Getting Started

Imagery is a precise yet easy‑to‑use pixel‑perfect editor designed for simple, enjoyable picture making. You can start drawing and editing straight away, and when you’re ready, you can explore extra tools that help you create animations and more advanced artwork. It’s a smooth path from quick sketches to Pixel Perfect Art & Animation.

Loading up the program you begin with a small canvas ready to accept your chunky pixels, but you can resize it or create a new image as you need, or just load in an existing file, with support for many popular image formats.

The screen is comprised of several area to give you access to the important essentials needed for drawing and animating.

The menu and main toolbars at the top
Drawing and manipulation tools down the left edge
The canvas is front and central - where you paint, draw and animate your artwork
Panels for preview, colour and layers down the right edge
Panels for frames (for animation), banks for organising different types of assets, and brushes for reusable image stamps

Click on the arrow on a panels title bar to hide and bring it back. If you lose any you can restore them from the View - Panels menu.

Take some time to have a look around the interface and read on when you are ready.

Drawing

You can jump right in and start drawing with the pencil tool.

Erasing

To remove pixels use the eraser tool.

Zooming and Panning around

You can use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out, and hold the middle mouse button to pan around the canvas. If you prefer, you can also hold the SPACE BAR and drag with the left mouse button to move around.

If you’ve used other image‑editing software, many of the keys and gestures will feel familiar. You can switch the default controls to different profiles including PaintShop Pro (classic or modern) and Photoshop, or set up your own custom shortcuts.

Press F1 any time to open the keyboard help and change anything you like.

Pick a colour

Choose a colour from the selector under the tools. You have a primary colour and a secondary colour, and some tools make use of both.

To quickly pick a colour from your artwork, right click the canvas to select the colour under the mouse.

Colour Swatches

If you are not sure which colours to pick, you can start with the ready made swatches. The PICO 8 palette is a simple set of colours that work well together.

You can also make your own swatches for colours you use often, so your favourites are always close at hand.

Colour Wheel

Change to the Colour Wheel tab to explore colours that work well together or colours that contrast nicely.

The pop up menu in the corner gives you different ways to examine colour, so you can quickly find combinations that suit what you are making.

Further information

Mouse wheel and button to zoom and pan
Hold Spacebar while dragging in the canvas or scrolling panels to pan around
Ctrl + Mouse Wheel will zoom in and out in many panels, for example banks and frames
Trackpad and stylus pen pressure support
Regular and isometric grids

Support for retro formats from enforcing colour palettes to chunky double width pixels
Real time colour blindness filters to see an approximation on how people may see your artwork and use of colour
Keyboard profiles can be changed to your own liking, including presets for popular paint programs you may already be used to
Light and dark theme support

Export to many formats for spritesheets and tilemaps
Print spritesheets grouped by banks
Support for aseprite, photoshop, Paint.Net and Tiled files
Import Mixamo animations directly to Imagery reference rigs for use when tracing poses or with puppet animation
Many filters all written in lua, make your own filters or tweak the built in ones
Layer effect styles

Explore in more detail

Drawing Tools

Transformations

Banks

Animation

PICO-8

Reference Rigs

Puppets