Vessel & Goblet

I built Vessel because no existing tool worked the way I draw. Pixel art editors, painting apps, and animation software are all separate worlds, and I was tired of moving work between them. I wanted pressure-sensitive brushwork, a low-resolution grid, and motion in one place, from the first mark. It runs in the browser, drawing and playback happen in real time, and export doesn’t flatten anything: the image comes out still running, with its timing, dithering, and colour animation intact.

The editor and the player

The system has two halves. Vessel is the editor: brushes, layers, shapes, dithering, colour cycling, export. Goblet is the player, and it takes an exported image and plays it back exactly as it behaved in the editor. The pieces embedded on this page aren’t video captures; they’re the actual exports, running in Goblet.

Low resolution and high resolution

The thing I could never find in other tools was low-resolution pixel structure combined with high-resolution brush marks. The grid holds the image together, and the brush keeps it feeling drawn by hand. Pen pressure can drive almost any parameter, so one stroke can shift from coarse dither to fine, or rotate a pattern partway through, without stopping to change tools.

Shape making

I build images from big masses first, then work tone, texture, and edges into them, so shapes in Vessel are part of the image itself: they can be drawn, filled, masked, animated, and dithered like anything else on the canvas. Pressure applies to fills too: press harder and a dithered fill gets coarser, ease off and it tightens up. Dithering happens while I draw, shaping how tones break and how colours meet, rather than getting applied as a filter at the end.

Colour cycling

Colour cycling is an old video game trick: the pixels stay put while the palette rotates through them, so a still drawing appears to move. In Vessel, any stroke or shape can cycle, whether flat or dithered, with the motion running through a shape or along the path of a stroke. It’s how I get movement into a drawing without animating frames.

Try it

Vessel is free and open source. It’s built around how I work, so it’s opinionated and rough in places, but it runs in any browser.

Demo: https://jasonstrachan.com/vessel/
Github: jasonstrachan/vessel.