Get started with Dottie
Dottie is a native Mac pixel art editor. It pairs classic paint tools with dithering, layers, tilesets, and animation in an interface that feels right at home on macOS.
The topics below are a taste of what Dottie can do—the full manual, covering every tool and feature, is in the Table of Contents.
Draw pixel-perfect art
Draw with pencils, pens, an airbrush, and shape tools that all understand pixels. Blend colours with ordered dithering, mirror your strokes with symmetry, and control brush size with a pressure-sensitive pen.
Work with curated colours
Dottie is built around palettes: choose from classic system palettes, import palette files or any Lospec palette, generate gradients, and protect colours you don’t want to disturb.
One layer, many roles
In Dottie a layer is one flexible building block: layers stack to form the composite image, each layer is also a frame of the animation, and in tileset mode they lay out as a grid of tiles—one thing, shown different ways. Open the timeline to reorder frames, set per-frame timing, and group them into tags. Preview the loop at any speed and export as an animated GIF, APNG, or sprite sheet.
Import and export almost anything
Open images in all the common formats (anything with more than 256 colours is reduced to a palette automatically), split sprite sheets into frames automatically, and export to PNG, GIF, SVG, XPM, and more—or send your artwork straight to another app.
This page shows only highlights. To explore the complete manual, click Table of Contents at the top of the page, or enter a word or phrase in the search field.
Have fun,
matt