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.

Vault Boy from Fallout series

So vacation is over and there isn't as much time for hobbies anymore. =) I've done some characters from Super Mario World. I'll show them all in a bunch one day.

Instead of all the Marios, here is awesome Vault Boy magnet I made the other day:

I don't know whose the original design is. If you google "Vault Boy" and "perler" or "hama" you will found plenty of these with some what different colouring and design. I shortened the "toes" of my Vault Boy from what seemed to be the general consensus. In most of the designs Vault Boy's feet are one bead wider. To me they seemed a little bit too wide. =)

Vault Boy is almost too big for a magnet. It still works, but probably won't hold more than one or two papers on the fridge. Looks nice though.

Colours used are all Hama:

Light blue no. 09,
Yellow no. 03 for the hair,
Pastel yellow no. 43,
Grey no. 17,
Beige no. 27,
and Black.

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:

Kingdom Hearts: Sora

Sora is one of my biggest creations so far.

It was also one of the first where I used both Photo Pearls and Hama. I didn't iron it quite long enough and when I flipped it to iron the other side some Photo Pearls were still lose and flew all over the place. Luckily I could still get them back to their places. I also apparently didn't iron the keyblade enough, but that I noticed only after I had ironed it from the other side as well. You can see that one of the dark grey beads is out of its proper place. After this one I have all ways used the masking tape method. =D (Here's a youtube video if you want to know more about masking tape method.)

I used AbyssWolf's Sora as a model for this. Original art can be found in Deviantart (partially concealed by other characters) and in here (not quite sure what this is about because the site is in Spanish). Sora is number 70 behind the other link.

I did some recolouring because I wanted Sora look more like the original in Kingdom Hearts II. I also modified the keyblade and Sora's legs a bit.

All in all I'm quite satisfied with Sora.

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.