Pixel Art Maker
Create pixel art with a grid-based editor. Choose grid size, colours, and tools like pen, eraser, and fill. Download your creation as PNG.
Use the pen to draw, eraser to remove pixels, and fill tool to flood-fill areas with a colour. Undo and redo to refine your art. Downloaded images are clean and crisp.
How to Make Pixel Art in the Browser
Choose a grid size (16x16 is classic NES/Game Boy territory, 32x32 is SNES-era detail, 64x64 lets you do recognisable portraits), pick a colour from the palette, and click cells to fill them. The pen tool draws single pixels, the eraser removes them, and the fill bucket flood-fills any connected matching colour. Hold and drag to draw lines, undo with Ctrl+Z (or the back arrow). The 16-colour default palette mimics the EGA palette that defined early DOS games - bright primaries plus a few earth tones - though you can pick custom colours for anything beyond 8-bit retro work.
The trick to pixel art that does not look amateur is restraint. Use 8 colours max for character sprites; reserve the last 2-3 colours for shadow accents and highlights rather than entirely separate hues. Anti-aliasing (smoothly blending edge pixels) is the wrong instinct - pure pixel art keeps hard edges and lets the eye do the smoothing. The grid forces you into chunky shapes, which is why a single-pixel-thick line at the wrong angle ruins the whole sprite. Stay symmetric and pixel-perfect; jagged outlines should be deliberate rather than mistakes.
Saving and Using Pixel Art in Other Software
Download the canvas as PNG to preserve sharp pixel edges. JPEG compression smooths out pixel boundaries and turns clean lines into blurry edges, which defeats the entire point of pixel art. The PNG export is at native canvas resolution: a 32x32 grid downloads as a 32x32 PNG that you can scale up in any image editor using nearest-neighbour resampling (not bilinear or bicubic, which blur the pixels). For game assets, that 32x32 sprite usually gets imported into Unity or Godot at the native size and scaled in the engine using point filtering.
If you want to use pixel art on social media or in a blog, scale up to at least 512x512 with nearest-neighbour interpolation before posting. Twitter and Instagram both auto-resize uploaded images, and they default to bilinear smoothing, which blurs pixel art badly. Pre-scaling to a high resolution PNG with hard edges preserves the look. The [meme generator](/meme-generator) or [add text to image](/add-text-to-image) tool can add captions to your pixel art without smoothing the original pixels if you set the right export options.
Frequently Asked Questions
What grid size should I use for pixel art?
16x16 for tiny icons or Game Boy-style sprites (Pokémon Red/Blue used 16x16). 32x32 for detailed character sprites in 16-bit style (Mega Man X, Final Fantasy VI). 64x64 for portrait pieces with recognisable facial features. Bigger is not always better in pixel art - the limitation is the point, and a well-made 32x32 sprite communicates more than a sloppy 128x128 one.
Can I save my pixel art and continue later?
The current version exports your work as a PNG image when you click download. Reopening the PNG in the maker is not currently supported because the tool reads from a canvas grid rather than re-parsing image pixels. For now, save the PNG when you finish a session, and start a new piece next time. To continue specific work, take a screenshot of the canvas as a reference and recreate the early stages quickly.
How do I scale up pixel art without it going blurry?
Use nearest-neighbour interpolation when scaling. In Photoshop: Image > Image Size, set Resample to 'Nearest Neighbor (hard edges)'. In Photopea (free, browser-based): Image > Image Size, choose 'Nearest neighbor'. In Affinity Photo: Document > Resize Document, set Resample to 'Nearest neighbor'. Scaling at 100%, 200%, 400% or other integer multiples gives the cleanest results.
What format should pixel art be saved in?
PNG, always. PNG uses lossless compression and supports transparency, which both matter for pixel art. JPEG is compressed in a way that introduces colour artefacts at sharp edges - exactly the kind of edges pixel art is made of. GIF works for animated pixel art but is limited to 256 colours; static pieces should use PNG. The maker's download button outputs PNG by default.
Related Tools
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Meme Generator
Create memes with custom text on uploaded images or colour backgrounds. Classic top and bottom text with Impact-style font and black outline.