Pixel Art Professional

Pixel Art Professional is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from willibrandon/pixel-plugin. It costs 220 tokens per session (3,233 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for improving pixel art, which uses small colored squares to make game graphics and other images. It covers color palettes, shading, dithering, and edge smoothing.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for reducing or choosing colors, adding shadows and highlights, creating patterned shading, and polishing sprite edges.
Why use it?
It helps refine the look of pixel art while controlling its colors, lighting, texture, and sharp edges.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the pixel-plugin plugin — 4 skills, 5 commands, 1 MCP server shipped together

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/willibrandon/pixel-plugin/pixel-art-professional
Any agent
npx skills add willibrandon/pixel-plugin --skill pixel-art-professional
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/willibrandon/pixel-plugin

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install pixel-plugin, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 4 skills, 5 commands, 1 MCP server.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for Pixel Art Professional

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/willibrandon/pixel-plugin/pixel-art-professional.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/willibrandon/pixel-plugin/pixel-art-professional)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/willibrandon/pixel-plugin/pixel-art-professional"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/willibrandon/pixel-plugin/pixel-art-professional.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 220 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,233 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found 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 $0.00220 $0.03233
Opus 5 $0.00110 $0.01617
Sonnet 5 $0.00044 $0.00647
Haiku 4.5 $0.00022 $0.00323

Measured 4d ago against content hash 92d99a1328d5, 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 Professional 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 4d ago.

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.

skills/pixel-art-professional/SKILL.md · 377 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 377 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Pixel Art Professional

Overview

This Skill provides advanced pixel art techniques for refining and polishing sprites. It handles dithering patterns, palette optimization, color theory, shading techniques, and antialiasing for professional-quality pixel art.

When to Use

Use this Skill when the user:

  • Wants to apply "dithering" or mentions dither patterns
  • Asks about "palette optimization" or "color reduction"
  • Mentions "shading", "highlights", "shadows", or "lighting"
  • Requests "antialiasing", "smoothing", or "edge refinement"
  • Talks about "color ramps", "gradients", or "color theory"
  • Wants to "polish" or "refine" existing pixel art
  • Mentions specific techniques like "Bayer dithering" or "Floyd-Steinberg"

Trigger Keywords: dithering, palette, shading, antialiasing, smooth, gradient, color ramp, polish, refine, color theory, quantize

Instructions

1. Understanding Dithering

Dithering creates the illusion of additional colors by mixing pixels of available colors in patterns.

When to Use Dithering:

  • Reducing color count (e.g., 256 colors → 16 colors)
  • Creating smooth gradients with limited palettes
  • Simulating textures (fabric, metal, stone)
  • Retro aesthetic (classic games used dithering extensively)

Dithering Algorithms:

Ordered Dithering (Bayer Matrix):

  • Uses fixed pattern matrix (2x2, 4x4, 8x8)
  • Predictable, regular pattern
  • Best for: textures, backgrounds, retro look
  • Fast and consistent

Error Diffusion (Floyd-Steinberg):

  • Distributes color error to neighboring pixels
  • More organic, less regular pattern
  • Best for: gradients, natural images, smooth transitions
  • Slower but higher quality

Common Dithering Patterns:

  • Checkerboard: Simple 2-color alternating pattern
  • Bayer 2x2: Basic ordered dithering
  • Bayer 4x4: More subtle ordered dithering
  • Bayer 8x8: Very subtle, near-gradient appearance
  • Floyd-Steinberg: Error diffusion for smooth gradients

2. Palette Management

Read the full file on GitHub · 377 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 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. 4d ago First seen · 377 lines · 220 tokens per session scan A 92d99a1328d5

Subscribe to this mod's changes

Pixel Art Professional is a skill published in the GitHub repository willibrandon/pixel-plugin (305 stars, last pushed 10mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 220 tokens to every session and 3,233 once invoked, about $0.0011 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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