Making sprites

Until now i’ve just been painting sprites/spritesheets in paint.net but i realised there may be some better software to do this with (mainly pixelart).

I did google for a while and not find a good answer. Is there by any chance anything built in with unity? What do you guys use?

photoshop,flash or gimp…gimp is free

Maybe www.aseprite.org if u need animations on the editor.