Editing AI pixel art into game-ready sprites

AI gets you a strong first pass; the last 10% is editing. This guide covers the cleanup pass on a fresh generation, targeted AI edits on a selection, and how imported artwork fits into the same flow in the pixel art editor.

Workflows

Clean up a fresh generation

  1. 1Zoom in and check the outline first — a single stray pixel on a silhouette reads worse than a wrong color.
  2. 2Use the magic wand on the background, then delete, to remove any leftover matte the stripper missed.
  3. 3Extract the palette from the artboard, drop near-duplicate colors, and snap the art back onto the trimmed palette.
  4. 4Fix remaining pixels by hand with the pencil at brush size 1 (or the artboard's own brush size for chunky art).

Edit part of a sprite with AI

  1. 1Select just the region you want changed — a helmet, a weapon, one wall of a building.
  2. 2Open the AI edit popover and describe the change only, not the whole sprite: "make the shield round and wooden".
  3. 3Keep Preserve Composition on when pose and framing should stay put; turn it off when you want a genuinely different arrangement.
  4. 4If the result lands at the wrong scale, re-run with Fit to target so it matches the original footprint.

Bring your own art in

  1. 1Drop a PNG, GIF, or sprite sheet onto the canvas — sheets are decomposed into artboards automatically.
  2. 2Check the detected brush size: imported art drawn at 2x or 3x should keep its logical pixel size, not be treated as 1px art.
  3. 3Lock it to your project palette so AI edits and hand edits stay in the same color space.
  4. 4From there it behaves exactly like generated art — variants, direction sheets, and frames all work on it.

Editing habits that pay off

Smaller selection, better edit

An AI edit spends its detail budget on whatever you selected. Selecting the whole artboard to change one shoulder pad risks redrawing everything; select the shoulder pad.

Describe the delta, not the sprite

The model already sees the art. "Swap the sword for a torch" beats re-describing the character — restating the subject invites it to redraw the parts you liked.

Palette first, detail second

Snap to your palette before hand-detailing. Otherwise you polish pixels that the palette pass is about to shift, and you do the work twice.

White subjects need care

Background removal targets light mattes, so white robes, fur, and highlights can get nibbled. Check white areas after any edit and repaint what was eaten.

Keep silhouettes on the grid

Scaling and moving snap to the brush grid on purpose — bypassing it shears outlines by a fraction of a logical pixel, which reads as blur once the sprite is in-game.

Duplicate before a risky edit

Copy the artboard before a big AI pass. Undo covers you, but a side-by-side comparison is how you tell whether the new version is actually better.

Re-export after every accepted edit

If a sprite is already synced to your game project, run the CLI sync again after the edit so the engine picks up the new sheet.