Home › Features
Features
KistePix is a pixel art editor for Windows with an English and German interface. It runs locally on your machine — no account, no subscription, no cloud. Here is what is in it.
Layers
Layers stack, can be shown or hidden, and each has its own opacity. The payoff comes when you change something: keep the outline, the flat colour and the shading apart, and you can recolour a suit of armour without redrawing a single outline. Every frame of an animation shares the same layer structure — add a layer and every frame has it.
Animation with a timeline
Below the canvas sits a strip showing every frame as a thumbnail. Each frame carries its own duration in milliseconds — which is exactly what makes movement feel alive, because a punch can wind up slowly and land in a flash. Playback loops right inside the editor. For the craft of it, see pixel art animation.
Palettes up to 256 colours
A palette holds up to 256 colours. Start from a bundled template, pick colours straight off the canvas with the eyedropper, or build and save your own. A picked colour that is not in the palette yet is added exactly as it is.
Twelve tools
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
| Pencil | Paint, at a brush size of 1 to 4 pixels. |
| Eraser | Clear pixels. Inside a selection it only erases there. |
| Fill | Flood-fill a connected area with one colour. |
| Replace | Swap one colour for another across the image. |
| Line | Straight lines. |
| Rectangle | Rectangles, filled or outlined. |
| Circle | Circles and ellipses. |
| Select | A rectangular region — everything else then acts only inside it. |
| Lasso | Freehand selection for irregular shapes. |
| Fold | A mirror axis for symmetrical painting. |
| Eyedropper | Pick a colour off the canvas — and carry straight on painting with it. |
| Hand | Pan the view without painting. |
Each mouse button carries its own tool and its own colour. Paint with the left, erase with the right, no switching.
Symmetry and brush sizes
The brush paints 1, 2, 3 or 4 pixels wide, switchable with keys 1 to 4. In symmetry mode every stroke is mirrored across an axis — for faces, armour, vehicles and anything else with two matching halves, that halves the work.
Transparency you can see
Empty pixels show up as a light checkerboard, not as white paper. That sounds like a detail, but it is the difference between "there is nothing here" and "there is white here". White is a real palette colour and paints visibly. The checkerboard exists on screen only; it never reaches an exported file.
Import and export
- Project file (.kpx) — keeps layers, frames, durations and the palette. The format to keep working in.
- Import PNG — load an existing image; canvas and palette adapt to it.
- Export PNG — the finished image, at a scale factor of your choice.
- Animated GIF — carries each frame's duration over from the timeline.
- Sprite sheet — every frame in one row as a PNG, plus an Aseprite-compatible JSON file that Godot, Unity, Phaser or GameMaker can read.
Every export lets you choose the scale factor and whether the background stays transparent.
Canvas and view
Canvases up to 2048 × 2048 pixels. Zoom and pan stay smooth, and one key press recentres the view. Undo reaches back over many steps — a flood fill or a cleared region counts as a single step, as it should.
The Pixel Gallery — free too
Your purchase includes the Pixel Gallery: the library for your work. It collects and sorts your images into collections, searches them, shows works by date and exports ZIP, sprite sheets, GIFs and colour palettes. With File › Send to Gallery a finished image goes straight over from KistePix. More about the Pixel Gallery.
What KistePix does not do
So that nobody is disappointed: there are no tilemap tools, no scripting and no extensions. If you need those, Aseprite is the better tool, and we say so plainly. Ready-made packages are currently available for Windows.
Two routes, one program
Build KistePix yourself with the Kiste programming language — that costs nothing. Or take the ready-installable version for 14.– and skip the building.
See both routes Guide: sprite sheets