Richard Hayler and his Code Club are currently experimenting with the AstroPi board and were fascinated by the way you can display scrolling text and images on the 8×8 matrix display. Richard has created a little Python/Pygame app that will allow you to create an 8×8 image and then export it as a PNG or as a Python-ready list that can be pushed to the matrix. Read more here or download the code from Github here.
Reminds me of the old UDG character editors you used to get on the ZX Spectrum / sprite editors on the C64!