How to Make Pixel Art on Ibis Paint for Game Sprites

Learning how to make pixel art on ibis paint mostly means changing three defaults: the canvas size, the brush’s anti-aliasing and the way you scale the finished image. ibisPaint X is built for smooth, painterly illustration, so out of the box it softens every edge. Fix those settings and it becomes a capable pixel editor that fits in your pocket, good enough to draw characters, items and tiles for a real game.

This guide walks through the setup, a worked 32×32 sprite, the reasons your art goes blurry, how to export it so it stays crisp in a game engine, and what to do when you start from AI art instead of a blank canvas.

Should you use ibisPaint for pixel art?

Pixel art is digital art where each individual pixel is placed deliberately, usually on a small canvas with a limited palette. It does not need a special program. What it needs is a tool that puts down exactly one hard-edged colour where you tap, with no blending into the neighbours.

ibisPaint can do that. Its strengths for pixel work:

• Layers. Keep outline, base colours, shading and highlights apart so you can fix one without breaking the others.
• Custom canvas sizes. You can make a canvas as small as a game sprite needs.
• Eyedropper and fill tools. Fast colour picking and flat fills, which is most of the work in pixel art.
• Touch and stylus input. Placing pixels with a stylus on a tablet feels natural.

Its weaknesses: no built-in timeline for sprite animation and no sprite sheet export. A sprite is a 2D image composited into a game scene (see sprite in computer graphics), and a sprite sheet is one image holding many sprite frames in a grid. You can draw every frame in ibisPaint, but you will build the sheet elsewhere or let your engine load the frames. For single sprites, icons, portraits and small tiles, it is a perfectly good choice.

How to make pixel art on ibis paint: the setup

Most of what you need to know about how to make pixel art on ibis paint is in this section. Get the settings right once and every drawing after that is just practice.

1. Create a tiny canvas

From My Gallery, create a new canvas and pick a custom size in pixels. Good starting sizes for games:

Canvas size	Good for	Difficulty
16×16	Items, coins, small enemies, tiles	Easiest, every pixel counts
32×32	Player characters, standard tiles	The best place to start
64×64	Detailed characters, bosses, portraits	More shading work
128×128 and up	Splash art, large scenes	Slow, closer to illustration

The canvas size is the art. A common beginner mistake is to open a 1080×1080 canvas and draw “pixel style” with a big brush. That gives you blocks that don’t line up with any grid, and the result looks fuzzy the moment it is resized.

2. Set up a hard 1 px brush

Open the brush tool and choose a hard pen. ibisPaint’s brush list includes pixel-style pens; whichever you pick, set:

• Thickness: 1 px.
• Anti-aliasing: off. Anti-aliasing adds semi-transparent in-between pixels along an edge to make lines look smooth. In pixel art, those extra pixels are noise.
• Stabilisation: zero. Stroke smoothing drags the line away from where your finger is, which you don’t want when placing single pixels.
• Opacity: 100%.

Test it: zoom in and tap once. You should get exactly one square of solid colour. If you see a faint halo, anti-aliasing is still on somewhere.

3. Fix the fill and eraser too

The bucket fill has its own anti-aliasing setting; turn it off, or your fills will leave a light fringe against outlines. Set the eraser up the same way as the brush: 1 px, hard, no anti-aliasing.

4. Pick a small palette

Choose 8 to 16 colours before you start and save them as a palette. For each material (skin, metal, cloth), pick a ramp of three to five shades going from dark to light. A limited palette is what makes pixel art read as a coherent style rather than a shrunken painting.

Worked example: drawing a 32×32 slime sprite

Here is how to make pixel art on ibis paint from a blank canvas to a finished game sprite. The subject is a classic slime enemy, because it is forgiving and teaches outline, fill, shading and highlight in one go.

1. Set up layers. Create four layers named Outline, Base, Shade and Highlight. Keep the background transparent so the PNG exports with no box around it.
2. Block the silhouette. On the Outline layer, draw a dome shape about 24 pixels wide and 18 tall, sitting on the bottom of the canvas. Use your darkest colour, not pure black: a dark green or navy reads better.
3. Clean the curves. Curves in pixel art are built from steps. A smooth curve uses step lengths that change gradually, such as 4, 3, 2, 1, 1. Look for “jaggies”: single pixels that stick out or steps that break the pattern, and delete them.
4. Fill the base. On the Base layer, flood-fill inside the outline with your mid green. With fill anti-aliasing off, the fill stops cleanly at the outline.
5. Add shading. Choose a light source, top-left is the convention. On the Shade layer, paint a band of darker green along the bottom-right edge, two or three pixels thick.
6. Add highlight. On the Highlight layer, place a small cluster of your lightest green near the top-left, plus one or two near-white pixels for a wet shine.
7. Add eyes. Two 2×3 dark rectangles with a single white pixel each. On a 32×32 sprite, a face is only a few pixels, so make each one count.
8. Check at 1x. Zoom out to actual size. If the slime doesn’t read as a slime at that size, the silhouette needs work, not more detail.

Blending colours without blur

Blending in ibisPaint usually means a blur or smudge brush. Don’t use them in pixel art; they create dozens of new colours and soften every edge. Blend by hand instead:

• Stepped ramps: place shades as neat bands, one next to the other.
• Dithering: a checkerboard of two colours where they meet, which the eye reads as a mix. Use it sparingly on small sprites.
• Selective outlines: colour the outline lighter where light hits it, so the sprite looks less like a sticker.

Why is ibisPaint pixel art blurry (or too pixelated)?

“Blurry” and “too pixelated” are the two complaints that come up most once you work out how to make pixel art on ibis paint, and they have different causes.

Blurry or soft edges

• Anti-aliasing is on on the brush, the fill or the eraser. Check all three.
• You transformed the layer. Rotating or scaling a pixel layer with a smooth transform resamples it and invents in-between colours. Move art in whole-pixel steps, and if you need a resize, redraw it.
• The image was upscaled with smoothing. Most apps and websites enlarge images with bilinear or bicubic filtering, which blurs hard pixels. The comparison gallery of image scaling algorithms shows the difference clearly: nearest-neighbour keeps hard blocks, the smooth filters turn them into mush.
• Compression. Saving as JPEG, or sending through a messaging app, adds artefacts around edges. Always save PNG.

Accidental pixelation in normal illustrations

If you are not trying to make pixel art and your drawings look blocky, the canvas is too small for the size you are viewing it at. For illustration, create the canvas at the final display size or larger. Pixel art is the opposite: deliberately tiny, then scaled up cleanly.

Scale by whole numbers only

When you enlarge pixel art, use 2x, 3x, 4x and so on. At 2.5x, some pixels become two screen pixels wide and others three, and the sprite looks uneven even with nearest-neighbour scaling.

Exporting ibisPaint pixel art for a game

For a game, keep the export at native size: the 32×32 PNG with a transparent background. Let the engine do the enlarging. That keeps file sizes small and lets you change the zoom later without re-exporting.

If you drew animation frames as separate files, line them up in a sprite sheet: same frame size, same order, the character standing on the same baseline in each frame. A sprite sheet is a kind of texture atlas, one image holding many smaller ones, which the engine cuts into frames by size.

Here is a complete Phaser 3 example that loads a single sprite and a 4-frame sheet and keeps both sharp:

const config = {
  type: Phaser.AUTO,
  width: 320,
  height: 180,
  zoom: 4,          // whole-number scale: 320x180 becomes 1280x720
  pixelArt: true,   // nearest-neighbour filtering, no blur
  backgroundColor: "#1d2b53",
  scene: { preload, create }
};

function preload() {
  this.load.image("coin", "coin.png");
  this.load.spritesheet("slime", "slime_sheet.png", {
    frameWidth: 32,
    frameHeight: 32
  });
}

function create() {
  this.add.image(60, 90, "coin");

  this.anims.create({
    key: "bounce",
    frames: this.anims.generateFrameNumbers("slime", { start: 0, end: 3 }),
    frameRate: 8,
    repeat: -1
  });

  this.add.sprite(160, 120, "slime").play("bounce");
}

new Phaser.Game(config);

The two lines that matter are pixelArt: true, which switches off texture smoothing, and a whole-number zoom. If you show sprites in a plain web page instead, the CSS equivalent is image-rendering: pixelated; on the image or canvas element.

For sharing on social media, do the opposite: export an enlarged copy (8x or 10x, nearest-neighbour) so the site doesn’t blur it when it scales the image up itself.

Turning AI art into real pixel art with Pixel Snap

Hand-drawing in ibisPaint is the right way to learn, and for a hero character you will tweak for weeks, it is often the right way to work. But a game jam needs dozens of sprites in a weekend: enemies, pickups, walk cycles. Many developers now generate art with AI and then try to make it look like pixel art, and that is where it usually goes wrong.

AI images that “look pixelated” are rarely real pixel art. The blocks are different sizes, they don’t sit on a grid, the edges are soft, and there are hundreds of near-identical colours. Drop one into ibisPaint and you will spend longer cleaning it than you would have spent drawing it.

Pixel Snap is the Sorceress tool built for this exact problem. It converts AI-generated images or videos into crisp, real pixel art. The workflow follows three steps:

1. Start with AI art or video. Generate a character, upload art you already have, or pull frames from a video clip.
2. Clean and snap. Remove the background, choose palette limits, and force true pixel-grid output, so every pixel is a real square on a consistent grid, the same thing you get by drawing with a 1 px hard brush in ibisPaint.
3. Preview and export. Align the animation frames, test the loop, then download sprite sheets and individual frames that are ready for a game.

Palette locking maps to the “pick 8 to 16 colours” rule from the setup section, and frame alignment solves the jittery-baseline problem that makes hand-assembled walk cycles wobble. The output drops straight into the Phaser loader above. Pixel Snap needs a paid Sorceress membership (Pro); the Pixel Snap overview explains more.

When to use True Pixel instead

True Pixel, also a Pro tool, converts any image or video into pixel-art sprites and sprite sheets, with chroma keying (removing a solid-colour background), clean outlines, edge cleanup and batch processing built in. Batch processing is the reason to pick it: when you have a folder of item icons or many animation frames to convert in one pass.

A practical hybrid workflow: generate a base character with Auto-Sprite v2 or convert existing art with Pixel Snap, then open the PNG in ibisPaint for the hand-polish. Fix the face, adjust the outline colours, add a highlight. AI handles the volume, and you handle the details players notice. For a deeper look at converting photos and AI images, see AI Pixel-Art Generator From Image, and the Sorceress tools guide covers every tool in the suite.

Common mistakes when making pixel art on ibisPaint

• Starting on a large canvas. If you can’t count the pixels, it isn’t pixel art yet. Start at 32×32.
• Leaving anti-aliasing on in one tool. The brush is usually fixed; the fill and eraser get forgotten.
• Pillow shading. Shading every shape darker at the edges and lighter in the middle, with no light direction. Pick a light source and stick to it.
• Too many colours. Grabbing a slightly different green each time adds up to forty greens. Use the eyedropper and your saved palette.
• Pure black outlines everywhere. They flatten the sprite. Use a dark shade of the neighbouring colour.
• Resizing finished art. Scaling a 32×32 sprite to 48×48 destroys it. Redraw at the new size or scale by a whole number.
• Exporting JPEG. It ruins hard edges and drops transparency. Use PNG every time.
• Judging only zoomed in. Check the sprite at actual size and at your game’s zoom, because that is how players see it.

The workflow at a glance

Here is how to make pixel art on ibis paint in one list:

1. Create a custom canvas at sprite size: 16×16, 32×32 or 64×64.
2. Set the brush, fill and eraser to 1 px, hard, anti-aliasing off, stabilisation zero.
3. Save a palette of 8 to 16 colours, in ramps of three to five shades.
4. Draw on separate layers: outline, base, shade, highlight.
5. Blend with stepped ramps and light dithering, never blur.
6. Export PNG at native size with a transparent background.
7. Scale up only by whole numbers with nearest-neighbour, or set pixelArt: true in Phaser.
8. For bulk sprites or animation from AI art, run it through Pixel Snap or True Pixel, then polish in ibisPaint.

Once you know how to make pixel art on ibis paint, the settings stop being the hard part and the craft takes over: silhouettes, light and colour choices. Draw small and often, and save your first sprite somewhere you can find it. In a month it will show you how far you have come.