Pinball machine perler bead art

My wife likes all sorts of crafts, one of which is perler beads. These are small beads that are placed on a pinboard mat using different colours to make images. The beads are then melted together by application of heat to form a single, cohesive mass and all of the colours meld together. This is what they look like:

After seeing her play around with this stuff for a while, the pixelated look of the images made me think of something: dots on a display. With a lot of black beads and a few shades of orange (or a whole bunch of different colours if you're trying for the Colour DMD look), you can faithfully recreate animations from any DMD machine as long as you have a still image to use as a template. We put together a WH2O splash screen as a test.

I think it looks pretty cool so thought I would share. It's the perfect kind of thing to put in a small frame and display on the games room wall. Might do some more of these in the future... but for now it's probably the closest I'll get to owning a WH2O!

Did she make that white water? If so would she do custom orders?

Yep she made that one. If you can supply a good picture of the frame you want recreated I'll see if she can do it :)

They look good, especially the white water.

There are so many great frames you could do from so many different machines.

Wow, that looks great! What size is it roughly?

Thanks for sharing.

Wow, that looks great! What size is it roughly?

 

Thanks for sharing.

It’s pretty much the exact same size as a DMD. Tiny bit bigger if anything. We used the same number of beads as there are dots on the screen.

Roughly how long did it take? I imagine it's time consuming with all those beads.

Probably a few hours of solid work in total. More if you bump it off the table like I did and have to restart! More time was spent finding the right colour beads, getting the pinboards, and finding a good image template. It is very fiddly, though.