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1–16 players · no sign-up

Pixel art, together

A pixel grid that more than one person can paint at once. You pick a square, you pick a colour, and everybody watching sees it appear. Send the link to a friend and you are both working on the same sprite a second later.

  1. One grid for everybody: 16×16, 32×32, 64×64.
  2. 16 colours and an eraser. One square holds one colour.
  3. Undo only takes back squares you painted yourself.
  4. Save the finished grid as a PNG that scales up cleanly.

You get a link. Send it to whoever should be painting with you.

Nobody around to paint with?

Drop into a grid where people are already painting. No link needed.

How it works

  1. Open a grid and send the link

    One button. No account, no download, nothing for anybody else to install. Whoever opens the link picks a nickname and is painting a second later — on their phone, on a tablet with a pen, or on a laptop. Up to 16 people can be on the same grid, and one person on their own works fine too.

  2. Paint squares while everyone else does

    Tap a square, or drag across a row. Every square you fill shows up on everybody else’s screen straight away, and theirs show up on yours. Two people reaching for the same square is not a problem: the last colour to land is the one that stays, and everyone sees the same thing a moment later.

  3. Keep it, or start over

    Save the grid as a PNG whenever it looks right — scaled up in whole pixels, so it stays sharp instead of turning into a blur. The person who opened the grid can wipe it and start again, or switch the size when a bigger canvas is wanted.

The one thing pixel editors do not do

There are a lot of good places to make pixel art on your own. What almost none of them do is let two people work on the same picture at the same time — you draw a sprite, export it, send the file, and your friend sends one back. That is not painting together, that is swapping homework. A grid that several people can be inside at once is a different thing: somebody blocks out a shape, somebody else starts shading it, and an argument about one square gets settled by painting over it.

Why a grid works when a canvas does not

Shared drawing usually gets messy because two brush strokes have to be woven together, and when it goes wrong everybody sees a different picture. A grid has no such problem. Each square holds exactly one colour, so when two people fill the same square the one that arrives last is simply the one that stays — there is nothing to reconcile. It also means a bad square is never permanent: anybody can put a better colour on top of it a second later.

The one thing that does need protecting is your own work, which is why undo is deliberately narrow. It takes back squares you painted, restoring whatever was underneath — and it skips any square somebody else has painted since, because rolling those back would be quietly deleting their drawing. Wiping the whole grid is left to the person who opened it.

It comes out as a real sprite

The PNG is not a screenshot. Each square is written as an actual pixel and then enlarged by a whole number — sixteen times, thirty-two times — with nearest-neighbour scaling, so the edges stay hard and the file is usable as a sprite or an avatar. Squares nobody touched are left transparent rather than filled with white. Under the grid sits a narrow strip with our name and a small code, drawn after the enlarging so it stays sharp — the square above it is untouched, so crop the strip away if you want the sprite on its own. It is assembled inside your own browser tab and never uploaded.

If you would rather have brushes than squares, Draw Together is the same room with a free canvas in it. On your own, Doodle Dash is sixty seconds of prompts, and the things to draw list is a decent place to steal a subject for your first 32×32.

Same idea as r/place, on a grid small enough to finish in one evening — or the pixel editors like Pixilart, except everybody is on the same canvas at the same time.

Questions people ask

What is pixel art?
Pixel art is a picture built one square at a time on a small grid, in a small set of colours. It came out of the technical limits of early computers and consoles — a 16×16 or 32×32 sprite was all the memory there was for a character — and stayed popular long after those limits went away, because working with very few squares forces every one of them to do something. A pixel art maker is usually a solo tool; this one is the same idea with more than one pair of hands on it.
How do several people paint the same grid?
Every square is sent on its own as “this square, this colour”, which is a tiny message, so what you paint appears on everybody else’s grid almost immediately. Because a square holds exactly one colour, two people painting the same square at the same moment is not a conflict — the one that reaches the server last wins, and everybody ends up looking at that. Nothing has to be merged and nothing gets lost in the middle.
Can somebody wreck what we have made?
Undo only ever takes back squares you painted yourself, and only if nobody has painted over them since — so nobody can undo their way through your work. Anything a griefer paints can be painted straight back over by anyone else, which is the reason this one is safe to list publicly at all. The person who opened the grid also has a wipe button and can remove people from the room.
What grid sizes are there?
16×16, 32×32, 64×64. 16×16 is about right for an icon or a tiny character, 32×32 is the default and fits a whole sprite comfortably, and 64×64 gives you room for a background. Bigger than that and the squares get too small to hit with a finger, and the picture stops being pixel art.
Do we need accounts or an app?
No. You open a grid, you get a link, and anyone who opens that link is in. There is no sign-up, no email and nothing to install — it runs in the browser, and the only thing stored about you is the nickname you type.
What if somebody loses connection?
Nothing breaks. The grid lives on the server, so when they come back the whole picture is put back on their screen exactly as it stands — including everything that was painted while they were away. Anyone joining halfway through gets the same treatment.
Can I save what we made?
Yes, as a PNG. It is enlarged by a whole number of pixels using nearest-neighbour scaling, so each square comes out as a crisp block rather than a smudge, and squares nobody painted are left transparent. Below the grid there is a narrow strip with our name and a small code that points back here, so anyone who sees the picture can find the tool. The square above that strip is nothing but your pixels, so crop it off if you are dropping the file straight into a game. The image is put together inside your own browser tab; nothing you paint is uploaded anywhere to be turned into a picture.
How is this different from r/place or Pixilart?
r/place was one enormous canvas with a whole website fighting over it; this is a small grid and the people you sent the link to. Pixilart is an editor with a gallery and an account attached — here there is no account and no gallery, just a shared grid, a palette, and a PNG at the end.

While you wait for everyone

Something to draw in the meantime.

r/place and Pixilart are trademarks of their respective owners. drawmates is not affiliated with them.