Perler bead projects - Female host from Nettou Quiz Champion

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Projects > Perler beads > Female host from Nettou Quiz Champion

Here's a larger project I made out of Perler beads. It's the female host from the Japanese quiz video game Nettou Quiz Champion, in a bunny gal suit presumably because the contestants are in Las Vegas at this point in their round-the-world quiz adventure. The sprite I used was 51 pixels wide and 120 pixels tall, so the completed project is 10" x 23 1/2" (25.5 x 60 cm).

I used:
3,139 Perler beads in 15 different colors
ten interlocking 6" square pegboards (since the pegboards are 29x29, this was the minimum I could use)
standard Perler gear – ironing paper, an iron, bead tweezers, sorting cups

It took about 30 minutes to pick the image I wanted to use, count the colors and find the closest colors of beads. It then took somewhere between 4 1/2 and 5 hours to arrange the beads on the pegboards, and another 30 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.

For some reason, I had a lot of trouble fusing this time. Beads kept sticking to the paper rather than staying on the pegboard. Even after I'd fused one side, lots of beads at the edges were loose and sliding around when I flipped it to iron the other side. There are three beads missing inside the arch of her left arm (just above and to the right of the tail in the photo). Also, the area above her mouth melted a lot more than the beads around it. It looks better on the other side, but I wanted to stay true to the original presentation.

Here's the host as she appears in the game in her bunny-gal costume. She also appears in several other costumes, as does the male host, both of whom are shown in the picture below it.

Directly below, you can see the design stage of this project. I used a green color to block out the background, then did a color count and discovered there were only 15 unique colors (not counting the green) -- the same as Arle and Draco.

Below you can see the work in progress as I was assembling it. Things started out a bit slow, as usual, but I picked up speed after a while. Despite being my tallest project yet, it took less time than Arle and Draco... partly because I'm learning to optimize the way I work, and partly because this character is narrower than Arle or Draco.


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

Oh, and if you're wondering how I figured out there were exactly 3,139 beads, here's my secret. I took the source image in GIMP, selected the background and painted it white, inverted the selection and painted it black, then did a histogram, which told me how many pixels were black.