I can't draw at all, so what the hell am I supposed to do? Take up
Perler Beads, where low-resolution pixel art can obscure my artistic inferiorities, of course!
To those too lazy to follow the link to get an idea, Perler Beads are arranged on a grid, and fused together into a permanent form using an iron. It's marketed to kids, but has obvious applications for nerdy gamers with an appreciation for pixel art.
I started this around the beginning of Feburary and mostly use this as a method to make myself my own weeaboo items instead of wasting all of my money on pricey figurines. At this rate, I probably do a random project once every two weeks or so, whenever inspiration hits. May or may not be Touhou-related, but the following is a list of everything I've made to date, from newest to oldest:
(Each thumbnail can be clicked for a link to a larger image.)
Portals and Weighted Companion Cube - Because sometimes, you just need to hug a loving cube that's sticking out of two parts of your wall at once.
Progress images here.
Keine Hat - My first 3d project.
Commentary and gradual progress images split off into a separate post.
Hidamari Apartment Signs with Hidamari Sketch xHoshimittsu Cast - Should be self-explanatory to anyone familiar with the anime (the signs are far less artistic and less noteworthy in the manga). Commentary for the character image is farther below; it was made long before the signs, so I talk about it down there to keep my commentary in chronological order.
Tomoe Mami from Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magika - A quickie that's attached to my bag.
Kyubey from Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magika - A quickie that's attached to my bag. Was originally wider and more true to Kyubey's actual proportions, but I crunched it down to save on white beads (because it's
really easy to run out of white beads).
Shiina Mafuyu from Seitokai no Ichizon (inspired by
this) - Easily the most difficult project I've done, nearly tying for largest raw bead count (50x70, or 3500 beads, just 38 shy of the Nitori image farther below), but requiring
far more thought. Because the source image wasn't already in a perler-friendly low resolution like Nitori was, I had to pay much more attention to what I was doing to make a good low-res conversion.
By the way, those socks are no less amazing in perler format.
Touhou Power and Point Items - A couple of quickies that are attached to my bag.
Nakano Azusa from K-On! - This is probably the main reason I picked up perling. A friend of mine had crocheted a
Mio doll for me last Christmas (because she's
mai waifu my favorite character from K-On! and I'm a K-On! fanboy), and when I'd learned of perling, making an Azusa perler for her in return was one of the first ideas that came to mind.
The image is oriented with a 45 degree rotation because, with the board oriented parallel to the ground, I initially couldn't get a look for the guitar that I liked. So, instead of trying to build the guitar at an angle, I built it parallel with the board edge, and rotated the entire image instead. I eventually came up with a guitar design for the "standard" board orientation, but Azusa came out as much more stiff than she did in the rotated version, so I kept the rotated version for the more dynamic pose.
Hidamari Sketch x??? Cast (inspired by
this) - At the time this was made, Noodles had a signature containing Cave Story-style sprites of the four original members of Hidamari Sketch, so I took it and started making the sprites, but, as I was still wary of making sprites that weren't solid rectangles, I wasn't going to make just the sprites themselves, and had to come up with a way to encapsulate them. I was originally going to make them into individual coasters, but that was proving to make some big ass-coasters and would have taken a shitton of beads. I put those ideas to the side and focused on making the sprites first. Since the image source didn't contain Nazuna or Nori-chan, I watched the OP from the show to get some references for them, stumbled upon the inspiration image, and I had my idea.
Nitori (
sprite from Touhoumon) - My first major perler project. Nitori was originally going to be another PatchCon sprite, but upon attempting it, I found trouble with some shading decisions due to my limited bead palette. I ended up searching for a new sprite, referencing Touhoumon due to its comprehensiveness, often with multiple selections for various evolutions of each character. The moment I saw this sprite, I fell in love with it, and while I was initially daunted by its size (the entire project, background included, is 58x61, or 3538 beads, and remains my largest project in raw bead count), since I was basically going to be copying the sprite pixel-by-pixel, I went for it.
The background was added in after completion of the sprite, primarily because I was still new to the iron, and some tiny hanging parts of Alice like the edges of her hair and her feet were giving me problems in trying to get them to fuse neatly with the rest of the sprite. I decided that making it into a solid rectangle would eliminate this problem. Naturally, taking a Touhou with a pose like that, there had to be a danmaku background, so I threw in her Hard difficulty spell Diluvial Mere as one that would be most recognizable. I also threw in falling autumn leaves to capture a bit of her stage as well.
In the final product, the right side looks a little weird, because I went a bit crazy with the iron and melted too much of that side, causing it to flatten out more than the rest. Well, gotta learn from mistakes, right?
Alice (
sprite from PatchCon: Defend the Library) - My first Touhou perler. I decided on using a PatchCon sprite for its small size, and because the PatchCon character select screen was the best reference I could think of for a quick selection of small Touhou sprites.
Mario (sprite from Super Mario Bros NES) - A simple sprite with a minimal palette. Mario was my first perler project for testing the waters.
