Pixel Art Grid Maker: Turn a Picture into a Pixel Grid

How to make a pixel art grid

1. Start. Choose a picture, drop it on the box or paste it. It stays on your device. You can also try the sample picture, or start drawing on a blank grid.
2. Set the size. Type the width in cells. With the picture's proportions kept, the height follows. A cell is one block, bead, brick or square of graph paper.
3. Choose the palette and colours. Free colours stay closest to the picture. Block builder uses 26 plain colours with everyday names. Grayscale uses 8 shades from black to white. Move the Colours slider to use fewer of them.
4. Edit. Pick a tool above the grid: Paint, Erase, Fill (fills the connected area of one colour) or Pick colour (takes the colour of a cell). Mirror repeats every stroke on the other side. Undo and Redo step through your changes.
5. Count and print. The colour list shows how many cells use each colour. Download the numbered grid as a PDF, or save a PNG.

Reading the grid and the counts

Each colour has a number, shown on its swatch in the list and, with Numbers ticked, on every cell big enough to hold it. The list also shows each colour's name or hex code, how many cells use it and its share of the filled cells. That is how many blocks, beads or bricks of the colour you need, before any spares. Empty cells, shown as a light checkerboard, are left out of every count: they are the background you chose to leave empty, or cells you erased.

The bold lines mark every 10 cells, counted from the top left corner. Build or draw one 10 × 10 square at a time and tick it off: it is much easier to keep your place than counting along a whole row. Hover or move the cursor over the grid to see the column and row of a cell.

The printed grid

The PDF starts with the whole picture and a page map, then the colour key: number, swatch, name and cell count. The grid pages follow, each with up to 40 × 50 cells about 4.5 mm wide, so a two-digit number fits. Row and column numbers run along the edges and continue from page to page. Tick Repeat 2 rows and columns where pages meet to repeat the edge of the page before, shaded grey, so the pages line up. Pick white cells for a colour-by-number sheet that uses almost no ink.

Uses

• Block games. Plan a wall picture, a floor mosaic or a map art one row at a time, and collect the blocks you need from the counts. It works for Minecraft and other block-building games; Block builder's plain colour names help you match them to the blocks you have. Not an official Minecraft product. Not approved by or associated with Mojang or Microsoft. For round parts of a build, use the block circle and sphere generator.
• Fuse beads and bricks. Count the pegs across and down your pegboard and use that as the size, use only as many colours as you own, and follow the grid peg by peg.
• Grid drawing and colour by number. Print the white-cell PDF for children to colour in, or copy the picture square by square onto printable graph paper.
• Sprites. Draw a game character on a 16 × 16 or 32 × 32 grid with Mirror on for a symmetrical face, then save it with one pixel per cell to use as an image.
• Stitching. For cross stitch with thread colours and skein estimates, the cross stitch pattern maker is built for that.

Tips for clean pixel art

• Crop first. A picture with the subject filling the frame gives it more cells. Plain backgrounds can be left empty with Leave the background empty.
• Go small, then grow. Pixel art reads best at small sizes. Try 24 or 32 cells across before going bigger.
• Tidy up. Tidy up single cells replaces lone cells with their neighbours' colour, which removes noise you would otherwise build by hand. Then paint over anything left with the Paint tool.
• Fewer colours, stronger shapes. Drop the colour count until the picture just starts to lose detail. Remove unused colours from the list when you are done editing, so the numbers stay short.
• Check the result from a distance. Zoom out with the − button: pixel art is meant to be seen from further away than you build it.

Sharing and privacy

Everything happens in your browser: the picture is never uploaded. A grid you draw yourself, or make from the sample, can be shared with Share result: the link holds the grid's size, its colours and which colour each cell has, and opens it for the other person to edit. A grid made from your own picture is not put into a link, so your photo never leaves your device, even in pixel form. Save it as a PNG or PDF instead.