Image to Pixel Art – Free Converter and Pixel Art Maker
Turn any photo, drawing, or painting into crisp pixel art in seconds. Our free image to pixel art converter lets you set the size in pixels, reduce the colors to an automatic or retro game palette, add dithering, and fix single pixels by hand with the built-in drawing tools. Download the result as a PNG or print it as a bead or cross-stitch pattern. Everything runs in your browser, so your image is never uploaded.
How to Turn an Image into Pixel Art
To convert your own picture:
- Add your image. Click “Upload image”, drag a file onto the picture area, or paste a screenshot with Ctrl+V (Cmd+V on a Mac). You can also paste an image link. On a phone, “Take photo” opens your camera.
- Choose the width. Drag the “Width” slider or click a preset from 16 to 256 pixels. The height follows your image. For an avatar, set “Crop” to “Square (center)”.
- Pick a palette. “Auto: palette from this image” finds the best 2 to 64 colors for your picture, or you choose a retro palette such as PICO-8, Game Boy, or NES.
- Fine-tune the look. Try dithering, adjust brightness, contrast, and saturation, or add an outline.
- Touch up by hand. Fix single pixels with the pencil, eraser, and fill tools.
- Download or print. Save a PNG or print a pattern for fuse beads or cross-stitch.
“Before / after” lets you drag a divider across the picture to compare the original with the pixel art. The “Grid” button outlines every pixel and adds a bold line after every 10 pixels.
Make Your Own Pixel Art from Scratch
The tool is also a simple pixel art maker. Click “Blank canvas” to start with an empty, transparent grid between 8 and 256 pixels wide and high. If “Auto” or “Original colors” was selected, the tool switches to PICO-8 so you have colors to paint with. The drawing tools work on blank canvases and converted images alike:
- Pencil (B): paints with the selected color, with a brush of 1, 2, 3, or 5 pixels.
- Eraser (E): makes pixels transparent.
- Fill (G): fills a connected area of one color.
- Pick color (I): takes a color from the pixel art.
- Move (H): lets you move around when you zoom in.
Click a swatch under “Colors in your pixel art” to paint with it, or choose any other color with the color field in the toolbar. Undo and Redo (Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y) go back up to 60 steps. Your painted pixels stay in place when you change the palette, dithering, or adjustments.
What Each Setting Does
| Setting | What it does |
| Width | Pixels across, from 8 to 256. Fewer pixels give a bolder, more abstract look. |
| Palette | The allowed colors: automatic, a fixed palette, grayscale, your own HEX codes, or the original colors without a limit. |
| Colors / Shades | The number of colors (2 to 64) for the automatic palette, or of gray shades for grayscale. |
| Dithering | None, Floyd–Steinberg, or Ordered (Bayer 4 × 4), with a strength from 10 to 100 percent. |
| Brightness, contrast, saturation | Adjust the image before it is converted, from −100 to 100. |
| Outline | “Darken strong edges” darkens pixels on the dark side of strong light-dark edges and next to transparent areas. “Outline around shape” draws a one-pixel border around shapes on a transparent background. |
| Remove background color | Makes the background transparent, starting from the edges of the picture. The color comes from the corners, or you click “Pick it” and then the background. Tolerance (2 to 60) sets how similar a color must be. |
The fixed palettes are PICO-8 (16 colors), Game Boy (4 greens), NES (55 colors), CGA (16 colors), CGA 4 colors (black, cyan, magenta, white), Sweetie 16, and black and white. With “Custom”, you can paste any list of HEX codes, for example from our color palette generator.
How Image to Pixel Art Conversion Works
The conversion happens in three steps.
Step 1: Downsampling
First, the tool shrinks your image to the width you choose. Each new pixel stands for a block of the original picture and gets the average color of that block. At a width of 64 pixels, a photo 960 pixels wide is divided into blocks of 15 × 15 pixels.
Step 2: Color Quantization
Next, every pixel gets the closest color from the palette. To judge “closest” the way the eye does, the tool compares colors in the CIE Lab color space instead of RGB. The automatic palette uses k-means clustering, the same method as our image color picker: it sorts the pixels into the number of groups you choose and uses the average color of each group.
Step 3: Dithering
A small palette turns smooth gradients, such as a sky or a cheek, into flat bands. Dithering mixes neighboring palette colors in a fine pattern that the eye blends from a distance, much like the dots in pointillism. Floyd–Steinberg dithering, published by Robert Floyd and Louis Steinberg in 1976, passes the rounding error of each pixel on to its neighbors and looks grainy and natural. Ordered dithering uses Bryce Bayer’s 1973 threshold matrix, here in its 4 × 4 form and creates the regular crosshatch pattern known from old computer games.
A Short History of Pixel Art
Building pictures from small squares of color is much older than computers. Roman mosaics were made from thousands of small cubes of stone and glass, called tesserae, and Chuck Close painted huge portraits as grids of small cells. The term “pixel art” first appeared in print in 1982, in a letter by Adele Goldberg and Robert Flegal of Xerox PARC in Communications of the ACM.
The style grew up with early video games and home computers, whose hardware could show only a few colors. IBM’s CGA graphics card from 1981 had 16 colors, but its common graphics mode showed only four at a time. The NES had a master palette of about 54 colors (counts range from 52 to 55), but only 25 could appear on screen at once, and the original Game Boy had four shades of green-gray. These limits gave each system its own look. Today, indie games, fantasy consoles like PICO-8, and many artists choose pixel art on purpose. It is also an easy way into digital art, because all you need is a small grid and a few colors.
Turn Pixel Art into Bead and Cross-Stitch Patterns
Every pixel can become a fuse bead, a cross-stitch, or a mosaic tile. Click “Print bead / cross-stitch pattern” to open a print-ready pattern:
- The first page shows a preview and a legend with a symbol, the HEX code, and the pixel count for each color, which is also the number of beads or stitches you need.
- The pattern pages show every pixel with its color and symbol, a bold line every 10 squares, and row and column numbers at every tenth line.
- Large patterns are split into parts of up to 50 × 65 squares so they stay readable on paper.
The tool also shows the finished size. With standard 5 mm fuse beads, a design 64 pixels wide is about 32 cm (12.6 inches) wide. On 14-count Aida, which has 14 stitches per inch, it is about 4.6 inches wide. “Pattern as PNG” saves the whole chart as one image. A pattern can use up to 75 colors, but 6 to 16 colors are much easier to buy and sort.
Tips for Better Pixel Art Results
- Start small. Widths of 32 to 64 pixels look most like classic pixel art.
- Use simple images. A clear subject, strong shapes, and a plain background convert best.
- Add contrast. A little extra contrast and saturation makes small pixel art easier to read.
- Dither photos only. Dithering helps with skies and skin. Turn it off for logos and bead patterns, where stray single pixels are hard to place.
- Fix faces by hand. Eyes and mouths often need one or two pixels moved.
- Enlarge without blur. Download the upscaled PNG instead of enlarging a small file in another program, which may blur the edges.
Want to see how far a masterpiece can be simplified? Click “The Great Wave” and set the width to 32. Hokusai’s famous wave is still easy to recognize in a handful of colors, and so is the Mona Lisa.
What You Can Use Pixel Art For
- Art practice: pixel art trains you to simplify shapes and work with a limited palette.
- Games: sprites, tiles, and backgrounds. Use the 1× download for game engines.
- Avatars and icons: a square crop at 32 or 64 pixels works well as a profile picture.
- Crafts: Perler and Hama bead designs, cross-stitch, mosaics, and knitting charts.
- Prints and gifts: large, sharp PNG files for posters, stickers, or T-shirts.
Your Images Stay Private
Your image is processed directly in your browser and is never uploaded to us or anyone else. If you paste an image link, your browser loads it from that website. The tool does not save your work either, so download your PNG before you close the page. The sample paintings load from Wikimedia Commons. There is no sign-up, no watermark, and no limit on how many images you convert.
More Free Art Tools
All our tools are free, run in your browser, and need no account. See them all on the free art tools page.
- Photo to sketch: turn a photo into a pencil sketch or line art.
- Photo to coloring page: turn any picture into a printable coloring page.
- Notan generator: plan light and dark shapes with a two- or three-value study.
- Art grid tool: put a drawing grid over any photo.
- Golden ratio overlay: check your composition with a golden spiral and rule of thirds.
- Perspective grid generator: print one-, two-, and three-point perspective grids.
- Paint by number generator: turn a photo into a printable paint by number template.
- Image color picker: find the exact colors in any photo or painting.
- Color name finder: get the name of any HEX, RGB, or photo color.
- Color wheel: find complementary, triadic, and analogous colors.
- Color mixer: mix paint or screen colors and find paint recipes.
- Color palette generator: create matching color schemes or a palette from an image.
- Color blindness simulator: see images and palettes as color blind people do.
- Art pricing calculator: find a fair price for your paintings and prints.
- Art prompt generator: get random ideas for drawing and painting.
- Random character generator: create an original character with traits and a palette.
Frequently Asked Questions
How Do I Turn a Picture into Pixel Art?
Upload, drag and drop, or paste your picture into the converter above. Choose a width, such as 64 pixels, and a palette, and the pixel art appears right away. Click “Download PNG” to save it.
Is There a Free Pixel Art Maker?
Yes. This tool is completely free and works without an account or a watermark. You can convert a photo or start with a blank canvas and draw pixel by pixel.
What Size Should Pixel Art Be?
For a classic retro look, 32 to 64 pixels wide works well. Game sprites are often drawn on small square grids such as 16 × 16 or 32 × 32 pixels.
Why Does My Pixel Art Look Blurry When I Enlarge It?
Most programs smooth an image when they enlarge it, which blurs the hard pixel edges. Download the PNG at 4×, 8×, 16×, or 32× instead. The tool turns each pixel into a sharp square without smoothing.
Can I Make Pixel Art with a Transparent Background?
Yes. Turn on “Remove background color” or use the eraser, and the PNG download keeps the transparency. “Outline around shape” can then add a dark border around your subject.
Can I Use Pixel Art for Perler Beads or Cross-Stitch?
Yes. Click “Print bead / cross-stitch pattern” to get a numbered chart with a symbol for every color and a legend that counts the beads or stitches of each color. The tool also shows the finished size with 5 mm beads and on 14-count Aida.
Can I Use the Pixel Art Commercially?
Pixel art you make from your own images or drawings is yours to use. If you convert someone else’s photo or artwork, the original copyright still applies. The sample paintings in the tool are in the public domain.
