Make Your Pixel Art Come To Life! Make video game sprites come to life! How to make a Bead Sprite

1. Make Your Pixel Art Come To Life! Make video game sprites come to life!How to make a Bead Sprite By Mariah Warfield

2. What is pixel art? • Pixel art is a form of digital art, created through the use of raster graphics software, where images are edited on the pixel level. Graphics in most old (or relatively limited) computer and video games, graphing calculator games, and many mobile phone games are mostly pixel art. • en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_art

3. How do you make pixel art/video game sprites come to life? • Through the use of special types of beads that are able to be heated and melted together, you can actually replicate pixels. The finished product is usually referred to, especially when taking the art from a video game, as a bead sprite.

4. What you will need • Perler beads (either mixed container or sorted colors) • Several small containers (to sort the jar if you have one big container) • Perler board (you may need more than one depending on the size of your art) • Parchment paper • An iron • Any computer • Any graphics program you can open a pixel image into • Any desired pixel-based image

6. Step 1 • Open any graphics program with the image you want to make into a bead sprite. Zoom into the image as much as possible.

7. Step 2a (optional) • If your image program has the capability, put a grid over the image so that it will be easier to see where each pixel is.

8. Step 2b (optional) • If you purchased a large container of beads (which is cheaper but more tedious than buying pre-sorted beads), start sorting some colors into containers. You can just sort the colors you feel that you’ll need.

10. Step 3 • Using your sorted beads and using the zoomed in image as a reference, start putting each bead on your board. You may need more boards if you’re trying to make a large sprite (perler boards can interlock if you need to expand the size). One pixel is equivalent to one bead, so it may be best to start out with something small. • Try matching the colors as best as possible, but don’t worry about them not matching exactly.

12. Step 4 • Once you are done placing the beads in the appropriate spots, you are now ready to use an iron.

13. Step 5 • Place a piece of parchment paper over your piece. Using any standard iron, slowly and carefully iron over the piece until you see the beads stick together. A good indicator is if you can see the beads through the paper. Once they are stuck together, you can stop ironing. (I wanted the holes to close up in my piece, so after the beads stuck together, I removed the piece from the board and continued ironing on a different surface.) • After you’re done making the beads stick together, take the piece from the board and lay on a flat surface. Put a stack of textbooks on top for 15 minutes so that the piece won’t curl up after they cool down.

14. How it should look… • Your piece will similar to this when it’s done.

15. I added clear beads to outline my piece so that the edges would be sharp since I wanted it to look more like “pixels”, but it’s okay for all the beads to still have holes in them and not have sharp edges. It is up to personal preference.

16. The Image I used

17. Finished piece: After cutting off the edges

18. Benefits • The hobby itself is fun • You can add your finished products to your own personal art collection • You can mount them on the wall for decoration • They’re nice and unique to make as gifts for friends • They’re relatively inexpensive • Once you become good enough, you can make stuff like this…

19. (Credits to Doctoroc at http://www.doctoroctoroc.com for the image)