It sounds as if your variable named "cellsize" is of type char.
It is legal to have a statement such as
for i = 'J':'*'
and it is legal to have
for i = 54:112
but it is not legal to have a number on one side of the colon and a character on the other side of the colon.
I think it more likely than not that what you are trying to do is completely wrong, but in the meanwhile you can get around the immediate problem by using
for i = char(1):cellsize