🧩 Tomodachi Life Grid — Complete Guide & Free Tool

In Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, the Palette House drawing tool uses a fixed-size pixel grid where you paint one cell at a time. A Tomodachi Life gridis a reference image that maps every cell in that grid to a specific color from the game's 84-color palette — essentially a paint-by-numbers guide for your Switch.

Instead of guessing which colors to use and where, a grid tells you "cell (3, 7) = color #42" so you can paint pixel-by-pixel with confidence. This is especially useful for recreating real images, logos, or characters as Tomodachi Life pixel art.

Drawing in Palette House without a reference is like painting blindfolded. Here's why a Tomodachi Life grid makes a huge difference:

Converting an image to a Tomodachi Life grid involves three steps:

1. Downscale — The image is resized to match your chosen grid size (e.g. 32×32 pixels). Each pixel in the downscaled image corresponds to one cell in the grid.
2. Quantize— Every pixel's color is mapped to the closest match from the 84 Palette House colors. This uses color-distance algorithms (CIEDE2000) to find the best visual match.
3. Number — Each of the 84 colors gets a number. The grid output labels every cell with its color number, creating a paint-by-numbers reference you can follow in-game.

Dithering options (Floyd-Steinberg or Ordered) can improve the perceived color range by strategically mixing two colors in adjacent cells — similar to how newspaper printing works.

Palette House offers different canvas sizes depending on what you're drawing. Here are the common Tomodachi Life grid dimensions:

Larger grids allow more detail but take significantly longer to paint. A 64×64 grid has 4,096 cells — that's 4× the work of a 32×32. Start small and work your way up!

The Palette House color picker contains exactly 84 colors: 77 swatches in an 11×7 grid plus 7 pure saturated extras on a side strip. When creating a Tomodachi Life grid, every pixel in your source image must be mapped to one of these 84 colors.

The palette covers these color families:

• Neutrals — White, grays, and black (11 shades)
• Warm colors — Reds, oranges, yellows, pinks, browns
• Cool colors — Blues, cyans, greens, purples
• Pastels — Light versions of most hues
• 7 pure extras — Maximum-saturation red, yellow, green, cyan, blue, purple, and pink

Good grid tools use perceptual color matching (not just RGB distance) to find the closest in-game color for each pixel. This makes the resulting grid look as close to the original image as possible within the 84-color constraint.

Our free Tomodachi Life grid maker converts any image into a paintable Palette House grid in four steps:

1. Upload an image — Drag and drop or click to select any PNG, JPG, or WebP file. Your image never leaves your browser.
2. Choose your grid size— Match the canvas type you'll use in-game (face paint, pattern, wallpaper).
3. Adjust settings — Pick dithering style, adjust strength, limit max colors, or crop the image.
4. Download your grid — Get a PNG preview, a numbered grid reference for paint-by-numbers, or raw JSON pixel data.

• Use high-contrast source images — Images with clear shapes and bold colors produce the best grids. Busy photos with subtle gradients lose detail when reduced to 84 colors.
• Crop before converting — Focus on the most important part of the image. Our tool lets you crop before generating the grid.
• Limit your color count — Set a max color limit (8–16) for cleaner results. Fewer colors = easier to paint in-game.
• Try ordered dithering for small grids — It creates a retro pixel-art look that works well at 16×16 and 32×32 sizes.
• Use the numbered grid download — Print it out or keep it on your phone beside your Switch for easy reference while painting.
• Mark cells as you paint — Our tool lets you check off completed colors so you never lose track of your progress.