Josh On Design

I'm happy to introduce you to PixelEater, a web-based pixel drawing tool with support for layers, resizing, the NES color palette and downloading images with integer scaling. Try it out here. The source is on github here.

I actually built most of PixelEater last summer but delayed releasing it until it was perfect. As well all know, we should never let the perfect be the enemy of the good, so I'm releasing it in its currently buggy state.

Parts of PixelEater are rather buggy, especially the data model which is mostly immutable but not completely, so there's a few places where the UI appears to get out of sync with the model. It isn't really, it just looks that way.

PixelEater is built entirely with React, with a tiny Node server on the backend for saving documents to RethinkDB. You don't need an account to draw, but if you want to save your images for later editing you must create an account with an arbitrary email and password. (I don't actually email you).

I am especially proud of the layers panel. You can not only add and delete layers with opacity, but also drag the layers rearrange them. The set of colors you see on the bottom of the screen are the colors you have recently used in the document, so it's easy to keep your color palette limited.

I am very open to feature requests, so please try it out and tell me what you think. And if you like it, consider hiring me to build some React apps for you.