Final Fantasy Brave Exvius: Vivi

Long time no bead. See what I did there. See! (Sorry for the bad jokes. I really shouldn't try to write this tired.) But in all seriousness, I haven't done any bead sprites in a long time. Partly the reason is my new job (Now it's holidays. Yay!). In addition I also started a new hobby which takes a surprisingly lot of time. When ever I've had a few minutes free time, I've played Final Fantasy Brave Exvius. A good game with a nice nostalgic touch. And it has awesome sprites from many Final Fantasy games. Below is one of my favourites: Vivi.

Ironing wasn't the greatest success. It never really is with Hama beads. They melt kind of ugly and faster than the other brands and usually won't close. I'm growing kind of annoyed with them and probably would replace them with Artkal beads if Artkal were easier and cheaper to acquire. At least farther off Vivi looks nice. It's definitely my new favourite.

Pokemon magnets from the original games

Pokemon Go being all the rage nowadays, I thought to revisit the original games and make some magnets. Here is Prof. Oak, Pikachu and a pokeball.

Photo Pearls Light grey (10) worked nicely with Hama Grey (17) and black.

Dota hero icons: Razor

Added a new hero icon to the wall. This time I made Razor. It looked like one of the easiest to make while I was choosing the next hero and that turned out to be true. The colours were quite straight forward, just shades of blue and black. Here it is with the others:

Mewtwo

Just a casual Mewtwo:

The colours used are:

Hama: Light grey (70), Dark grey (71), Grey (17) and Pastel purple (45).

Photo Pearls: White, Black, Light grey (10), Purple (11)  and Lavender (24).

Artkal: Purple (S22)

 Sprite is from spriters-resource.com and the game is Fire Red/Leaf Green.

Charizard

Pokemons were big when I was a kid. I haven't been exited about them in a long while but some of them do look pretty cool. Charizard is definitely one of the coolest and it might be the coolest beadsprite I have made so far. Here's a pic of it and some pics from the making process.

Colours used are the following:

Hama: Creme (02), Red (05), Grey (17), Reddish brown (20) and Light grey (71)

Photo Pearls: Black (01), Skin (07), Yellow (14), Clear blue (17) and Light orange (29).

Nabbi: Blue (21).

At this point I run out of pegboards. I thought I had 9 of them but apparently I had only 6. So masking tape for the top, made the bottom half, joined the top and bottom together and ironed the whole thing. I probably should buy more pegboards. Making these big projects would be more simple then. I also was a bit worried that the line between the top and bottom half would be visible (luckily it wasn't).

Still plenty of space on the wall. Charizard is the biggest beadsprite I've made so far. 9 pegboards all together. Sprite is from spriters-resource.com but I don't remember which game this sprite is from.

Dota hero icons: Part 3

The Manila Major is over and OG is the winner with very solid performance. Liquid was my favourite and they had a good run too. Second place is not bad at all. Here are the last hero icons I made during the Major. From top to bottom and left to right: Axe, Lich Juggernaut, Tidehunter and Beastmaster.

Perhaps I'll make some more Dota sprites around The International. After all there is still 106 heroes left.

Dota hero icons: Lich

Lich joins the fray:

Lich turned out pretty great. And it was much nicer to make than Tidehunter. Maybe I'll make one or two Dota characters but after them it definitely is time for something else.

Dota hero icons

Juggernaut and Tidehunter minimap icons. Maybe I should make more. They look lonely.

The Making of: Juggernaut (Dota)

The Manila Major is here and to celebrate that I thought to make some Dota related beadsprites. I decided to keep it simple this time and go with a ready sprite. Hero minimap icons' size was good for what I had in mind and I made Juggernaut. Here is how it turned out:

 Easiest colour i.e. black first.

Next Photo Pearls (PP) Red (19) and Hama Dark grey (71).

PP orange (13) and Hama Pink (06). I hadn't noticed before that there was pink in Juggernaut's mask. Well of course the minimap  icon is so small that you can't really see it.First I tried PP Pink (25) but it was way too bright.

Hama Grey (17) and Light grey (70).

Another surprise was that the mask is not actually white but kind of really really light shade of green. I used PP Light grey (10) because it was the closest almost white I have. There also is some PP Light beiges (12) near the... ears or what ever those are.

Then the browns. These browns (PP 02, 03 and Hama 12) were too dark so I changed them for lighter.

The browns are PP Brown 27, Light brown20 and Cappuccino 06. I also replaced some beads with Hama Grey and Light grey (around the ear area).

Top part finished with Hama Burgundy (30), Reddish brown (20), Light brown (21) and PP Rust (05)

Finished Juggernaut on the wall waiting for company. It turned out pretty great.

Edit: Forgot the original image, but no worries here it is:

Sprite from http://dota2.gamepedia.com/Category:Hero_minimap_icons

Magic the Gathering coasters part II

For the same friend I made Magic coasters before (http://beadssional.blogspot.fi/2015/12/magic-gathering-coasters.html), I now made one colorless mana coaster. As the Wastes was introduced as a new type of land, my friend asked if I could make a coaster of it too. I took my sweet time making it but here it now is:

Now the set is complete. Wonder what I should make next...

Dark Souls - Chosen Undead

Finally finished the current project. Well actually I finished it a couple of days ago, but because I was busy with moving and some other stuff, I only now got around to make a post about it. Here is the chosen undead from Dark Souls:

Dark Souls is one of my favourite games of all time and I wanted to make something linked to the game. Some parts of the chosen undead turned out great, but others not so much. Especially the left knee just wouldn't work out as I wanted it to (I had about two dozen different versions of it). On the other hand I think that the top half turned out pretty great. I let you be the judge of how well it turned out. Below are the original image, scaled down image and my version beside each other.

Current project

Thought that I should take a pic of my current project before I manage to mess it up. About 5000 beads in it so far. I think that the figure needs some modification but overall I'm quite happy with it. Can you say what it is supposed to be?

All the Super Mario World sprites so far

I finished Super Mario World. Good game. Somehow it felt a lot harder when I was a kid. Or maybe Dark Souls have redefined the concept of hardness in my mind. Well anyway, to celebrate I made some more of Super Mario World sprites. Here they are with all the other SMW sprites:

The Making of: Mario and Yoshi (Super Mario World)

We got a Wii some weeks ago and surprise, surprise there was Super Mario World on it. I've been playing it some time now (Valley of Bowser almost conquered) and thought that it would be awesome to make my favourite character: Yoshi. Because Yoshi shines only when he's with Mario, I decided to make them together. Sprites are from spriters-resource.com, I just had to combine them myself.

As I have already made Mario with cape once, let us start with him. Whites and blacks first. I put Yoshi's there too already.

Next Hama burgundy (no. 30).

Hama yellow (03) and pink (06).

Hama blue (08), Photo Pearls yellow (21) to the cap, PP light grey (10) to the face and added also some whites I missed earlier.

PP no. 27 for the brown parts, PP yellow (21) to the shoe which I missed earlier, PP no. 23 and 28 for the blues (for some reason there was a lot of greens with the blues in the no. 23 bag).

Hama claret for Mario's arm and cap. Then I made a small adjustment to my earlier colour selection. Previously I had used Pyssla pink for the pink in the cap and in the arm. Pyssla beads however are thinner and taller than Hama or Photo Pearls so this time I traded it for Nabbi no. 18 which I got just recently. The Nabbi number 18 is about the same colour as Pyssla pink. First use for Nabbi beads. Let's see how it turns out.

Next Yoshi. Yoshi has three shades of green and I decided to try PP dark green (09) for the darkest, Hama green (10) for the middle and PP light green (22) for the lightest. Another viable option would have been PP green (16) instead of Hama green, but as it is really hard to separate PP geen and light green when they are next to each other, I decided to try Hama green as the middle one.

Almost there. Only feet (or shoes?) and hand left. The feet are easy. Just add red. Hama no. 05 for them. Unfortunately I don't have exact colour for the yellowish orange that is Yoshis hand. After some debate I used Hama teddybear brown (60) for it.

Here is the final product.

Iron Man

Yay! Got the iron back. To celebrate I made an Iron Man. It is a fridge magnet and a gift for a friend.

Just hanging here

I don't know whose the design is originally. If you google "iron man" and "perler" or "hama" there will be plenty of those. All the colours are Hama.

Creations of my better half - Part II: Some flowers and more owls

As promised, here are more of my wife's creations. First some flowers:

...in sky with diamonds?

I'm not sure if the last one is supposed to be a flower, but maybe it's close enough. It's nice and psychedelic anyway.

Then some more owls. There used to be about a dozen of these on our windowsill, but now all I could find were these two. I wonder what happened to the others.

The right one is also a badge:

These are all for today, hope you enjoyed the photos and perhaps got some inspiration. Maybe I'll do part III in some distant future.

Creations of my better half - Part I: Darth Vader, Bernese Mountain Dog and Huge Owl

My better half left for this school practise... internship... thingy to another city and won't be back until March. And she took our iron with her. So as I can't do any new beadsprites, I thought to show some of the work she has done.

First what I think is the coolest thing she has made out of beads: Darth Vader coaster!

Just needs a storm trooper coaster for companion

Next there is a head of Bernese Mountain Dog. Can be used as a coaster as well. Man we do a lot of coasters...

Last piece for this post is Huge Owl.

I think this is the biggest piece she has done. And it is actually pretty cool. Especially because you can see it pretty well from outside.

She got the ideas for these from the Pinterest, I think.

That's all for to night. Some more of her creations in a couple of days.

Christmas presents: CS: GO and Tappara logo

Handmade Christmas presents this year (except for the picture frame of course). First a CS:GO logo for a CS enthusiastic:

And for another relative a logo of Finnish ice-hockey team Tappara:

I especially like how the logo of Tappara turned out. Both pieces are few beads under 60 in height. A program called Perler was big help when I was creating these as I didn't have any model for them.