Free pixel art grid maker
Pixel art grid.
Turn a photo into a pixel grid, or lay an exact grid over pixel art you already have — for graph paper, for beads, for stitching. Unlike ordinary image resizing, this keeps the colours that were actually there.
Why most tools ruin pixel art
Averaging invents colours that were never there.
Standard image resizing blends each output cell from the source pixels underneath it. On a photograph that is correct — the blend reads as shading. On pixel art it is fabrication: averaging across the hard edge between two flat colours produces a third colour that appears on neither side of it.
A 6-colour 32×32 sprite, scaled to 640px and converted back to a 32-cell grid
| Method | Colours in result | Cells with an invented colour |
|---|---|---|
| Ordinary resizing (averaging) | 617 | 99.6% |
| Flat art mode (majority) | 6 | 0.0% |
Measured 30 August 2026 against the sprite’s known source palette. The same test on 16 photographs is why photographs still default to averaging — for continuous-tone images, blending is the right answer and majority sampling is the wrong one.
So the mode is chosen, never guessed. Arriving on this page sets it to Flat art; the converter’s own upload check only ever raises a suggestion, because a photograph of balloons against a clear sky is genuinely as flat as a sprite and no pixel statistic reliably tells them apart once a JPEG encoder has been through the file.
What a grid becomes
Beads
One cell, one bead. Snap every colour to a real Perler shade and get a count per colour before you start sorting.
Crochet
One cell, one stitch. The grid becomes a graphgan chart with written rows and a yarn list.
Cross stitch
One cell, one stitch on Aida, with DMC floss codes and the finished size worked out for you.
Pixel grid questions
Asked constantly, answered once.
- How do I turn a photo into pixel art?
- Upload it and choose a grid size — that is the number of pixels along the longest edge. 32 or 48 reads as classic sprite art; 80 to 150 keeps enough detail to recognise a face. Then choose a colour count: the fewer the colours, the more it reads as deliberate pixel art rather than a shrunken photograph. Eight to sixteen is the sweet spot.
- Why does other software turn my pixel art muddy?
- Because it averages. Standard image resizing blends each output pixel from the source pixels around it, and averaging across a hard edge produces a colour that exists on neither side of it. We measured this on a six-colour sprite: after a normal resize, 99.6% of the cells held a colour the sprite never contained, and a six-colour image had become a 617-colour image. Choosing Flat art switches the grid maker to majority sampling, which reproduced the same sprite exactly — six colours, nothing invented.
- What grid size should I use?
- Match it to what you are making. A 16 or 32 grid is a sprite. A 48 to 64 grid suits perler beads and small cross stitch. 80 to 100 is the usual range for a crochet blanket. Above 150 the grid stops reading as pixel art and starts reading as a low-resolution photo.
- Can I print the pixel grid on graph paper?
- Yes — every grid exports as a printable numbered chart with row and column numbers down the sides, which is exactly what graph-paper pixel art needs. The numbering is what makes a large grid countable by hand.
- Can I use a pixel art grid for crochet or beads?
- That is what the grid is for. One pixel is one stitch or one bead, so a pixel grid is already a stitch chart — it just needs a materials list. Use the crochet or bead options to have every colour matched to a real buyable yarn or Perler bead instead of a hex code.
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