pixel-art

A skill for converting images into retro pixel art using palettes associated with systems such as the NES, Game Boy, and PICO-8. It can also turn the result into a short animated video or GIF.

In plain words
What is it for?
Making retro-style posters, album covers, social images, sprites, characters, avatars, and short looping scenes.
Why use it?
It provides repeatable pixel-art conversion and era-specific colors instead of requiring manual pixel editing.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/starrycod/cogitum/pixel-art
Any agent
npx skills add StarryCod/cogitum --skill pixel-art
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/StarryCod/cogitum

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 20 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,073 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 97% copy Near-identical to another mod in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00020 $0.02073
Opus 5 $0.00010 $0.01037
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00415
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00207

Measured 3d ago against content hash 247915477d5b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

pixel-art scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 3d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 4 executable files (scripts/__init__.py, scripts/palettes.py, scripts/pixel_art_video.py, …), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

This is a copy

97% identical to pixel-art — 9 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

cogitum/data/skills/creative/pixel-art/SKILL.md · 219 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 219 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Pixel Art

Convert any image into retro pixel art, then optionally animate it into a short MP4 or GIF with era-appropriate effects (rain, fireflies, snow, embers).

Two scripts ship with this skill:

  • scripts/pixel_art.py — photo → pixel-art PNG (Floyd-Steinberg dithering)
  • scripts/pixel_art_video.py — pixel-art PNG → animated MP4 (+ optional GIF)

Each is importable or runnable directly. Presets snap to hardware palettes when you want era-accurate colors (NES, Game Boy, PICO-8, etc.), or use adaptive N-color quantization for arcade/SNES-style looks.

When to Use

  • User wants retro pixel art from a source image
  • User asks for NES / Game Boy / PICO-8 / C64 / arcade / SNES styling
  • User wants a short looping animation (rain scene, night sky, snow, etc.)
  • Posters, album covers, social posts, sprites, characters, avatars

Workflow

Before generating, confirm the style with the user. Different presets produce very different outputs and regenerating is costly.

Step 1 — Offer a style

Call clarify with 4 representative presets. Pick the set based on what the user asked for — don't just dump all 14.

Default menu when the user's intent is unclear:

clarify(
    question="Which pixel-art style do you want?",
    choices=[
        "arcade — bold, chunky 80s cabinet feel (16 colors, 8px)",
        "nes — Nintendo 8-bit hardware palette (54 colors, 8px)",
        "gameboy — 4-shade green Game Boy DMG",
        "snes — cleaner 16-bit look (32 colors, 4px)",
    ],
)

When the user already named an era (e.g. "80s arcade", "Gameboy"), skip clarify and use the matching preset directly.

Step 2 — Offer animation (optional)

If the user asked for a video/GIF, or the output might benefit from motion, ask which scene:

clarify(
    question="Want to animate it? Pick a scene or skip.",
    choices=[
        "night — stars + fireflies + leaves",
        "urban — rain + neon pulse",
        "snow — falling snowflakes",
        "skip — just the image",
    ],
)

Read the full file on GitHub · 219 lines

Files

What ships with it

6 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 3d ago First seen · 219 lines · 20 tokens per session scan A 247915477d5b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

pixel-art is a skill published in the GitHub repository StarryCod/cogitum (11 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 20 tokens to every session and 2,073 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 97% identical to pixel-art, differing in 9 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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