Porcelain

Mar 19 2010, 11:41 AM

I've been using Perlers on and off for years, when I was younger it was just for top of the head sort of designs. I started doing Pokemon related ones during Jr.High but since I didn't have a job then I relied heavily on my mom giving me some cash here and there and the little allowance I would get, so it was extremely hard to maintain and I stopped for a few years.

Pete actually brought it to my attention again! Now I can afford it.

If you are just getting into it, it's going to be quite pricey, you should have at least 4lg Peg Boards.
A big bucket of mixed beads, I got a 11,000 count, just so you familiarize yourself with all the different shades and options of colours that there are.
A couple of 1000 count bags of single colour, if you're doing video game you'll need A LOT OF BLACK, lots of whites and reds, as well as skin tone.

I open up my pictures on Adobe Photoshop, I like to use sprites that are .PNG as well as under "Image>Mode" in photoshop when it says "indexed colors" and has a check mark that's a good thing, it means it is only using a few select colors so that when you zoom in on your picture, in order to get it to the size where you can actually see the pixels the colors won't blur, it will just look pixelated like you want it to.

In order to first set up the picture, of course you need a picture, so once you do that, I forget exactly what header it is under on photo shop.

Try file or image and look for an option that says "guides, grids and slices"
when that window pops up, go to where it has some options under "Grid" make sure you make the grid "every 1 pixel"
So when you zoom in it shows you.

If you're not getting the grid, go to "view" and select "show Grid"

Now it's just a matter of zooming in the picture enough where you can see exactly how many beads you need in order to create!

I actually like zooming in enough where each box of the grid is almost the size of one perler bead.

Hope this helped!