Pixel Art Maker

About the Pixel Art Maker

Draw pixel art and animate it, right in the browser. Pick a canvas from 8 × 8 to 256 × 256 pixels (or any size in between) and draw with the pencil, eraser, fill bucket, line, rectangle and ellipse, with mirror symmetry for faces and characters, an eyedropper, brush sizes and a pixel-perfect mode that keeps freehand lines one pixel thin. Stack layers with their own opacity, add animation frames with their own timing, see the previous frame faintly with onion skin, and watch the animation play.

Your drawing is saved in this browser as you work, with undo and redo for every step, so closing the tab or a crash costs you at most the last few seconds. When it is ready, download a PNG at any whole-number scale, an animated GIF, a sprite sheet with a frame list for game engines, a vector SVG, or a project file to continue on another device. Nothing is uploaded — there is no account and no watermark.

Common uses

• Sprites, tiles, icons and animations for games, game jams and fantasy consoles such as PICO-8.
• Emotes, stickers, avatars and favicons in a crisp pixel style.
• Cleaning up a photo converted with Photo to Pixel Art, pixel by pixel.
• Teaching and learning pixel art, animation timing and colour palettes.
• Cross-stitch, bead and mosaic designs on an exact grid.

Tools and shortcuts

• Pencil (B) and Eraser (E): sizes 1–8. Pixel-perfect removes the extra corner pixels a quick freehand line leaves, so curves stay one pixel thin.
• Fill (G): fills the area of one colour that touches the pixel (pixels touching only at a corner are not part of it); untick Only touching pixels to recolour every pixel of that colour.
• Line (L), Rectangle (R) and Ellipse (O): drag from one corner to the other; hold Shift for 45° lines, squares and circles. Lines use Bresenham’s algorithm and ellipses Alois Zingl’s rectangle algorithm, so they look like hand-placed pixels.
• Picker (I), or Alt+click with the pencil: takes the colour you see at a pixel.
• Move (V) shifts the current layer (pixels moved off the canvas are cut off); Pan (H), Space+drag or two fingers scroll a zoomed-in canvas, and Ctrl+wheel or a pinch zooms.
• X swaps the primary and secondary colours, [ and ] change the brush size, , and . step through frames, Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Shift+Z undo and redo (100 steps).
• Without a mouse: focus the canvas, move the cursor with the arrow keys and press Enter to draw; for lines and shapes press Enter at both ends.

Downloads and files

• PNG: the current frame with its visible layers, at 1× (the real size, for games) or enlarged by a whole number. Colours and transparency are exact.
• Animated GIF: all frames with their timing, looping forever. GIF pixels can only be fully transparent or opaque, and a GIF holds up to 256 colours — more than enough for pixel art. Browsers show frames of less than 20 ms for 100 ms, so the shortest frame here is 20 ms.
• Sprite sheet: all frames on one PNG in a row, a column or a grid, with optional space between them, plus a .json frame list (positions, sizes and durations) for game engines.
• SVG: the current frame as vector squares — one path per colour — that stay sharp at any size, for print, laser cutting or the web.
• Project file (.json): the whole drawing with layers, frames and palette, to back it up or continue on another device. You can also open PNG, JPG, WebP and animated GIF files of up to 256 × 256 pixels; each GIF frame becomes a frame.

Where your drawings are kept

Each drawing is saved in this browser’s storage (IndexedDB) a moment after every change, and the 12 most recent are listed under Your drawings, where you can reopen or delete them. They stay on this device — another browser or computer does not have them, and clearing this site’s data deletes them — so use Save project file for anything you want to keep for good.

Limitations

• Canvases are up to 256 × 256 pixels, with up to 16 layers and 120 frames (fewer for very large canvases, to stay within a browser’s memory).
• Layers are blended normally (no multiply or other blend modes), and there is no selection tool for copying parts of a frame.
• Pixels outside the canvas are cut off when you move a layer or make the canvas smaller.
• Downloads are limited to what browsers can draw: up to 8,192 pixels on a side for PNG and sprite sheets, and less for long GIF animations.

Privacy

Everything happens in your browser. Your drawings are kept only in this browser’s storage on your device and are never uploaded; delete them under “Your drawings” or on the Cookies & storage page.