Pixel Art Maker

16 × 16 suits icons and game items, 32 × 32 is the classic size for characters and small scenes, and 64 × 64 or larger gives room for detailed portraits and backgrounds. Width and height can differ, from 8 to 128 cells each. Resize (keep art) changes the grid without clearing your drawing: the art stays centred and is padded with transparency or cropped at the edges.

Choose a scale from ×1 to ×32 before downloading. Every export uses nearest-neighbour scaling, so each cell becomes a solid square of exactly that many pixels with hard edges. ×1 gives the true-size sprite for game engines; ×8 or more suits sharing online, where sites would otherwise blur a tiny image when they enlarge it. Very large scales are capped at 4096 px per side for PNG, 1024 px for GIF and 8192 px for sprite sheets.

Each frame is a separate drawing, up to 64 frames. With Onion skin on, the previous frame shows at about 30 % opacity and the next frame even fainter, so you can line up movement. Play loops the frames in the small preview at your chosen speed, and the GIF export uses that same speed and loops forever. Frames can be reordered, duplicated, flipped or cleared.

Yes, as long as the whole animation uses 256 colours or fewer, which pixel art nearly always does: the tool builds the GIF palette straight from the colours you used, so nothing is approximated. Transparent cells stay transparent. With more than 256 colours, for example after importing a photo into several frames, the colours are reduced with the gifenc quantizer.

Yes. Under Image to pixel art, choose an image and it is shrunk into the grid by averaging the pixels that fall into each cell, then every cell is matched to the nearest colour in the current palette, or to the best 4–32 colours picked from the image itself. Dither mixes colours in a checker-like pattern to suggest shades the palette lacks. The result replaces the current frame, and undo brings the old frame back.

The six built-in palettes — Retro 16, Handheld 4 greens, Grayscale 8, Earth 12, Pastel 12 and Neon 8 — were made for this tool, so you can use them in any project. Colours you pick yourself collect under My colours. Your frames, palette and speed are autosaved in this browser’s storage and restored when you return on the same device; nothing is uploaded.