# Make Pixel Art with Aseprite - review & insight | Gareth B. Davies Source: https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/make-pixel-art-with-aseprite/ [← All courses](https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/) Video & Animation · Quick win · Rated 6 /10 # Make Pixel Art with Aseprite Updated September 2026 Simon Sanchez · Game Designer Beginner · 71 min A tight 71-minute tour of Aseprite's actual toolset, not a pixel-art theory class, best for people who already know what they want to draw. [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fmake-pixel-art-with-aseprite%2F1324169327) New to Skillshare? Your first month is free, enough to take this course at no cost. Make Pixel Art with Aseprite is exactly what its title promises and nothing more: a software walkthrough, not an art class. Across twenty short lessons totaling roughly seventy minutes, Simon Sanchez moves through Aseprite's interface, tools, palette system, and animation workspace in a brisk, demonstration-heavy style. There is no long-form project, no character built from sketch to finished sprite, and no discussion of composition or color theory. What there is instead is a competent, if occasionally rough, tour of where things live and how to use them. ## Structure and what it actually covers The course splits cleanly into three arcs. The first four or five lessons cover setup basics: creating a new file with the correct color mode, reading the interface, and using the core tools, pencil, eraser, bucket, selection, and eyedropper, with attention to specifics like pixel perfect mode for clean diagonal lines and the difference between fast rotation and RotSprite when scaling a selection. The middle stretch is the strongest part of the course. It covers building a custom dithering brush by hand, painting on an indexed palette and understanding how repositioning a palette color reshuffles the image, generating an automatic outline through the convolution matrix filter, and reducing an image's color count by generating a palette from the current sprite. Tiled mode and the symmetry tool round this section out, both genuinely useful for anyone making seamless textures or mirrored sprite work. The final arc introduces the animation timeline: adding and linking frames, onion skinning, and animating a bouncing ball before exporting the result as a GIF, a spritesheet, or separate layer files. ## Strengths and weaknesses The dithering brush lesson stands out as the most transferable skill in the course. It is a concrete, repeatable technique, painting a two-pixel checkerboard pattern, saving it as a custom brush, and applying it with Lock Alpha, that a viewer can immediately reuse in their own work. The outline and palette-reduction lessons carry similar weight, since they solve real production problems game artists run into constantly. The weaknesses are structural rather than technical. Lessons are short and dense, sometimes covering five or six menu options in under three minutes, which suits someone who wants a reference-speed overview but will frustrate anyone hoping for a slower, more explanatory pace. The bouncing ball animation, meant to be the capstone project, is treated briskly and leans on onion skinning and copy-pasting frames rather than walking through the underlying principles of timing and spacing that make a bounce read as believable. Viewers looking for actual animation principles will need to look elsewhere. As a beginner-level orientation to the software, the course does its job. It is not a pixel art course in the sense of teaching visual judgment, shading, or style, it is an Aseprite operations manual delivered in video form. For someone who already owns the software and just wants to stop guessing which button does what, that narrow focus is a reasonable trade for a short runtime. The standout The walkthrough of building a two-color dithering brush and saving it as a reusable custom brush is the single technique most likely to change how a beginner actually paints. ## What you will learn - · Set up a new sprite with the right color mode (RGBA, grayscale, or indexed) and canvas size - · Use the core paint tools, including pixel perfect line drawing, the bucket tool with tolerance and continuous settings, and rotsprite versus fast rotation - · Organize artwork with layers, groups, blend modes, and the layer reference options for fast recoloring - · Build workflow shortcuts like a custom dithering brush, an automatic outline via convolution matrix, and palette-based color reduction - · Use tiled mode and symmetry tools to build seamless textures and mirrored sprites - · Animate a bouncing ball using onion skinning, frame linking, tags, and export it as a GIF, sprite sheet, or spritesheet with JSON data Best for: A beginner who has already installed Aseprite and wants a fast, guided tour of its menus and tools before self-teaching pixel art technique. Skip it if: Anyone hoping to learn pixel art fundamentals like shading, anti-aliasing theory, or character design, since the course is about software operation, not art instruction. Clarity of Instruction Helpful Examples Organization of Lessons Actionable Steps [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fmake-pixel-art-with-aseprite%2F1324169327)