8-Bit Chicken

Today, I want to write something about my personal way of sen-buddhism. It is called bead sprite'ing... or whatever it is called under professionals. Invented for bored children to express some creativity beside the good ol' pen&paper, these „beads“ can be put und so called peg boards, to craft some nice little images. In the end, your mommy just has to iron it, and *bam* you got yourself a nice little gift for your grandparents, or next mother's day.

Sounds lame, huh? But: Behold the age of information and the rise of videogame consoles!!! Oooh yeah. Now this gets interesting...

Every digital image is composed of pixels. In the 90s, crappy computers couldn't process alot of them at a time. But this is exactly the time, that gave birth to one of the most iconic videogames known to man. I'm speaking of Zelda, Mario, Sonic, Kirby, Seiken Densetsu, Final Fantasy....

And what do they have all in common? Right. Crappy graphics and unforgetable childhood memories. Thanks to some really nice people on the internet, you can find sprites of nearly every videogame ever made. Like this one:

The chicken of DOOOM! [thanks to http://www.spriters-resource.com]

Obviously its necessary to enlarge the picture, but keep in mind to deaktivate any kind of smoothing from your software, otherwise you will only see a big, fat smear.

Now just start to translate every pixel of the picture to the bord with your beads.

 This one is pretty simple and can be done in about 10 min. or so. Exspect time rising exponentialy with bigger projects. For example my Invader Zim took ages... [~2h].

So, here is the result of my little speed-bead-sprite'ing (is that even a word???):

See, it's a great way to transport your favourite charakters from the screen of your television to a wall in your room!

Now, lets go and make a ton of them! Link will have a HELL of a time ;)

PS: Next time I will give a small rundown on all the manufactors  and different kind of beads.