Paint of Persia Is A New Free Tool for Rotoscoped Pixel Art

Paint of Persia is a new tool that allows the user to draw over stills and videos to create rotoscoped pixel art animation and sprites.

Named after the iconic 1980s computer game Prince of Persia, which used rotoscope techniques to build its sprite animation, Paint of Persia can be downloaded for free from the website of its developer, Dunin.

The software features scale and transparency controls:

It also allows users to easily manage animation sequences, which can be exported as single frames or sprite sheets (PNG/JPG):

As far as software goes, it performs a fairly niche function, but with the prevalence of both rotoscope and pixel art projects in contemporary animation projects, it’s not hard to imagine artists thinking up different uses for it.

For now, Dunin says he’s focused on creating a stable version for Windows, though ports to other operating systems may happen at some point.