Bead Art

Submission 11,635

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About

Bead Art, also commonly known as bead sprites or Perler art, is a type of fan art that combines traditional beadwork and pixel art to produce 2D or 3D images of iconic characters and objects from various video games, TV shows and films. On the web, the textile handicraft has grown into a popular medium of fan art as the real-life equivalent of fan-made, computer-graphic sprites, similar to other analog techniques of pixelation like Sticky Note Art and Toast Art.

Origin

One of the earliest mentions of Perler Art online was a question left on Answers.com^[12] on November 8th, 2003, which reads:

"How do you make yin yang out of perler beads?"

Spread

On May 17th, 2006, the Perler Art site 8bitsprites^[13] was created. On July 10th, 2007, the blog Pibbit^[14] published a post titled "Video Game Crafts – Perler Beads." On November 11th, 2008, The Girl Gamer^[15] published a post titled "Epic 8-Bit Art: Family Guy Perler Bead Art." On December 23rd, 2009, the DeviantART group^[5] "Perler-Beads" was founded, as of September 2014, the group has gained over 1,000 members. As of September 2014, there are over 44,000 fan art submission tagged Perler on Deviant art.^[7] The Facebook group^[3] "Perler Bead Sprites" was created April 14, 2010, and has gained over 15,0000 likes. The subreddit /r/beadsprites^[2] was created January 11, 2011, and as of September 2014, has gained over 10,000 subscribers. On March 21st, 2011, Buzzfeed^[11] published a post titled "9 Awesome Perler Bead Picture Frames." The Perler company joined Pinterest ^[4] in 2013 and has since gained over 1,000 followers. On May 24th, 2013, Autostraddle^[6] published an article titled "Nerdcraft: Craft Like a Nerd With Perler Bead Sprites." There are many fan run Tumblr blogs dedicated to Perler art including fuckyeahperlercreations^[8], perlerbeadsrus^[9] and radperlerart.^[10]

Notable Examples

The craft has been since embraced by fan artists to produce real-life sprites of well-known characters from a wide range of pop cultural and media franchises, including The Legend of Zelda, Doctor Who, Pokémon, My Little Pony, and many other fandoms.