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First let me tell you a little story. The year was 1992 and I noticed the girl across the street was making something, with some kind of strange meltable bead-y stuff. Curious fellow that I was, I went across the way and inquired. So some weeks later I got me some of it too and made some worthless things and never touched it again.
Fast forward to 1995 where I was fooling around with my Super Gameboy. Suddenly something clicked and I had the brilliant idea to remake a Megaman sprite with those beads. So I made some relatively nice Megaman characters and once again forgot about the whole thing.
Then, sometime in 2002 my younger brother found my old Megaman thingies somewhere on the attic and my old idea was reborn. He wanted to make his own so I helped him rip some sprites and increased their color where possible. It turns out his interest in making these things wasn't as short lived as it was with me and he made a ton of them, all of which looked better than anything I ever made (of course, he had pixel-perfect sprites at his disposal thanks to emulators, whereas I had to do with a blurry TV).
The characters used in the pics below are really his creations, but I'm sure he doesn't mind that I'm giving them some exposure. He hasn't touched them in at least a year anyway. He's just like me. For extra techyness, all images have been taken with an Eyetoy. Or maybe it's just the only camera I have access to.
Regardless! If you always wanted a way to express your creative abilities, but couldn't draw anything more complex than stick-men, or perhaps your drawing abilities weren't the problem, but you wanted to create something tangible, but clay, metals and wood just weren't your thing - fear not creative children of the digital age, because now you can bring your favorite pixels to life!
All you need is some pixel-art of choice, patience and fusible beads.
Let's get started.
EQUIPMENT
The actual process of recreating a sprite or any other form of pixel-art
with beads is pretty easy, but you'll need some equipment first.
Getting some beads would be a good place to start. Over here in Europe
they shouldn't be too hard to find. Just go to your favorite toy store
and look for Hama beads. You could get
yourself beads of another brand, but this is the part where I blatantly
recommend Hama beads over others. HAMA GET HAMA GET. I'm not sure if
Hama also sells this stuff in the US, but since the back of a typical
pack of beads says "GB + USA" I'd guess so. Word is that Perler Beads work as well though. These are all marketed as being for children, so you might want to let some little bastard relative buy it for you.
Mind you that this gets expensive fast. Before creating something
make an estimate of how many beads you'll need and buy those colors
accordingly. Black, white and the primary colors are a must, but if
you're gonna make something exotic you might need just a couple of
beads of a uncommon color. Luckily there are packs with multiple
uncommon colors combined, so get one of those instead of buying a
whole pack with just, say, neon-green.
You'll need something to put these beads on too; a so-called pegboard.
These come in various shapes and sizes. The larger the pixel-art
you're gonna recreate, the larger a pegboard you'll need. Hama has
nifty pegboards that you can click together if you need more space,
but they're made of really soft plastic that melts just as easily as
the beads. This a scheme to make more money. It isn't much of a
problem if you think you can manage to not touch the pegs on the board
while ironing the beads, but you might want to look into other brand
pegboards made from harder plastic anyway. It'll melt just the same
as the Hama ones, but not as fast.
When you've created something you'll need to iron it, and this is
where the ironing paper and iron come in. Any ironing paper and iron
will do really.
GETTING STARTED
So now you have all the necessary equipment all you need is some
kind of pixel-art. Thanks to the wonders of the internet and emulation,
it shouldn't be that hard to find sprite sheets with your character
of choice. If all else fails you can always take a snapshot with an
emulator of whatever it is you're going to make.
Once you have a picture open it in Paint or Photoshop or whatever and
enlarge it several times so you can clearly see each pixel. You might
or might not want to activate a grid to make it easier to recognize
each individual pixel. If you don't have enough space behind your
desktop to make your character print out a large version of whatever
it is you're going to make. Or recreate the pixel-art by hand on good
old-fashioned grid paper.
You might as well start out easy and recreate something small and simple.
Something like... Super Mario!
Take your empty pegboard and start by recreating Mario's outline.
Whenever you make something it's easiest to first complete the
outline and any other parts that use the same color as the outline.
After a certain amount of time you'll even start to recognize patterns
used for creating outlines, which will speed things up a bit.
When you've finished the "skeleton" coloring it shouldn't be a
problem. Do keep in mind that recreating pixel-art this way gets
the best results on low-color art. 4 to 8 color characters (NES quality)
generally look a lot better than the mess 16-bit (Snes, GBA, MD/Genesis etc.)
characters often are. You can of course down-scale the amount of
colors in 16-bit characters, but it will require a lot of work to
get them to look good. Plus, there's always the problem of higher
costs being involved when having a lot of different colors.
Seems this little Mario is ready to get brought to life. Time to
heat up your iron and get that piece of ironing paper. Never
do this without the ironing paper unless you completely want to
ruin your iron. Ironing your clothes will be a lot less fun with
molten plastic hanging underneath.
Depending on the temperature of your iron it'll take about a minute
to make your beads melt and fuse. When making something large check
up on your beads to see if they're being fused evenly. There's nothing
worse than taking of the ironing paper and finding out some appendix
hasn't properly molded. Or the opposite where you'll find out some
part was heated so much it's now stuck to the pegboard.
When the beads are fused take it off the pegboard and your work is
done. Well, almost. You really should fuse the back too. This certainly
isn't a requirement, but it'll make your creation extra sturdy. Just be
sure to not melt it too much, usually the thinner the beads the worse
they look.
Pro Tip - When done your creation will start to bend as it cools
down. Put something heavy on top of it to keep it as straight as possible.
Yay! Mario lives! Time for him to search for a real-life princess.
3D BONUS
If you've got some left-over beads and feel like creating something a
little bit more posable, make some 3D thingies. Like those old wooden
dinosaur skeletons you had to puzzle and glue together. With beads
you can make low-res versions of whatever you want. Like Metroids!
Sure, they don't look much better than the average tree in a
Playstation racing game, but it's nifty desktop dressing nonetheless.
So - here are a few sample creations.
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