Pixelmash

The easy way to make low–res art and animations

$24.99 (free seven–day trial) From Nevercenter, nevercenter.com/pixelmash Needs OS X 10.9 or later, 64–bit processor

Today’s Retina screens are sharp enough that you can’t see the pixels. But what if you like pixels? After all, there’s a whole genre of artwork that makes a virtue of low resolution as seen in such mediums as illustrations, GIFs, retro games, and icon design.

One way to create pixel art is to just make a very small document in your favorite image editor, zoom in, and paint individual pixels. Pixelmash, however, works smarter, with a canvas that exists at a higher resolution than you’re aiming for. The default is a 320x320 document for 32x32 artwork, but you can pick any size and scale factor. A button toggles between viewing what’s actually stored and the pixellated version. You can even drag a slider to change the pixel resolution live.

The first consequence of this is that you can import a drawing or photo and, rather than converting it to low–res once for all, leave it intact while previewing your pixel version. This leads on to Pixelmash’s other unique features: effects and animation. Layers are supported, and you can apply shading and outlines to each, or to a master layer to style your artwork. You can also add frames, with ‘onion skinning’ to see ghosts of other frames while editing, and move, scale and rotate layers frame by frame, enabling a simple kind of rigged character animation. Layers also let you keep parts of a design separate and show or hide them.

This resolution–agnostic approach isn’t so helpful when drawing from scratch. The straight line modes of the pencil and brush tools produce lumpy results, there are no shape tools, and the fill bucket works unpredictably in pixel view. Nor is it as flexible as vector–based methods.

But Pixelmash’s neat user interface makes it easy to get started, and you can export in a variety of useful formats, from animated GIF to ‘sprite sheets’, where every frame of an animation is laid out in a single image — a common way of loading and referencing game characters. Although there are some glitches and omissions, the developers are rapidly adding features, and it’s well worth a try if you want to take a more organized approach to pixel art.

the bottom line. Its unique approach to pixel design could make Pixelmash a revelation for some artists interested in working with the form.

Pixelmash can turn your multilayered high–res art into low–res illustration and animations.

You can export your work in a choice of formats, such as sprite sheets for use in coding game characters.