Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Perler Beads and Monster hunter

Just around Christmas I was quite bored and needed a creative outlet. Many of my friends are into podcasts, trivia nights, sewing and what have you that I was feeling a little left out since those things have never held too much interest for me. Although my coworkers and I did have lots of fun doing trivia night once a month.


So I got myself some of these:

Then I proceeded to do what every nerd does with perler beads, I made sprite/pixel art.

I started small and worked my way up, but I'm not here to show you the lesser of my works, but my first genuinely large piece. For reference each plate is 29x29 beads. This creation sat on 3x3 planks which means 7,569 possible beads. Now, it didn't take all of that available room, but it was necessary for size overflow.  My working image was about 66x66 pixels or 4,356 beads.
 

So here's an original image of the beast in question. This fancy blue lad likes to swim, eat fish, and electrocute you every time you swat at him with a great sword. He is also really rather large in game, but even so he's just a medium + size monster.


 
I didn't sit down and do it all one go, but rather over a couple of different sittings. I've got all my beads sorted in a container and often use tweezers.

Working on this many tiny beads really cramps my hands up and puts a lot of strain on my back to bend over so long.

 
 
You can see that I like to start at the bottom and my method entails going to the horizontal maximum before working upwards.

I feel like working in this manner helps ensure I've got the piece well centered and provides reference lines so I can tell everything is placed where it is supposed to go.

 


Generally I'll put down my black lines and then do the color in-fills. Again, this helps establish references for me. I also feel like doing sections makes it more rewarding to work on as instead of just all one color placed or squiggles or black you can see a whole piece and know what it looks like.




Now how did I get this down to pixels? Well I took this in-game icon and pixelated it so that I could use it for my reference.



 
Ironing the piece comes last and that melts the edges of the beads together, binding them all and making the piece solid. Generally it is considered the most dangerous part aside from curious cats during construction. 



Ironing is pretty tough to get right and it will turns the circles into more traditional squares if you iron long or hard. Some people like the squared style, but in terms of technique making the beads melt to attachment only shows mastery.

So just how big is my piece? If the water bottle didn't help, then how about this: the whole thing is sitting on my computer desk and here are some other classic sprite characters I've made.


When he gets hungry he'll probably eat Undine first just to show he is the king of the tides.

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