📖 Tomodachi Life Drawing Guide — Palette House

Palette House is the in-game drawing tool in Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream. It lets you create custom Tomodachi Life drawings using a fixed 84-color palette. Your designs can become wallpapers, clothing patterns, and more throughout your island.

Whether you want to recreate a famous painting, design a custom shirt for your Mii, or decorate your apartment with unique patterns, Palette House gives you the creative freedom to make your Tomodachi Life drawings truly yours.

Palette House unlocks after you reach 6 Mii residents on your island. A Mii will have a Yellow Pondering bubble about wanting something handmade — accept it and the workshop unlocks. Walk up to the easel to start creating!

The Palette House tool uses a fixed set of 84 colors — 77 swatches arranged in an 11×7 grid, plus 7 pure saturated colors on a side strip. You cannot add custom colors beyond these 84.

The palette covers a wide range: whites, grays, blacks, reds, oranges, yellows, greens, blues, purples, pinks, browns, and pastels. While it may seem limiting compared to a full RGB spectrum, working within constraints often sparks more creativity!

Each color also has adjustable Hue, Saturation, and Brightness (H/S/B) sliders within the tool, letting you fine-tune tones while staying within the palette family.

Creating Tomodachi Life drawings in Palette House is different from traditional drawing. Here are some tips to get the best results:

• Start small — Begin with a 16×16 grid before attempting larger canvases.
• Use outlines — Dark outlines around shapes give that classic pixel art look.
• Limit your palette — Even though you have 84 colors, great pixel art often uses 8–12 colors max.
• Reference images — Use our tool to convert photos to the game palette first, then recreate them as Tomodachi Life drawings by hand.
• Dithering — Use alternating pixels of two colors to simulate blending. Our Tomodachi Life drawing tool supports Floyd-Steinberg and Ordered dithering.

Once you've created a Tomodachi Life drawing in Palette House, you can share your Tomodachi Life patterns with friends and the community:

• In-game sharing — Other Miis on your island may wear or display your patterns.
• Screenshot sharing — Take a screenshot with the Switch capture button and share on social media.
• Pattern Gallery — Upload your creations to our community gallery for others to browse and download. Share Tomodachi Life patterns by category so other islanders can find them easily.
• Recipe cards — Share the color recipe (grid size, color list, pixel map) so others can recreate your design exactly.

Our free Pixel Art Maker tool simplifies the process of creating game-compatible pixel art:

1. Upload any image — PNG, JPG, GIF, or WebP. Your image stays in your browser and is never uploaded to any server.
2. Choose your settings — Select grid resolution (8×8 to 64×64) and dithering style.
3. Automatic palette mapping — Your image is automatically converted to the 84-color in-game palette.
4. Download and recreate — Get a PNG, a numbered grid reference, or JSON pixel data. Use the numbered grid as a paint-by-numbers guide in Palette House.