Pixel Paint

Overview

Pixel Paint is a small studio rather than a game with a score. The canvas is a 16×16 grid — 256 squares — and you fill them one at a time to build an image, the way sprite artists once worked under tight hardware limits. Operating at that resolution forces deliberate choices: every square is a large fraction of the picture, so colour and placement matter in a way they do not on a big freehand canvas.

The toolkit is surprisingly complete for the size. A 24-colour palette, a pencil for placing pixels, a fill bucket for flooding regions, an eraser, and an eyedropper for sampling a colour already on the canvas cover the basics, and five colour-by-number templates give a guided starting point. Work auto-saves to the browser, undo and redo walk back through twenty steps, and finished pieces export as PNG — so what you make actually leaves the page with you.

How to Play

Paint by clicking or dragging across cells with the mouse (right-click erases), or by tapping and dragging on a touchscreen. Pick a colour from the palette, choose a tool — pencil, fill, eraser, or eyedropper — and apply it to the canvas. The fill tool floods an enclosed area, the eyedropper copies an existing colour onto your brush, and undo and redo step through your last twenty actions. Start a colour-by-number template for guidance, or begin on a blank grid and save automatically as you work.

Tips & Strategy

Plan the silhouette first. Because the grid is small, sketching the outline of your subject in a single colour before filling anything in keeps proportions honest — a 16-square-wide canvas punishes a head drawn too large, and an early outline catches that before you have invested in detail. Work dark to light: lay down the darkest shades, then the mid-tones, then highlights, so the form reads clearly even before you finish.

Use the eyedropper heavily. Sampling colours already on the canvas keeps your palette consistent and speeds up shading, since you can grab a tone and place it elsewhere without returning to the palette. Export a PNG at stages you like — the auto-save protects your current piece, but an export preserves a version you can revisit after bigger changes. For clean results, avoid single stray pixels of a different colour inside large areas; at this resolution, even one off-colour square reads as noise.