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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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...