Pixel art editor guide

Start

The tool opens with a small tree on a 16 × 16 grid, drawn in NES greens and browns. The Pencil is picked and the colour is white.

What you need

• A current browser. Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari all draw it. No WebGL or GPU is needed.
• Nothing else. The tool does not open pictures; you draw on its own grid.

Your first result

1. Open Pixel art editor. The tree is already on the grid.
2. Keep Pencil picked in the list, and pick a colour: tap a swatch under Palette, or use the colour box under Color.
3. Draw on the grid. Then pick Fill and tap inside an area to fill every touching square of the same colour.
4. Scroll, or pinch with two fingers, to zoom. Pick Move, or drag with two fingers, to slide the view.
5. Press 4x at the top of the panel to save the drawing as pixel-art-16x16-4x.png.

Good to know

• A faint square follows the pointer to show where the Pencil will land. The Eraser shows a red outline instead.
• Line, Rectangle and Circle draw from where you press to where you let go, with a half-strength preview while you drag.
• Open History and press Undo to step back one stroke, fill or shape, up to 50 of them.
• Picking a grid size, or pressing Reset canvas, empties the grid and clears the undo steps. Save first.
• The two numbers at the top right of the frame are the square under the pointer, counted from 0, 0 at the top left, and the zoom.
• On a phone the tools sit in a row above the grid; swipe it sideways to see them all. The controls sit in a bar at the bottom of the screen. Tap the bar to open them.