleanly from pixel to pixel instead of growing little L shapes. A corner pixel shows as you reach it and goes again once your next pixel shows it was a corner; with the box off, every pixel you pass over stays.
  • The cursor outlines the pixels the next dab will cover.
  • Opacity works as usual; Flow, smoothing and pressure don't apply.
  • With symmetry on, the frame's centre stays on a pixel edge or a pixel centre, so mirrored strokes land exactly on mirrored pixels, for odd and even brush sizes alike.
  • Selections and stencils cut pixels fully in or out, never half.

Shapes and the bucket

On a pixel-art document Line, Rectangle and Ellipse draw pixels into the bitmap, in the fill colour, instead of adding vector shapes. Hold Shift for 45° lines, squares and circles, and Alt to draw a rectangle or ellipse from its centre. Their settings in the Properties panel are Size, Tip and Filled, shared by all three.

The Paint Bucket fills by colour. Clicking the open canvas around a drawing fills it right out to the edges of the page. Untick Contiguous to fill every pixel of the clicked colour, joined up or not, and make a pixel selection first to keep the fill inside it. Set Tolerance to 0 for exact colours.

Moving, turning and resizing

  • Moves snap to whole pixels.
  • Turning with the Pointer goes in quarter turns, and a quarter turn — there or from Modify ▸ Transform — turns the bitmap's pixels themselves, so it stays on the pixel grid.
  • Resizing a bitmap, and the Scale tool's warps, keep hard pixels.
  • Modify ▸ Document Size picks Nearest neighbor for pixel art.

The palette

A pixel-art document keeps its own palette, up to 256 colours, in the Palette panel under Layers. New documents start with PICO-8's 16 colours.

  • Click a swatch for the fill colour (what the brush paints with), right-click for the stroke colour, double-click to change it, and drag swatches to reorder them.
  • + adds the fill colour; − removes the selected swatch.
  • The panel's header counts the colours the current frame uses.

The ⋯ menu holds the rest:

  • Starter Palette: PICO-8, Sweetie 16, DawnBringer 16, Game Boy, CGA and 1-bit.
  • From Image: the colours your drawing uses, most used first.
  • Import… and Export: GIMP .gpl, .hex lists (the format Lospec downloads), JASC .pal and Adobe .ase swatches. Brushee never fetches palettes itself; it reads the files you choose.
  • Replace Colour turns the fill colour into the stroke colour.
  • Reduce to Palette turns every pixel into its nearest palette colour. Reduce to Palette (Dithered) spreads the difference into a pattern of palette colours instead, which suits gradients and photos.

Replace Colour and Reduce to Palette change every bitmap on every animation frame, as one step you can undo.

Exporting

Export As… and Export Animation… tick Pixel art for these documents. Exported bigger — up to 1600% — every document pixel becomes a hard block, shapes and text included, exactly as the canvas shows them. A 32 pixel sprite at 800% is a crisp 256 pixel image.

A PNG with 256 colours or fewer is saved as an indexed PNG: the same pixels in a far smaller file. A GIF with 256 colours or fewer keeps every colour exactly, with no quantising or dithering. Both happen in any document, not just pixel art.

Pixel art animates like anything else in Brushee: add frames with Alt+N and see the Animation guide.

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