Characters from Chrono Trigger and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

Link from The Legend of Zelda

The beads are all Hama except blues on the shield and on the sword, yellow(ish) on Link's tunic, browns on Link's hands/arms and orange on the hat and on the foot.

Chrono, Robo, Lucca, Marle and Ayla from Chrono Trigger (that most awesome rpg from SNES!)

Chrono

Orange, blue, light blue (on the clothes not on the sword), that greyish brown (on legs, 5 beads together), and the lighter skin colour are Photo Pearls. The rest of the beads are Hama.

Robo

The greens on the eyes, the three shades of grey, black and gold are Hama, rest Photo Pearls. This is the first time I used Hama's gold. I was a bit worried how the gold beads would turn out because after ironing they tend to become sort of two-coloured, but luckily that happened only on lower part of Robo and you can only see that if you look closely.

Lucca

Orange, white and greens are Photo Pearls; pink is Pyssla and the rest are Hama. I did some experimenting and ironed this one longer. I was hoping that the PP (Photo Pearls, don't feel like writing the whole name anymore) would melt a bit more from the back side. Well they did melt a bit more, but so did the Hama beads. Lucca got so thin and soft that she got warped from the middle. You can see that the vertical lines are not straight. It doesn't look too bad from the distance, but I'll probably try to straighten it.

Marle

Orange, white, light beige (on the hands for example, looks almost exactly as white) and the darkest green PP, rest Hama. With this one I tried lower temperature with longer melting time, hoping that the beads would melt more evenly. No luck. As you can see, the Hama (grey ones especially) are much more melted than the PP. Marle also warped a bit, but not too much.

Ayla

Black, white and brown are PP, the rest are Hama. You can recognise the brown PP by their not-melted-as-much-as-Hama form =) Another experiment: PP black on the edge and more pressure when ironing. I was hoping that the PP on the edge would prevent the warping and that the greater pressure would melt PP more. Result: Failure. PP didn't melt anymore than normally and I think that the black PP on the edge created some warping on their own. Just look at Ayla's right leg (left leg from our point of view). The bottom left corner has clearly bended downwards. Not too badly luckily and you can't really see it from distance. So what did we learn today? No use to try to melt the Photo Pearls as much as the Hama beads melt. You get better looking beadsprites by not doing so. Just look Link, Chrono and Robo.

And here are all the characters on the wall

Sprites for the characters are from spriters-resource.com.

All these different colours!

I began this hobby with just ten differen colour. The ones that come in Ikea's Pyssla box.

Not much to go on, eh?

Soon after I bought all available colours from local arts and crafts store. That was about ten colours more. Their brand was Hama and now I had about twenty different colours. A mix of Pyssla and Hama. Twenty sounds plenty, right? At first I thought so, but after a while I knew that it wasn't nearly enough. I had all the basic colours. I even had two different shades of some colours. But at some departments I was lacking. For example I had only one shade of red. What if some sprite needed red and dark red? Just use red for both? Well, in addition to red I had also pink, but you really can't use that as a substitute for red.

Clearly it was time to do some acquisitions! Quick googling told me that there was two brands of beads that were more popular than the rest: Hama and Perler. Since Perler was mainly American brand and not easily available on Europe I decided to concentrate on Hama. I did some research on what colours would be sensible choices to buy, but in the end I ended up ordering pretty much every colour Hama has except the fluorescent, glitter and translucent. I used Hama's website for my purchase because it seemed most convenient. And cheapest.

Hama's colour palette

I did end up owning some translucent beads because I ordered some of those boxes that has almost every colour. With all the Hama's colours I was contend... for a while. I did some awesome (in my opinion at least =D) Super Mario Bros. sprites...

...and Chrono Trigger sprites.

 

I still wasn't happy with my colour selection. Especially Magus' face was unsuccessful and could have used more variety. Some of it's failure was due to my inexperience, I'm sure. I could have used colours more wisely, but anyhow I wanted more colours. I did some more googling and found Nabbi and Photo Pearls. Photo Pearls were quite easily available and the cost wasn't too bad either. Maybe I went a bit overboard, but I ordered all the colours they had. Except gray, yellow and purple which I judged were so close to the ones I already had that I wouldn't need them.

So here's my colour collection so far. Longing for some Perler colours though...