Recoloring Art and Making Palette Swaps
Make enemy variants, team colours and reskins from one sprite: exact colour remaps with the free Palette Swap tool, or a prompt edit for bigger changes.
The palette swap is one of the oldest tricks in game art: take a sprite you already have and recolour it into a family of variants. A green slime becomes red (fire), blue (ice) and purple (poison): three enemies from one design. Here are two ways to do it.
Why palette swaps work
- Enemy tiers: the same shape, with hotter colours for a tougher version.
- Team colours: red team and blue team from one unit.
- Rarity: common, rare and legendary versions of an item.
- Biome reskins: one prop recoloured for snow, desert or lava.
The silhouette stays identical, so the variants read as one design.
Option 1: Palette Swap tool (free, exact)
The free Palette Swap / Recolor tool extracts a sprite's colours and lets you remap each one to a new colour. Nothing else changes, so pixel art stays pixel-perfect. Use it for pixel art, for tiers and team colours, and whenever the shape must not move.
Option 2: Edit this image (5 credits)
Open the sprite in the editor and describe the new colours in Edit this image: "same slime, deep red and orange", "same armor in blue and silver". Keep everything except the colour words the same. This handles changes the Palette Swap tool can't, such as adding a glow or changing materials, but the shape can shift slightly, so compare it with the original.
Build the family together
Make all the variants in one sitting and line them up side by side. It's the quickest way to check they feel related and that each one is distinct at game size.
Before you start
Recolour from a clean, finished base with clear colour regions; every variant inherits its quality. For pixel art with many similar shades, lower the colour count first (with the Colours setting in Pixelate) so each region maps to one colour.