Aseprite is good, and cheap too. You can also buy pyxel edit or pro motion ng far below photoshop price. The tool doesnt make you a better artist though. It’s what you do with it. Gimp or krita is free. Piskel too. Perhaps first deside what you want to make, and then try to do it with the software you got. I bet that’s the best learning curve/flow for skill and software learning combined

I would add Pixel Studio (search it on steam), as it has a free version, although i'll recommend purchasing it, because you can use it at your computer and with your tablet/mobile, using gdrive to store graphics, very usefull

This soft is very complete with layers and animation tools

I'm very used to Aseprite too, in fact is mostly my tool of choice for making pixel art, but for some things I like to use other tools, like using Pyxel Edit for making tile sets

Also I'll add Graphics Gale, I've used it a lot before moving to Aseprite. In the past it had a free version and a paid one, but now it's free (https://graphicsgale.com/us/)

You have also Lospec free pixel editor (https://lospec.com/pixel-editor/) although i've never used it because I have several tools for this


But as Squ4re idi0t said, it's not the tool what makes the artist, but what you can learn by doing (and it comes always after working and improving, there is no other way around :-) )

I have actually made my own pixel art editor called Stipple Effect. It costs $3.00 and is open source and can be compiled for free if you can't afford to pay for it. The reason I decided to make my own was because I needed something that would make the workflow I want to use to make my dream game possible. My dream game is a top-down 2D RPG with a crazy amount of procedurally generated systems and content. Because of this, most of the art assets will undergo a lot of processing at runtime. So, I created a scriptable pixel art editor with a custom, concise, easy-to-write scripting language to make it possible to do things like this from right within the editor:



Download: Itch.io store page
Source code: GitHub repo