Pixel art is an engaging form of graphic art in which images are drawn pixel by pixel . But the funny thing is that to convert a photo into pixel art you don't specifically need a specialized editor like those. All it takes is one program that would probably be the last thing on your mind: a spreadsheet. This is an example: Pixelart123.

Google spreadsheets, with the help of a template specially designed for it, allows you to convert any photo (of small size, yes) into a pixel art image, where each cell of the spreadsheet acts as a pixel. The whole process is very simple , and we explain it to you in the following steps.

The first thing to do is get the template needed to generate the pixelated version of the photo. Open it from this link and copy it to your own Google Drive.

Once you have the template in your Google Drive, it's time to choose the image you want to convert into pixel art. Since the process involves reading the color of all the pixels in the photo, it is recommended to use a small image size , about 200 or 300 pixels wide at most. Click on the Spreadsheet Art menu and then on “Step 1: Upload image”, and choose the image you have chosen to apply the effect to.

The template will parse the image you upload, and write to each spreadsheet cell the hexadecimal color code corresponding to each individual pixel of the original photo.

Go back to the Spreadsheet Art menu and this time choose the “Step 2: Apply colors” option. This script will read the color code of each cell and apply the corresponding hue to it . A few seconds later, you will see something similar to this. And if you zoom out a bit, you'll see that the image starts to look like your photo.

Now you can delete the cell code (by selecting all of them and pressing the delete key), and if you want, also hide the grid lines (from the «View» menu) for a more attractive result.

Finally, it's time for the last step: make all the cells on the sheet square , so that they perfectly represent the pixels of an image. It's as easy as going back to the Spreadsheet Art menu and selecting the last option, “Step 3: Adjust cells”. You can choose the size yourself, and in this case we have put “5” to turn the cells into 5×5 pixel squares .

And this is how you will have converted an image into pixel art…

Pixel art created with Google sheets