Where it all began

Some time ago, in not so distant past, my girlfriend brought home from Ikea some Pyssla beads. My first thoughts were along the lines: “What crap is this?? A box of plastic trash…”

I just hope I'm not supposed to build any furniture out of these.

But the beads turned out to be pretty nice entertainment. I’ve never been too much into arts, but I’ve always liked patterns. In school, for example, I never liked drawing unless we were supposed to draw geometric shapes or 3D objects with straight lines like cubes, pyramids and rectangles. I think that is what I liked in my first encounter with beads. I was creating patterns and I didn’t even have to use pen. And if I made a mistake or didn’t like the way the shape was forming, I could just remove the bad-looking beads and continue from there. So we ended having a blast. We drank some beer and made coasters out of the beads.

Then I accidentally made a swastika...

Soon after the first experiment with the beads I realised that I could do so much more than just some random geometric shapes. After all, the old video games used very simple graphics and I could recreate all my favourite characters from Super Mario Bros., Final Fantasy, Metroid, Zelda, Chrono Trigger, Donkey Kong…! Only the sky would be the limit (or the quantity of those early video games made)!

I could not have been more wrong. With only the ten colours that came in the Pyssla box I couldn’t recreate… well I don’t want to say anything, but it comes close. I did some digging through the internet and found out that other people also had had the same idea: There were plenty of different video game characters made of beads. Some even fitted in my colour palette. So I chose as my first project Koopa Troopa from first Super Mario Bros.

I was so proud of myself

I quickly added two other Super Mario characters, Boo (the ghost) and Super Mushroom (you know the basic mushroom that makes Mario grow), and a black mage from Final Fantasy series to my collection before I realized that I had been cheated. That's not Koopa Troopa from Super Mario Bros. It's not Koopa from any of Mario games (though it is quite close to the one in Super Mario Bros. 3). And neither were my Boo, Mushroom or the black mage accurate to their original games. Someone had made his/her own versions of those characters and they weren’t similar to the originals. So I vowed that I would not make the same mistake again. I would go to the source itself. I would find the original sprites and I would base my recreations to those! (But more of that in the next post.)