One of my hobbies that brings in some cash to help pay bills is bead art. I specifically use Perler brand beads to make these pieces. I specialize in recreating gaming scenes that are replications in beads. One pixel is one bead in my recreations.
Considering it takes so long to create these pieces time is of the essence. Some pieces can take me a day or two of my free time to finish while others can take less than 10 minutes. There is something awesome about finishing a huge piece that took a long time, knowing the new owner is going to love them.
Some of my early pieces were all simple things. Super Mario mushrooms and the like. Some 8-Bit takes on Spider-Man and Incredible Hulk.
I later went onto start creating pieces that would set me apart from the hundreds of others that make bead art. That is when I decided to combine my favorite past times, bead art had quickly became #2.
Video games and bead art designs were fun to lay out. I felt like a mason of some sort here. Recreating the world that video game companies created years ago. I was working on making these game worlds “holdable” for fans.
One of my first was this scene from Nintendo's Donkey Kong arcade game
Now with Halloween about three and a half months away, I figured it would be an appropriate time to start making these pieces. The problem is, how to gauge the interest?
One way I am finding out what is in demand is writing this article. I am interested in knowing what you want to see in bead art. What would you be interested in holding? Displaying on a shelf or even scaring friends and family.
The biggest thing holding back going all hog wild with beads is figuring out how to ship them to their new homes. The bigger the piece, the more likely there is going to be trouble in shipping.
I do a lot of commissions. That is how these two pieces came to life.
Bead art is time consuming. There is no printer that can spit out the right color bead in the right position. Not yet anyhow. I have talked with a few friend’s years ago about making one but the sheer number of bead colors would make it an unwieldly beast to even think of.
This was also a commission request:
This was a set of 50 Links for a video game loot box style subscription service (the first 50 subscribers got one of these). There were actually 51 (four sets of colored rupees as the base and one set of 10 with the purple base and one special edition with a TriForce base).
I have a basic formula to figure out what to charge customers for pieces. About one penny per bead. That covers my time to make the piece, layout the colors, buy the beads, and create whatever a person could ask for (within reason – still haven’t quite figured out how to recreate Unicron from the 80’s Transformers movie, to scale even).
Anyhow, time to get to work on some basic designs and see how they do. If you want a specific piece contact me.