This Free 'Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream' Tool Turns Your Photos Into In-Game Pixel Designs

Nintendo's new Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream game is highly customizable, allowing users to create their own designs for their Mii's appearance, clothing, and home from scratch. For the more creative gamers among us, this game is ideal for letting your imagination run wild, but for the less artistically-inclined, this freedom can be rather intimidating.

However, help is out there - with a fan-made online tool that lets you upload photos of your choice and breaks them down for the game's grid system for design.

Living the Grid, as its independently-run website informs users, allows Tomodachi Life players to "Turn any image into a paintable pixel grid," with customization enabled for "Brush size, colour palette, and a step-by-step recipe."

As you can see from the screenshots below, simply upload your chosen image that you would like to incorporate into the game (example photo courtesy of Unsplash). You can later adjust or crop the image to fit your ideal design once you select upload.

From there, you can adjust how many pixels you'd like your grid image to be, depending on how long you want to spend on the project and how detailed you want your image to be. You can also adjust for what the desired object the design is for - e.g, an object, an article of clothing, or home interiors or exteriors.

To make things easier, there's a "Game" option that bases the design on the color palette Tomodachi Life automatically presents you with, or an "Auto" option to make your design as photorealistic as possible. There's also a "Paint by Numbers and "Symbols" option for extra guidance if you find all the grid drawing confusing to look at.

At the bottom of the website, a breakdown of every color code used in the image is presented to help gamers get their designs exact, as well as a brightness/saturation option to ensure your Tomodachi design is picture-perfect.

This story was originally published by Men's Journal on May 19, 2026, where it first appeared in the News section. Add Men's Journal as a Preferred Source by clicking here.

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This story was originally published May 19, 2026 at 3:50 PM.