PIXEL

Video games greatly evolved in the last decade, becoming closer and closer to photo realism. This sparks nostalgia every time you encounter a few pixels arranged to look like specific characters or elements that remind you of the good old days, which gave birth to pixel art. In case you fancy drawing, maybe PIXEL helps create net artistic pixel drawings.

The application comes with a custom-made interface which can blend in with any environment. You can work on multiple projects at the same time, because each canvas is stored in its own window you can arrange in the workspace. Toolboxes take up little space, but manage to provide all you need to practice your drawing skills.

Every canvas is fitted with a grid so you can tell pixels from one another. There’s the possibility to import existing pictures of formats like PNG, BMP, JPG, TIF, and GIF, with content automatically being converted in pixel art. However, loading high-resolution pictures can put a bit of pressure on system resources, so you need to be careful.

Drawing tools aren’t that abundant, with the possibility to place individual points, circles, clean up, fill, and pick colors. On the other hand, a dedicated set of controls is there so you can choose either a rectangular or circular brush, whether to use gradient pixels, set transparency, as well as size of the brush.

A major disappointment is the color palette. By default, you can’t change the colors you use, even there are multiple slots. However, you can extract them from imported pictures, but the palette can’t be saved, or colors used in other drawings except the one you extracted from. If satisfied with your work, there’s the possibility to save as JPG or PNG.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that PIXEL comes with good intentions, and lets you create pixel art with a set of intuitive, simple tools. However, it’s a little rough around the edges overall, and the color palette can get frustrating, especially because of no possibility to save it once configured.