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: 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

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.

Magic the Gathering coasters

A friend of mine is a huge Magic the Gathering enthustiatic so I made some Magic the Gathering coasters for him as a birthday present. One coaster for each land.

The design is half mine and half copied from different google image search results. Searching with words "Magic the Gathering", "coaster" and "perler" gave plenty of different results. The coasters are 19 x 19 (if you ignore the rounded corners). One reason for tweaking the existing designs was that most of them were too small. Something along the lines 16 x 16 beads and I wanted to make a bit bigger coasters. Another reason was that I didn't like the designs of the already made coasters. Don't know if mine turned out to be any better, but it was fun to try.

The swamp (i.e. black) and the island (blue) coasters were the easiest to make. There was nothing too complicated about them: easy shapes and simple colours.

The forest (green) and the mountain (red) were quite simple also. Their shapes and colouring demanded some thinking though. For example: should use white as background for the mountain? I ended up with the Creme (Hama 02) because some of the land cards have that colour (sort of anyhow) as the background and because I didn't have good light red. If I had used another red that coaster basically would have been just red ...or pink and red.

The plains coaster was the hardest one. Nothing hard about making it, but the designing... Oh man that was annoying. Below are some runners for the final design:

And these are just the final five

Colouring was a problem, shape was a problem, shadowing was a problem... In the end I copied the colouring from one of the google's image search results and the shape, with some small modifications, from another. It is farthest one from the originals, but I guess it turned out to be recognizable.

The friend liked his present and I liked making them and that's the most important point in the end.

Leviathan from Final Fantasy V

Leviathan from Final Fantasy V and some random characters from earlier FFs.

This is the largest piece I've done so far. All together Leviathan was 8 boards.
Sprite from spriters-resource.com.

The Making of: Goofy (Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories)

Finally got new pegboards! The old ones are in bad condition due all the ironing. Nowadays I only use the masking tape method when ironing =)

I bought Nabbi's/Photo Pearls' pegboards this time. They were only 1€/pegboard when you ordered at least twelve. Not bad price compared to Hama's boards which usually are at least 2€/board. There is some difference in the boards. Hama's pegs are longer for example and Nabbi's have 30 pegs instead of 29. Hama's boards clearly fit tighter together. I'm not sure Nabbi's would hold together if you tried to lift them. On table they hold together well and that's the main point anyway. The new pegboards are also see through. Previously I have only used white pegboards. Let's see how the new ones work out:

As the first project I chose Goofy from Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories. Here's the first phase. As usual I started with the easiest colours. Blacks and grays this time. The lightest gray was little bit blueish in the original sprite, but since I don't have that kind of colour I used Hama's light grey. Colours:

Photo Pearls: Black

Hama: Gray (17), Light gray (70) and Dark gray (71).

Still easy colours. (Also added black to the nose. Missed that the first time around.) And as you can see my table is kind of short so I will add the last pegboard and Goofy's leg in the end. =)

Photo Pearls: Red (19), Dark green (9), Light green (22) and White.
Hama: Pastel green (47).

Getting to the harder colours. This one was a debate between Hama's Light brown (21), Photo Pearls Light brown (20) and Brown (27). I rejected Photo Pearls' Light brown because was too light and Photo Pearls' Brown because I feared that it would be too close to which ever dark brown I would use.

The dark brown, which looks almost black in this photo even though I edited it lighter, is Photo Pearls no. 3 Chestnut.

The hardest choices were the brownish orange, the light yellow and the king of brownish light yellow. Below are bunch of combos I tried out for them. In the cap there is Photo Pearls' Orange (13) and Yellow (21). In Goofy's lower jar there is Hama's Creme (02) and Teddybear brown (60) and Photo Pearls' Orange (13). On the upper part of the face there is Hama's Creme (02), Photo Pearls' Yellow (21) (supposed to be the same colour as Hama's Teddybear on jaw) and Photo Pearls' Rust (05) (this one is orange in the cap and jaw). I also changed Hama's Light brown to Photo Pearls' Brown (27) because Rust and Hama's Light brown were almost the same. Final colours in the next pic.

I chose Photo Pearls' Orange as the orange, Photo Pearls' Yellow (21) as the brownish light yellow and Photo Pearls' Light beige (12) as the lightest yellow. Hama's Creme was just too yellow for the face and too close to the Photo Pearls' Yellow. The whole face was just too yellow. I thought really long about using Hama's Teddybear brown instead of Photo Pearls' Yellow but it was just so dark, compared to the colour in the sprite, that I decided against it. Now only thing left was the leg and ironing.

Below the whole work half way through the masking tape.

And final product on the wall with Sora and Neoshadow. The face is little bit too yellow for my liking, but other ways it looks good.

Sprite from spriters-resource.com as usual.

Super Metroid: Samus

This time I made Samus from Super Metroid which is another all time favourite game of mine from SNES. I made it facing sideways so that, if I want to create monsters or a level from Metroid, Samus is already ready for action. Maybe Mother Brain next =)

Choosing what colours to use was little problematic as usual, but I think that in the end the colours worked out pretty well and the ironing (for once!) worked out too.
Colours used:
Hama: creme (02), yellow (03), red (05), green (10), black (18), dark red (22), dark green (28), burgundy (30), neon orange (38) and pastel green (47).
Photo Pearls: dark green (09) and green (16).

Sprite for Samus from spriters-resource.com as usual: