Recently, I hopped on the th ZABAL Gamez live stream with @bettercallzaal to launch the Bizarre Pixel Studio.
Bizarre Pixel Studio is a fully featured pixel art and animation editor that runs on desktop, mobile (PWA), the Base App, on Farcaster as a miniapp, and has a dedicated edition on the BizarreBeasts Kids site.
This is the story of what I built, why I built it, and the technology powering the canvas.
BizarreBeasts started as raw illustrations in my physical sketchbook, grew into an arcade of 12 games, and is now becoming an animated series on DCP+, set in Bizarre City. The thread through all of it is simple: I want BizarreBeasts to be something that people can interact with and create with.
Pixel art is the friendliest possible gateway into making things. A 16x16 grid is not intimidating. Anyone can place a square. Under the hood, I designed a system that turns this simple grid into a powerful, highly flexible creative canvas.
Under the hood, a drawing in Bizarre Pixel Studio is actually a grid of characters. The color palette maps each letter to a specific color. For example: the letter g might be Wasabi green, k is the outline ink, and a period . represents a transparent pixel. Your drawing is literally a block of readable, plain text.
Because of this, I made the editor fully two-way:
Paint on the canvas, and the text code writes itself in real-time.
Edit the text code, and the canvas instantly repaints.
If you want to recolor an entire image or color, you do not have to click every pixel: you can just swap a single character or hex value in the code tab. It is a drawing tool and a text format that happen to be the exact same thing.
This architecture makes your art portable and remixable in a way that traditional image files (like PNGs or JPEGs) can never be. A whole animated project saves as a tiny, readable file (.newt format) that you can copy, paste, share, and reopen with everything intact: your palette, layers, frames, and animation timing.
I first revealed the inner workings of the studio during a live workshop for ZABAL Gamez (hosted by @bettercallzaal).
If you want to watch the live stream or read the full session breakdown, you can check out the video and complete transcript here:
๐ Watch ZABAL Gamez Workshop #23: Building Bizarre Pixel Studio
The BizarreBeasts Kids page has its own kid-friendly version of the pixel studio, and I added a guided tour hosted by pixel Wasabi himself! He walks kids through picking colors, painting, animating, and saving.
The tour ends by opening the Code tab to show kids their drawing represented as letters, with an interactive decoder connecting a glowing pixel to its matching character, demonstrating one of the biggest ideas in computing: everything on a screen is flexible data you can change.
I spent time making sure this tool is incredibly fun and useful:
BizarreBeasts Templates: The built-in examples are real, official BizarreBeasts art assets, including Wasabi, BizBe (and his signature booty shake), Plantz, Ringo, Seymour the Sun, Monty the Moon, the $BB coin, and Bizarre City itself. You can load these up to study exactly how a two-frame walk cycle or spinning animation works, and then make your own
Social Sharing: When using the Bizarre Pixel Studio, hitting the sharing button attaches your actual artwork.
Game-Ready Exports: You can export your creations as PNGs, SVGs, animated GIFs, sprite sheets for game engines, or raw CSS and React components for web design.
Bizarre Pixel Studio is live and completely free to use, so have some FUN going BIZARRE!
To officially kick off a series of community contests for BIZARRE Summer 2026, there is a brand-new contest live on the BizarreBeasts miniapp right now. Your challenge is to paint your own pixel BizarreBeast using the studio. Community voting decides the winner, and the first-place prize is $20 USDC!
Paint a Pixel BizarreBeast
Make your own BizarreBeast in Bizarre Pixel Studio. Community votes. Winner takes $20 USDC. NOTE: You MUST use BIZARRE Pixel Studio to qualify for the contest!
If you find a bug or have a feature idea, use the "Report a bug" button directly in the app. I read every single submission.
Make Art on the Web/Farcaster: pixel.bizarrebeasts.io
Pixel Paint in the Kids Studio: kids.bizarrebeasts.io/pixel
I'm the artist, animator, and builder behind BizarreBeasts ($BB), creating a universe where art and web3 technology converge. This is where everything I am intersects: a lifelong artist captivated by darkly humorous outsider art, a creative entrepreneur, a self-taught builder who coded 12 original games and a fully onchain miniapp from scratch, a musician performing original soundtracks, and a true BIZARRE believer in decentralized creativity.
This project was born from a vision of what's possible when an artist fully owns their creative universe, exploring the opportunities and economies that web3 enables to build a legacy of creativity and freedom for myself and the BizarreBeasts community.
In early 2026, I walked away from a six-figure corporate position to build BizarreBeasts full-time. BizarreBeasts is an Arts3 Foundation A3 Startup Award recipient, earning $100K in funding for an original animated series currently in production for release on DCP+, the streaming platform empowering independent creators from Decentralized Pictures.
For more on my transition to building BizarreBeasts full-time, see my previous update: Going Bizarre Full-Time!
BizarreBeasts is an original, art-powered ecosystem featuring hand-illustrated characters, animations, NFTs, and web3 games. With 12 games played over 183,000 times, hitting #1 trending on both Remix and The Base App, I've built a notorious community of 6,800+ token holders going BIZARRE.
Token info:
Ticker: $BB
CA: 0x0520bf1d3cEE163407aDA79109333aB1599b4004
BizarreBeasts Animated Series Coming Soon, Exclusively to DCP+!
Click here to visit the BizarreBeasts Miniapp!
Explore, add the Miniapp to your Farcaster account, and share the BIZARRE!
Collect: Highlight, Objkt & VibeMarket.
Play: Remix.
Trade: Clank.
Shop: Slice.
Stream: Spotify and more.
Explore: BizarreBeasts.io.
Disclaimer: This article is a marketing piece created to share information about the BizarreBeasts IP and onchain entertainment project. It is not financial advice. Always do your own research before making any investment decisions.