Make
Pixel Art
Sprite editors and pixel canvases. The limited grid does most of the design work for you, which is why beginners' output looks good immediately.
14 sites
Pixel canvas designed for thumbs first, fed by a huge stream of daily themed drawings from a mostly Japanese community.
Thousands of curated palettes, from Game Boy green to 64-colour monsters, each downloadable in every format going.
Browser sprite editor built around palette discipline, with the specific constraints pixel artists keep asking for.
Deliberately tiny paint tool inside a fake old window, with fat pixels and a palette that makes clumsy art look intentional.
Minecraft skin editor with a 3D preview you can spin, plus a gallery of other people's skins to take apart and reuse.
Sprite and animation editor with onion skinning and a live loop preview, exporting straight to a spritesheet or GIF.
Grid, palette, mouse. The whole tool fits on one page and you are drawing about three seconds after it loads.
Draw on the grid and it writes the box-shadow monstrosity that renders your sprite with no image file involved at all.
Feed it a photograph and it hands back a pixel-art version, with block size and palette entirely under your control.
Two decades of the pixel art scene's best work, still curated by hand and still running weekly drawing challenges.
Open-source pixel editor with tilemaps, animation and 3D layers, playable in the browser or free to download properly.
Sprite editor with layers and animation frames, wrapped in an unusually friendly community gallery of other people's work.
Tilemap editor for small games — paint a level from a tileset, then export it straight into Godot or Unity.
Ripped sprite sheets from thousands of games, sorted by console — half reference library, half nostalgia trap.
How we picked these
Every entry in Detour is hand-sorted rather than scraped: filed under one category, given one to three moods, and placed in a time band for how quickly it pays off. The practical facts — cost, sign-up, sound, device and whether it is safe at a desk — are recorded per site and shown on every card, so you can rule things out before you click.
Pixel Art: questions
How many sites are in Pixel Art?
14 sites, each hand-sorted by category, mood and how long it takes to pay off.
Which of these sites are free with no sign-up?
14 of the 14 are free and need no account. None of them are paid.
Do these sites work on a phone, and are they safe for work?
4 of 14 work on a phone; the rest are desktop only. 14 are safe for work and 14 work with the sound off.