Perler bead projects - Draco Centauros from Puyo Puyo Sun

moonatnoon.com:
Projects > Perler beads > Draco from Puyo Puyo Sun

Here's a larger project I made out of Perler beads. It's the character Draco Centauros from the video game Puyo Puyo Sun. The sprite I used was 60 pixels wide and 87 pixels tall, so the completed project is 11 3/4" x 17" (30 x 43.5 cm).

I used:
approximately 3,000-4,000 Perler beads in 15 different colors
seven interlocking 6" square pegboards (her wing extended outside the boundary of a 2x3 array, so I added another)
standard Perler gear – ironing paper, an iron, bead tweezers, sorting cups

It took about an hour to pick the image I wanted to use, count the colors and find the closest colors of beads. It then took 5 1/2 hours to arrange the beads on the pegboards, and another 20 minutes to fuse them with the iron.

If you're not familiar with how to fuse Perler beads, you can read these instructions on the manufacturer's site.

Here's Draco as she appears in the game. I learned some lessons from the color-picking I did with Arle, but I still wish there was a darker and bluer shade of green, and a more maroon shade of brown. I also chose the darker gray where I had used the ligher gray for Arle, but it's still darker than I'd prefer. I also used a coral color for the lighter red, since I didn't have a dark orange, and I think it looks OK.

Below you can see the work in progress as I was assembling it. I thought I'd be able to shave an entire hour off the six it took to make Arle, since Draco has several large areas of flat color, but it took some effort to tell the two shades of red apart in the source image.


After 1 hour	After 2 hours	After 3 hours	After 4 hours	After 5 hours	After 5 1/2 hours (ready to fuse)

Nice contrasting expressions between Draco and Arle, who I made a few days earlier.