Tomodachi Life · Living the Dream
Pixel-art drawing helper ✨ ★ ♥ ♪
Turn any image into a paintable pixel grid.
Brush size, colour palette, and a step-by-step recipe.
84 handpicked swatches matched to the Tomodachi Life in-game colour picker — the same grid the game uses.
A step-by-step recipe for each pixel art design: brush, shape, stroke mode, and custom items layout.
Hover or tap a swatch to highlight matching cells on the pixel grid preview.
Drop a PNG/JPG/GIF to import images into the Tomodachi Life pixel grid maker. Choose canvas type before pixelating.
Adjust brush size, max colours, tomodachi patterns, and display toggles for your pixel art style.
Follow the grid recipe, then download your Tomodachi Life pixel art as image, numbers sheet, or JSON for automation.
How Living the Grid works, and how to map its output to what Tomodachi Life actually lets you do.
Not natively. Living the Grid simulates a pixel grid so each brush stamp maps cleanly to a cell, turning any image into paintable pixel art for Tomodachi Life.
Drop your image into Living the Grid to convert it into a Tomodachi Life grid. The tool generates a pixel-by-pixel recipe you can recreate inside Palette House. This is the easiest way to import images to Tomodachi Life custom items.
The exact 84 swatches from the Tomodachi Life in-game colour picker (77 grid + 7 saturated extras). Every swatch gets a row-column label so you can recreate tomodachi patterns without eyeballing.
Yes — Living the Grid is a dedicated pixel art maker for Tomodachi Life. Upload any image to generate pixel art with the game's own palette, brushes, and grid sizes.
Living the Grid runs entirely in your browser. It works on Tomodachi Life mobile, iOS, iPad, Nintendo Switch Lite, and desktop. No app install needed.
Tomodachi Life itself needs an emulator on PC (Ryujinx Canary, Citra emulator, Eden Nightly, or Ryubing). Living the Grid works in any browser — design on PC, paint on your console.
The Tomodachi Life colour picker is a 2D saturation/brightness pad with a hue strip. The H/S/B readout in Living the Grid shows exact button-press counts from the default position so you can land the right colour.
Tomodachi Life ships with fixed brush sizes. Snapping your design to one brush keeps the pixel grid consistent — every cell is the same size, every stroke lands cleanly.
Use it for photos, skin tones, and gradients — the speckled pattern hides limited palette steps. Turn it off for logos, tomopattern textures, and flat pixel art.
Living the Grid focuses on the pixel art subset. For stamps, fill, blend modes, and Mii faces use the Tomodachi Life Palette House tools directly.
Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is the Switch version of Tomodachi Life. Living the Grid is the go-to living the dream toolkit for pixel art, island layout planning, and custom designs.
Get six Mii residents on your Tomodachi Life island layout. Accept the Yellow Pondering event to unlock the creation workshop and all custom items categories.
No live mirror brush in Tomodachi Life. The Symmetry toggle in Living the Grid is a preview-only planning aid for balanced pixel art composition.
At 100% zoom each pixel grid cell is roughly one screen pixel — too small to read. Zoom in; the tool uses nearest-neighbour scaling so your Tomodachi Life pixel art stays crisp.
Step-by-step beginner's guide covering image upload, palette selection, brush settings, and exporting your design.
How to bring any photo or artwork into your Tomodachi Life island using Living the Grid and Palette House.
Full tutorial for getting custom art into Tomodachi Life on Switch, 3DS, and PC emulators.
Why Living the Grid is the best free pixel art maker for Tomodachi Life — features, workflow, and tips.
Living the Grid (also found as "living grid" or "living the gird") is a free, browser-based Tomodachi Life pixel art maker and pixel grid tool. It works as a companion for Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream on Nintendo Switch Lite, as well as the original 3DS version via emulators like Ryujinx Canary, Ryubing, Citra emulator APK, or Eden Nightly.
Whether you want to create tomopattern designs, tomotexture surfaces, custom items for the tomodachi catalog, bong pixel art, or plan your island layout — this is the living the dream toolkit built for it. Use it to import images into Tomodachi Life and generate pixel-perfect tomodachi patterns, personality charts, and MBTI-inspired designs.
Available on any device: Tomodachi Life mobile, Tomodachi Life iOS, Tomodachi Life iPad, Nintendo Switch Lite, or PC. Can you play Tomodachi Life on PC? Yes — pair Living the Grid with an emulator and design right from your desktop. You can also share your creations on the tomodachi share website or tomodachilife.site community.
Drop us a line. Bug reports, feature requests, and corrections all welcome.
✉ contact@livingthegrid.com