Pixel Art Editor

Pixel Art Editor is a small, deliberate editor for drawing on a pixel grid in the browser. There are no layers, brushes or timeline: a grid, four tools, a color picker, a palette and an export button. That restraint is the point. Every click lands on one cell, so a sprite or an icon comes out with the edges you placed, not with the soft edges a general drawing app would add.

What it does

• A grid from 1×1 to 64×64. It starts at 16×16. Change the width or height whenever you want: the pixels already on the canvas stay where they are, and new area is added on the right and bottom; shrinking crops from those same edges. 64×64 is the limit, enough for a sprite, an avatar or a small icon while keeping every cell reachable on a phone.
• Four tools. Pencil places the selected color, eraser returns a cell to transparent, fill floods a connected area of the same color and the eyedropper takes a color from the canvas. The color picker accepts any color; the palette is a fixed set of shortcuts, not a saved custom palette.
• Undo and redo that follow the whole session. Drawing, erasing, filling, clearing, resizing, loading a project and importing a JSON file all become steps in the history. Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y move through it. The history lives in memory: reloading the page starts a new one.
• Zoom and a grid you can hide. Zoom runs from 50% to 1000% in 10% steps. At high zoom the grid helps place single pixels; hide it when you want to see the drawing as it will look. P, E, F, I and G switch tools and the grid from the keyboard.
• Named projects in the browser. Save the current drawing under a name, then load or delete it from the Load list. Projects keep their width, height and pixels, so a 32×24 sprite comes back as a 32×24 sprite. They are stored in this browser profile, not in an account.
• PNG, SVG and JSON out; JSON back in. PNG is exported at one pixel per cell, with a transparent background: a 16×16 drawing is a 16×16 file. SVG is a vector file at 10× the grid size and stays sharp at any scale. JSON keeps the dimensions and the color of every cell and can be imported later to continue editing. The same JSON is the portable backup.
• Offline after the first load. The editor and its assets are cached by a service worker, so it keeps working with the connection off. It installs as a PWA on Android, iOS, Windows, macOS and Linux. There is no account, no cloud sync and no advertising.

What it does not do

• It does not import images. PNG, JPG and SVG files cannot be opened as a starting point; the only import is the app's own JSON. It does not trace a photo or convert an image into pixels.
• It has no layers, frames or animation tools. There is one grid, no onion skin, no timeline, no tileset mode and no export to a sprite sheet. It is an editor for a single still image.
• It does not save automatically. The current drawing is lost if you reload or close the tab without pressing Save or exporting. Saved projects are in localStorage; clearing the browser's site data, using private mode or changing profile removes them. Export JSON if the drawing matters.
• It does not offer export sizes. PNG is one pixel per cell, not a scaled-up image. If you need a 160×160 version of a 16×16 sprite, use the SVG or scale the PNG in another program; the editor will not resample it for you.
• It does not sync between devices. There is no account and no server copy. Moving a drawing to another device means exporting the JSON and importing it there.

Privacy and offline

The drawing, the saved projects and the undo history stay in the browser. No account is created and no drawing is uploaded. The app and its assets are cached for offline use. The optional Ufumbuzi menu includes a QR code generated by an external service; that one action needs a connection, while the editor does not.

Why use it

It is for the moment when a general drawing app is too much and a text editor is too little: a game sprite, a favicon, an avatar, a small icon for a project. The fixed grid makes the result reproducible, and the three export formats cover the usual next steps: PNG for a quick image, SVG for a scalable asset and JSON for coming back to the same file tomorrow.

For freehand drawing with different brushes and an imported image, the drawing board is the better fit. To build a palette before you start, the color palette creator gives you the colors and their codes. And to keep the apps you use in one place, the application launcher puts them on a single screen.