How to make pixel art on a Mac

Pixel art is made of square blocks of solid colour with crisp edges. The easiest way to get that in Easy Paint Pro is to draw on a grid with “big pixels”: each block is a small square snapped to the grid, filled with one colour. This is exactly how the knight below was made, recorded straight from the app.

Step by step

1. Make a small canvas

   Click + beside your tabs for a new canvas. Double-click the size at the bottom of the window and enter an exact size, for example 320 × 320. That gives you a 32 × 32 picture made of 10-pixel blocks.

2. Turn on the grid

   Choose View ▸ Guides and Grid ▸ Set Grid Spacing… and enter 10. Then turn on View ▸ Show Pixel Grid and View ▸ Snap to Grid.

3. Fill the background

   Pick a colour and use Fill to paint the sky, then the ground.

4. Place the blocks

   Choose Rectangle, set the shape finish to a solid fill, and drag one 10 × 10 square at a time. They snap to the grid, so the edges stay crisp. Outline first in a dark colour, then fill in the details.

5. Zoom in for detail

   Hold Shift and scroll to zoom around the pointer, all the way to 3,200%. Command–Z undoes a misplaced block.

6. Export

   Use File ▸ Export ▸ PNG…. For a true 32 × 32 sprite, first choose Image ▸ Resize Image…, resize by percentage to 10%, and choose the crisp pixel-art option so the blocks don’t blur. Resize up the same way for sharing.

Tips

• Use a small palette. Four to eight colours look the most “8-bit”.
• Why not the Pencil? Pencil and brushes draw smooth, anti-aliased lines, which is what you want for sketches but not for pixel art. Snapped blocks and Fill keep every edge hard.
• Record it. Record ▸ Record Canvas captures your picture coming together, and you can export the replay as a video or GIF.

More guides

• Is there MS Paint for Mac?
• Blur or pixelate part of a screenshot
• Remove the background from a picture
• Draw and write on a picture