How to
How to turn an image into pixel art
Pixel art is a picture built from a small grid of square pixels, each one a single flat color from a short palette. This converter shrinks your image to that grid, picks the colors, and scales the result back up with hard edges so every pixel stays a crisp square.
- Add an image. Drop a photo, a drawing or a logo on the page, choose a file, or paste one. It is read on your device.
- Set the pixel width. 32 pixels wide gives a chunky icon; 64 to 128 keeps a face or a landscape recognizable.
- Choose the colors. Best colors from the picture finds the palette for you. Or pick a fixed retro palette such as the 16 PICO-8 colors.
- Try dithering. It scatters pixels of two nearby palette colors so that, from a distance, they read as a shade in between, which smooths skies and gradients.
- Set the export size and download. Choose how many screen pixels each art pixel becomes, then download the PNG. The size is shown under the preview.
Why the export stays sharp
Most image editors resize with smoothing, which turns the edge between two pixels into a blurry ramp of extra colors. Here each art pixel is drawn as a solid square exactly N screen pixels wide, so a 32 pixel sprite exported at 10x is 320 pixels wide and still contains only the colors in the palette. Keep PNG resolution at 1x for exact sizes.
Getting a better result
Crop close to the subject before you start and pick pictures with strong contrast and simple shapes. Faces and fur need more pixels and more colors than logos. If the background eats into the subject, turn on Make the background transparent, which removes the color touching the edges.
From pixels to beads and stitches
The same grid works for crafts. The Perler bead pattern maker matches every pixel to a real bead color and counts the beads, and the cross stitch pattern maker turns it into a chart with symbols. For smooth, scalable artwork instead of blocks, vectorize the image.
Questions people ask
How to turn a normal image into pixel art?
Shrink the picture to a small grid, such as 32 or 64 pixels wide, then limit it to a handful of colors so each block reads as one flat shade. This converter does both at once: choose the pixel width and the number of colors, then download the result scaled up with hard edges.
Can Chatgpt do pixel art?
Image models can draw something in a pixel art style, but the result is usually a large picture that only looks blocky, with uneven pixels and dozens of near-identical shades. A converter gives you a true grid: every pixel is one square of one color from a fixed palette, which is what sprites, games and bead or stitch patterns need.
How can I convert an image to pixels?
Drop the image on this page and set how many pixels wide the result should be. Each block of the original is averaged into one pixel and matched to the nearest color in the palette. Then pick how large each pixel is in the export, from 1 to 64 screen pixels, and download the PNG.
Is JPEG or PNG better for pixel art?
PNG. It is lossless, so every pixel keeps its exact color, and it supports transparency. JPEG compression blurs hard edges and adds speckled artifacts around them, which ruins the flat blocks that make pixel art readable. That is why this tool only exports PNG, scaled up with nearest-neighbor so the edges stay sharp.
Can I make 32x32 pixel art from a picture?
Yes. Crop the picture to a square first, then set the width to 32 pixels; the height follows the picture, so a square image gives 32 by 32. At that size keep the palette small, around 8 to 16 colors, and choose a subject with a clear outline, since fine detail cannot survive.