How to Make Pixel Paintings Using Google Spreadsheets

Making Pixel Paintings Using Google Spreadsheets

Google Spreadsheets mostly used for budgeting and project management. But do you know that these applications can be also used to create beautiful pixel paintings by spending only very few minutes? The Google blog has recently published a story of two illustrators who have created a delightful and bright wall painting with the help of the Google Spreadsheets.

This is a simple idea. Each cell in the sheet resembles a pixel in the painting. The color of the pixel will be computed to make it as the background color of the corresponding cell. The Spreadsheet to look absolutely like the original painting, the sheet cells should be resized to perfect and small squares.

Painting with Google Spreadsheets

If you wish to create your own Spreadsheet art and you have very less time to manually paint each of the cells carefully, then with the help of Google Script, it finds you easy. Choose any photograph or any other image of your choice and using Google Script, you can convert that bitmap image into Spreadsheet art.

Create Pixel Art with Google Sheets

Following are a few simple steps to make pixel art with Google Spreadsheets. You can make use of any image but be sure that they are 300 pixels or less than that for optimal performance.

Open the Google Spreadsheet template and copy it in your own Google Drive.
Go to the Spreadsheet Art menu, select the “Image Upload” option and choose the picture that you have downloaded before.
Now the sheet will divide every single pixel of the image and write the corresponding hex color codes in the spreadsheets cells.
Choose the “Apply Colors” option from the Spreadsheet drop down and the Google Script will set the background color to every spreadsheet cell equal to the cell value.
The spreadsheet cells are shaped rectangular whereas pixels are perfect squares. Choose the third step to resize all the cells in the spreadsheet as a square.

And now your own spreadsheet art is ready.

The final result may look slightly pixelated (as in the above video) since we have used a small image as the source template however it appears impressive. The Google Sheet can be either downloaded as a PDF file or it can be saved in Microsoft Excel format.