Pixaki is a powerful pixel art creation studio for iPad. It features many of the same features found in desktop apps — such as custom canvas sizes, layers, animation, precise colour selection, and customisable palettes — but with a gorgeous multi-touch interface that is just right for iPad.
Whether you’re creating 8-bit game characters or vast isometric cityscapes, Pixaki has the tools you’ll need in an app you’ll love.
// WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING:
“For our money, Pixaki is the only app worth considering for iPad-related pixel art.” — TechRadar
“It’s a great way to kick back on the couch and create the 8-bit scene of your dreams.” — The Verge
// FOR THE FUTURE OF PIXEL ART.
Pixel art is so much more than just retro. We believe that the best pixel art ever is still being made. By you. That’s why there’s nothing retro about Pixaki. The app is built to take full advantage of the latest features of iOS, and designed for a fantastic experience on iPad and iPad Pro.
// PIXEL OVER YOUR SKETCHES.
Pixaki’s reference layers allow you to import any image from your photo library at full resolution, resize and reposition it on the canvas, then draw pixels over the top. You can even have multiple reference layers at once, and adjust the opacity so that you can draw underneath the image if you prefer.
// ANIMATE.
Pixel art was made to move, and with Pixaki it’s a joy to bring your creations to life. With advanced features such as per-frame duration and colour-shifted onion skinning, nothing can stop you.
// LAYERS.
Supports up to 50 layers per frame. Adjust the opacity of each to easily create lighting and translucency effects. Reordering layers is as simple as drag and drop.
// FULLY CUSTOMISABLE PALETTES.
Pixaki comes with some great palettes pre-installed, but also allows you to create and save your own. Once you’ve saved a palette, you can import it into any document that you’re working on. You can also import palettes you’ve created in other software or downloaded in .aco, .pal, and .gpl formats.
// SHAPES AND LINES.
The line tool makes it easy to create perfectly straight lines, which can optionally be locked to angles used in isometric art. The rectangle and ellipse tools help in creating basic shapes, which can be automatically filled with colour, and the aspect ratio can be locked to create squares and circles.
// POWERFUL COLOUR REPLACEMENT.
It might look like an old bucket, but this is actually a supercharged colour replacement tool. You can use it like a standard bucket tool, or replace all instances of a particular colour with another. This can be configured to affect just the layer you’re working on, all layers of the current frame, or all layers on all frames. Turning on erase mode to removes all pixels of a given colour. It’s a great way to work with limited colour palettes.
// SELECTION.
Cut, copy, paste, move, flip, and rotate anything that you draw with a simple, intuitive interface. Touch and hold the paste icon to quickly tile an area with an image from the clipboard.
// IMPORT AND EXPORT.
Pixaki makes it easy to work with other desktop and mobile apps, as well as output for game engines and social media sharing.
• Photoshop files: Import and export layered PSDs. Export an animation, and the layers for each frame are put into groups.
• Animated GIFs: Import and export animated GIFs. Export supports magnification, perfect for crisp images online.
• Sprite sheets: Perfect for use in your game, with a configurable number of columns. Also supports magnification.
• ZIP archives: Save a PNG of each frame packaged into a ZIP file. Great for game engines and video production.
• PNGs: Export supports nearest-neighbour upscaling for crisp social media sharing.
• Other images: Any image format supported by iOS can be imported into Pixaki — things like TIFFs and even JPEGs (yuck).
• Palettes: Supports Adobe Photoshop’s .aco files, GIMP’s .gpl files, and the JASC .pal format.
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User Rating
4 out of 5
18 ratings
in Germany
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Reviews
Really good, not a superstar yet
This app is great, it has most of the needed tools for an easy and useful pixel art workflow, although it’s still missing a couple of stuff to make the it the professional tool it can really be.
- a better Apple Pencil integration for starters, it already supports working with the pencil, but it is sometimes buggy, and some behaviors are a bit weird
- missing a real rotation feature, you can rotate selections only in chunks of 90deg, which is okay, but not very useful for most cases, specially for character animations and such
- missing an animation preview and timeline, the animation workflow can be so much better with a small preview option on the side, and a timeline view per layer, layers should somehow have a relation between the frames, so you can keep one layer per frame and only animate the needed layers
- this may seem trivial, but the palette creation process is kind of confusing, it would be cool if the app had a better palette Managment procedure, its okay at the moment, but it’s not always clear what the app wants
All that being said, it’s still a very good product, and I really enjoy using it! Thank you for the great work!
Too pricey
Overall the app has a good flow but is lacking on basic options like a lazo tool selection, been able to freely rotate objects and not only on 90 or 180 degrees, or to scroll in the timeline without having to play the whole animation.
Compared with other apps like procreate or art studio pro, Pixaki is too limited and too expensive.
Good but full of Bugs
I like the app, but please fix some stuff.
The first thing is the UI is not in the language of my system settings. The little icons are the only indicator what a button should do.
The second thing: If I cut a selected piece and copy the piece in the canvas, the piece is duplicated. If I agree the copy, the piece is third times in the canvas. So this feature is unusable. I don‘t know if this are the only bugs but this is very sad.
Please fix this! It can be such a great app.
Best pixel-app on the iPad
I’m using pixaki on a iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil. I don’t actually use the animation capabilities, but do use pixaki extensively for all other kind of pixelart and completely moved away from using the mouse. I am very pleased with pixaki and don’t regret that I bought it. It’s a great app and the developer reacts quickly to messages (can be found on Twitter) and communication is no problem. I did encounter some bugs, reported em, got invited into beta...everything is smooth!
I’d like to see some features added though
*bulk-export (Export content of one or more selected folders or multiple files)
*backup functionality
...can’t think of anything else right now, but I’m sure I’ll find more things that could be added =)
I am underwhelmed.
It’s a nice basic app for pixel art, but it still needs a lot of upgrades to make it actually worth this price. There are no layer options like multiply or overlay, there’s no alpha lock and there are no adjustment options to change hue and saturation for example. So if you used the wrong color, you gotta redraw everything, no other choice.
I got the app because of good reviews, but I wish I had taken more time to research what this app is capable of. Procreate only cost me 6,99 and it has like 100 times more features, even if it isn’t made for pixel art.
Great workflow and very good support
I bought this app to get into pixel art and pixel art animations for game development and it works really good. With the export function you can export your drawings as png, psd, ... and continue working on a desktop machine with photoshop or import your drawings in Unity or the Unreal Engine. Import of drawings into Pixaki via cloud is also possible. Also the import of color palettes is really nice.
I had sometimes a few problems with crashes and wrote a mail to the developer and he immediately replayed personally and he was thankful for the report and will fix the issues. So you really get a strong tool and support for your money. Hope to see an update that fixes the problems.
I use the app with an iPad Pro 9,7" and the Apple Pencil and can recommend the app.
