Pixel Art Studio
Draw with mirror symmetry, pick colours off the canvas, and undo a whole stroke rather than one square at a time. Changing the grid keeps what you have already drawn instead of throwing it away.
#FF004DResize keeps your drawing centred. Imported art can use its natural, non-square ratio.
Import & Convert
Preserve subject ratio, reduce colours, and keep every output cell sharp.
Export
Multiplied by an exact integer, so every edge stays hard.
- Image
- 768 × 768 px
- Magnification
- 12×
- Transparent
- 0%
- Colours used
- 0
Colours in use
Nothing drawn yet.
- Filled cells
- 0 / 4096
Screen printing and cut vinyl are priced per colour, so this count is the number that decides what a run costs.
Why the magnification has to be a whole number
Pixel art is defined by its hard edges. Enlarge a 32-pixel sprite to 500 pixels and the factor works out at 15.625 — every art pixel then covers a fractional number of image pixels, so the renderer has to average along the boundaries and each edge picks up a soft grey fringe. At 15× or 16× the arithmetic is exact and every square stays razor sharp. This page only ever offers whole factors, and when you ask for a physical size it rounds down and tells you how far under you have landed.
Transparency, and why erasing to white is not the same thing
An eraser that paints white looks identical on screen and behaves completely differently once printed. DTF and garment transfers lay down white ink wherever the artwork is opaque, so a sprite erased to white arrives as a solid white rectangle with your character sitting in the middle of it. Here the eraser removes the pixel outright and the exported PNG carries a real alpha channel, so only the squares you actually painted are printed.
One undo, one stroke
Most simple pixel editors snapshot the canvas on mouse-down and then write directly to the grid as the pointer moves. Undo therefore rewinds to the first square of the stroke and abandons the rest, which is startling the first time a long drag turns out to be almost entirely unrecoverable. This editor takes its snapshot when the stroke begins and closes it when the button is released, so one undo removes one stroke — and the pointer path is interpolated, so a fast drag draws a continuous line rather than a dotted one.
Questions
What happens to my drawing when I change the canvas size?
It is re-centred into the new grid. You can set width and height independently; imported images automatically keep their original ratio. Growing the canvas adds empty space around the artwork; shrinking it trims from the edges. The change is undoable, and undo restores both grid dimensions along with the pixels.
Which palette should I use?
PICO-8 and Sweetie 16 are well-balanced general-purpose sets. Game Boy is four shades of green for authentic handheld work. CGA is the classic sixteen. Cut vinyl lists colours that map onto commonly stocked vinyl, which matters if the design is going to be cut rather than printed.
Can I draw perfect circles?
Not directly — there is a line tool and a rectangle tool. Circles in pixel art are usually placed by hand anyway, because the mathematically correct rasterisation rarely looks right at small sizes.
What do the keyboard shortcuts do?
B pencil, E eraser, G fill, L line, R rectangle, I eyedropper, X cycles through the palette. Ctrl or Cmd with Z undoes, and adding Shift redoes.
How does importing a picture work?
Import & Convert first trims transparent padding, applies your optional pre-processing, retains the image ratio and builds an adaptive palette. Each result cell is calculated from its source area, so thin transparent edges stay clean. Turn on dither for classic textured shading and black outline for a clear sprite silhouette.