Here's something to keep you busy for a few hours today! Indeed, Piskel is a small online tool created by the French Julian Descottes which will allow you to create small animations in a 100% vintage spirit since it involves making you draw animations pixel by pixel.
Very well designed (even for bad designers like me), Piskel will allow you to draw all the images of your animation frame by frame. Then put end to end they will allow you to create an animated image.
Getting started is very simple. You have a 32×32 pixel square (the size is modifiable) on which you can draw a first image using a series of fairly standard drawing tools (pencil, paint pot, eraser, image import, etc.).
To make things easier, you also have the possibility of managing several layers per image which will then be independent (we can imagine in particular the background and the foreground on 2 different layers).
Then you can add as many images as you want and adjust the number of images per second. With each new image, you will see in transparency the drawing that you made on the previous image so as to have a basis to evolve your drawing and thus create a fluid animation.
Once your work is completed, you can save it locally (via cookies) or online by creating an account or export it in Animated Gif format (or frames by frames in PNG).
I tested it by drawing a sad guy and in just a few minutes (and despite major artistic shortcomings) we achieved a fairly satisfactory result!
It is called Piskel, it's awesome and it's here!
So have you tried it? Share your masterpieces in the comments!
Through which channels you reach those people, classic and out of the box.
Hello, I am a novice in this field but I am very interested in pixel art. I would like to know if it is possible to create a short animation (character + environment + story) with piskel?
Thank you, your site is very enriching 🙂
Hello Franck,
I think it's possible but it must be a pretty phenomenal amount of work and there may be more professional tools...