Image to pixel art
Concept art, a painting, a photo cut out, an icon drawn big: in, a clean pixel-art sprite out, with a real palette and real outlines rather than blurry squares.
Free, no sign-up. It runs in your browser: your files never leave your computer, and the tool works offline once the page has loaded.
Left, the picture simply shrunk to the same size; right, drawn as pixel art. Zoom with the buttons or the mouse wheel over a picture; drag a zoomed picture to move round it.
How to use it
- Drop a picture on the box (a PNG with a clear background works best).
- Choose how many pixels the sprite is, the look and, if you like, a palette.
- Turn the lines on or off.
- Download the sprite, as it is or scaled up 4× to post.
Not just smaller: pixel art
Shrinking a picture gives blurry squares and hundreds of colours. This tool draws it again as pixel art: the colours go to a palette of ramps (each colour of the picture gets a few shades of its own, so a small patch of red stays red), the shape gets a clean outline, and stray single pixels are tidied away. It is the renderer Pixor uses for its sprites, running in your page, so the same picture and settings give the same pixels every time.
Looks and palettes
Selective outline draws each part's outline in a darker shade of its own colour, the way pixel artists often do; Clean uses a dark line; Retro keeps four shades a colour; Flat drops the shading the picture had. From the picture builds a palette out of the picture's own colours; the others take every colour to a fixed palette.
Pictures that work best
A clear background (a PNG with transparency) gives a sprite with a clean silhouette and an outline round it. One subject, a character, an item, a building, at any size: the tool fits it to the pixel size you choose. To turn a whole folder of pictures into sprites in one look, Pixor's command line does it in one line: pxr batch pictures/ -o sprites/ --size 48.
Making sprites from 3D models? Pixor renders a model into pixel-art sheets from every side, frame by frame, and writes GIFs, Aseprite files and engine formats itself. How it works.
Try Pixor freeMore free tools
- GLB and glTF viewer: Open a 3D model, orbit it, play its animations, and see what is wrong with it.
- Sprite sheet to GIF: Turn a sprite sheet into an animated GIF or APNG, pixel-perfect.
- GIF to sprite sheet: Split an animated GIF into a sprite sheet, with its frame times.
- Sprite sheet slicer: Cut a sheet into frames, by grid or by the gaps between sprites.
- Pixel art scaler: Scale pixel art 2× to 16× with no blur, for posts and stores.
- Reduce to a palette: Map every pixel to a palette: a Lospec palette, a .gpl or your own.
- Sprite sheet maker: Pack frames into one sheet, with a JSON your engine reads.