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.

The Making of: Mario with the cape (Super Mario World)

Here is some of the work and thought process I went through when making Mario from Super Mario World (which is one of my all-time favourite Mario games). The sprite below is from spriters-resource.com.

Sorry for blurry image by the way. I tried about half an hour to get it sharper, but it just wouldn't co-operate. It is perfectly sharp on my computer, but something on Blogger blurs it. Maybe it got something to do with the fact that the image is so small (original size here:). If someone knows how to make it sharp I'm all ears =) The colours are the most important thing for this post anyway even though the form is a little bit difficult to see.

Back to business then. This Mario is pretty simple, about one pegboard in size. Only the colouring of the face produced some difficulty. Because I could see that from the beginning I decided to start from the easy colours and proceed to harder from there. So first the black:

Next yellow and white, no problems there. Yellow is Hama yellow (product number 03). Black is Hama black and white is the white of Photo Pearls, if you are interested. Reason for different brand of white and black was that I had run out of Hama white.

On the edge of the cape I used Hama burgundy (no. 30). First I thought about using dark brown (Hama or Photo Pearls), but I thought there was a reddish tint on the edge so I used burgundy instead. It is quite dark anyhow and I think it worked out pretty well.

Next Hama blue (no. 08) for Mario's clothes and that short section of the cape (which I found out a bit weird but it was on all the sprites I could find so I guess it is correct). In the cap there is two Photo Pearls (from now on just PP) yellows (no. 21) and one Hama teddybear brown (no. 60). The red in the cap and close to Mario's hand is Hama claret (no. 29).

I didn't quite have the right light brown, but the PP brown (no. 27) was the closest so I used that. I thought about using Hama light brown (no. 21), but it was too light and a bit too much like fudge.

Add some blues (PP no. 23 and 28). First I put Hama azur blue (no. 49) as the lightest blue, but it wasn't quite distinct enough so I changed it for PP.

Rare use for Pyssla beads. Pyssla pink to the cap and to the arm.

For the face I tried different combos. The light, almost white, colour is PP light grey (no. 10). It settled there easily, but the red/pinkish colour was harder.

This one is Hama pastel red (no. 44) which was actually close to the original colour, but was just a little bit too red. With it Mario looked like he'd done too much drinking... So I discarded it.

Here we have PP antique pink (no. 18). It looked most natural, but not like the original. Plus it didn't really fit in the cape.

My final choice was Hama pink (no. 06). It is not exactly the right colour either, but I think it was the best choice.

Here's the final work before ironing...

...and here after ironing. Diving on some Final Fantasy characters.

So what do you think? Did I make right choices or wrong choices? Comments appreciated.

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...

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.)