Details
We're hosting another competition to celebrate the 8-year anniversary of Coloring Pixels!
Now is your chance to get your pixel art in Coloring Pixels!
The 20 winners of this competition will have their pixel art featured in a free update to Coloring Pixels. It's very easy to enter; keep reading to find out all the information you need. When you're ready, click on the big SUBMIT HERE link at the bottom.
The deadline is the 9th of October 2026 at 17:00 UTC. The winners will be announced on the 16th of October 2026 via a blog post here on our website, a Steam announcement, Discord, and Twitter. Links to the socials can be found at the top right of this website!
Rules and Suggestions
We need to make sure that your pixel art is compatible for use in Coloring Pixels. To help improve your chances, we have come up with a few simple rules for you to follow and some suggestions to help you get started.
Rules (the dull bit):
You must submit an image of file type PNG. Sadly, PNG is the only image file format supported by Coloring Pixels. Other formats can easily be converted to PNG through most image editing software and online converters.
The image must have a maximum dimension of 300x300 pixels. As you will have noticed, the larger images in Coloring Pixels take exponentially more time to complete. Although we know a lot of you prefer larger images, we don't want levels taking weeks to complete.
Submissions must have fewer than 100 different colors. The fewer colors, the better for Coloring Pixels; so try to keep to as few as possible. It isn't easy to know how many different colours there are in an image, so if you accidentally submit more than 100 colors it will be alright (we will need to pass your image through a filter). Some applications, such as Aseprite, let you create a color palette (which we recommend), which allows you to keep track of colors easily. If you choose an application such as Paint.NET, we recommend sticking to the pencil tool over using paintbrush tools, as they can often create numerous different shades of colors in an attempt to blend with the background. Using the magic wand tool with tolerance set to 0, you can hold Shift and select a color to highlight every colour with the same hex code - this is useful to find color count issues, as some shades of colors look the same to the eye but will have different hex codes, which matters for Coloring Pixels.
You must submit pixel art. A simple but important rule: the artwork you submit must be in the style of pixel art, resized photographs or graphical art will not be selected if no pixel art alterations have been made to the image. Although we enjoy looking at pictures of your cats and dogs, we have a Discord for that!
You must own the art piece. Please don't submit on behalf of someone else without their permission. Please make the art piece yourself for this competition. We check to see if the art you submitted belongs to someone else, as we cannot use people's work without their consent.
Suggestions
Size doesn't matter! As long as you keep within the 300x300 image dimension limit, you won't be penalised for submitting a smaller image. We will be judging submissions based on aesthetics and not complexity. For example, submitting an image of size 10x20 will be judged equally to one of size 150x200. In fact, we prefer to select a mixture of large and small submissions when possible!
Which software should I use? We recommend using either Pixaki (used by our Artist on the iPad to make Coloring Pixels levels), Aseprite or Paint.net (free). All are very powerful pieces of software that are more than capable of creating pixel art for this competition. That being said, you can use whichever software you want; as long as you can draw and produce a PNG file, it should be good enough.
"I've gone brain dead... I need inspiration!" - We can't choose for you, but you can draw anything. If you can't think of anything new or inspiring, try drawing something you love (film, game, pet fish, food) or even something on your desk (Keys, a book, the computer mouse you have with too many buttons).
If you want to submit a photograph of your cute pet, we recommend resizing it in your art software of choice and tracing over it on a separate layer to recreate your cute companion in pixel art.
Anything inspired by films or games must be different enough not to infringe on IP.
If you wish to generate image suggestions with AI, that's fine too! All we ask is that you use it as inspiration and make the piece yourself.
Can I submit multiple times? Yes, don't hold back! Submit as many images as you like. We will judge each image anonymously and individually.
