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How to use MC Painting Maker

Turn any image into a custom Minecraft Bedrock painting, install the generated .mcaddon, and place your paintings in-game. Works on Bedrock Edition 1.21.40 and newer, including Minecraft Education Edition.

What an Add-On is

An Add-On is the official way to extend Minecraft Bedrock and Minecraft Education Edition. It is a small bundle of two folders: a Behavior Pack (rules and logic) and a Resource Pack (textures, sounds, models). Add-Ons run inside Minecraft itself, on any device that supports Bedrock, and they are safe to share with classmates or friends.

MC Painting Maker is a creator tool. It produces a single .mcaddon file that contains both packs. Each image you drop in becomes a custom painting entity, plus a matching placer item in the Creative inventory. Use the item against a wall and the painting appears, just like a vanilla painting.

For a broader introduction to Add-Ons in a classroom setting, see Microsoft's official Teacher's Guide to Add-Ons (PDF). That guide is generic; this page focuses on the specific workflow for custom paintings.

1. Add your images

  1. Open MC Painting Maker in any modern browser. No account, no install required.
  2. Drop one or more images into the left sidebar, or click the Add images button. PNG, JPG and WEBP are supported.
  3. For each image, pick the painting size in Minecraft blocks. Common sizes are 1x1, 2x1, 2x2, 4x2, or anything up to 8x8.
Privacy note. Images stay inside your browser. Nothing is uploaded to any server. See the privacy policy for details.

2. Fine-tune each painting

Select a painting from the list to open the editor. From there you can:

Use Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y to undo and redo. On macOS use Cmd+Z / Cmd+Shift+Z.

3. Set the pack identity

Open Pack settings (the gear icon in the top bar) and fill in:

4. Build the .mcaddon

Click Build .mcaddon in the top bar. A single file is generated in your browser and downloaded directly to your device. The file is named after your pack, for example my-paintings.mcaddon.

The archive contains a Behavior Pack and a Resource Pack. Minecraft installs both automatically when you open it.

5. Install it in Minecraft

The instructions are the same on every platform that supports Bedrock and Education Edition:

  1. Open the downloaded .mcaddon file. On Windows, double-click it. On iPad or iPhone, tap and choose Open in Minecraft. On Android, use a file manager and select Open with Minecraft.
  2. Minecraft launches and confirms Successfully imported for both packs.
  3. From the main menu, edit a world (or create a new one).
  4. In Behavior Packs, activate your pack. Minecraft will offer to auto-enable the matching Resource Pack. Accept.
  5. Make sure the world is in Creative mode if you want the painting items to appear in the inventory. The Cheats toggle must be on if you plan to use commands.
  6. Open the world and start playing.
Education Edition. The same .mcaddon works in Education Edition. After importing, enable the packs from Behavior Packs on the world settings screen. On managed school devices, an MDM download policy may block the .mcaddon file before Minecraft even sees it; in that case your IT admin needs to allow the download.

6. Place paintings in-game

You have three ways to place a custom painting on a wall.

From the Creative inventory

  1. Open the inventory in Creative mode.
  2. Find your Creative group (default Custom Paintings) inside the Items category. If your build of Minecraft does not show category tabs, just use the inventory search bar and type the painting name.
  3. Pick the painting item with the name you want.
  4. Aim at a wall and use the item (right-click on desktop, tap on touchscreen, left-trigger on controller).

The painting appears flush against the wall, snaps to the nearest cardinal direction, and is fully clickable across its width and height.

With the /give command

If cheats are enabled, you can hand yourself a painting item from any game mode. Open chat with T (desktop) or the chat icon (touchscreen) and run: 

/give @s <namespace>:<painting_id>_painting

Replace <namespace> with the namespace you picked in Pack settings, and <painting_id> with the painting's in-game ID (the slug shown in the painting properties panel). Concrete example, for a pack with namespace my_paintings and a painting whose ID is sunset: 

/give @s my_paintings:sunset_painting

Then use the item against a wall to place the painting.

With the /summon command

Custom paintings are summonable entities. If you want to spawn one at a specific spot, aim where you want it and run: 

/summon <namespace>:<painting_id>

Example:

/summon my_paintings:sunset

You can also pass coordinates and rotation in the standard Bedrock syntax: 

/summon my_paintings:sunset ~ ~ ~3 180 0

The painting will face the direction it was summoned with, then snap to the nearest cardinal facing on the next tick. The rotation argument controls which wall the painting attaches to: 0 faces south, 90 west, 180 north, -90 east.

Removing a painting

Punch a painting once (left-click on desktop, tap on touchscreen) and it despawns cleanly. Or remove all of them at once with: 

/kill @e[family=<namespace>_painting]

Every painting from a given pack belongs to the entity family <namespace>_painting, so the command targets only paintings produced by that pack, not paintings from other Add-Ons.

Tips and troubleshooting

Sharing a project file

Inside Pack settings you will find Export project and Import project. These move a snapshot of the editor state (paintings, transforms, pack metadata) as a JSON file. It is the easiest way to back up a project, share work-in-progress with someone else, or move between devices. The JSON file does not contain a built Add-On; it is a save file for the editor itself.

References

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