Turn a Photo into a
Perler Bead Chart

Fuse beads are pixel art you can hold. Each midi bead is 5mm across, so a full large square pegboard — 29 by 29 pegs — finishes at about 14.5cm, roughly the size of a coaster or a small framed piece. That resolution is the single fact that decides whether a photo will work. A face at 29 pixels wide has about a dozen beads for the eyes, nose and mouth together, which is enough for a cartoon and not enough for a portrait. Bold silhouettes, game sprites, logos, flags, holiday motifs, and lettering all convert cleanly.

Sizing is easiest in whole boards. 29×29 is one board, 58×58 is a 2×2 block of four, 87×87 is nine, and a large wall piece might be 116×116. Keeping the chart to a multiple of 29 means every seam lands on a board edge: you fuse each board on its own, then join the finished panels, instead of fighting a design that runs off the pegs halfway through a face. If you are working with mini beads at 2.6mm, the same peg counts finish at roughly half the size with twice the detail.

Palette discipline matters more than it looks. Perler's opaque range is wide enough that a naive conversion will happily ask for forty colors, most of them a single bead apart in shade — which reads as speckle once fused and means opening forty bags. Ten to twenty colors is the practical range for a photo-derived design, and the preview lets you drop or merge the ones doing the least work before you commit. Beads are also unforgiving of dithering: a checkerboard of two shades that looks like a blend on screen just looks like a checkerboard at 5mm.

Perler, Hama, and Artkal are three brands of the same thing: fusible plastic beads placed on a pegboard and ironed. Perler is the dominant US brand, Hama the European one, Artkal a common budget alternative with a wider color range. Their standard sizes match closely enough that charts are interchangeable — Perler midi at 5mm and Hama midi at 5mm are the same grid, so a pattern generated here works for either. "Melty beads" and "fuse beads" are generic names for the same craft, and "melty bead patterns" and "Perler bead patterns" describe the same chart.

The three bead sizes are the real decision. Midi (5mm) is the default and by far the best supported: the widest color range, the most pegboards, and the size every published pattern assumes. Mini (2.6mm) fits about four beads in the space of one midi, which is what people use for detailed portraits and small sprites — it is fiddly and worth it only when the design needs it. Biggie (10mm) is for young children and finishes fast at large physical size.

Fuse beads versus cross-stitch and diamond painting: all three are one-cell-one-unit crafts, and the charts look similar, but the finished object could not be more different. Cross-stitch is thread on fabric and stays flexible; diamond painting is resin drills on adhesive canvas and stays flat under glass; fuse beads become a single rigid piece of plastic you can stand up, magnet to a fridge, or build into 3D shapes by fusing panels together. Because the bead is the pixel, fuse bead charts are the least forgiving of detail and the most forgiving of mistakes — nothing is permanent until the iron touches it.

Finished pieces are mostly coasters, magnets, keychains, ornaments, sprite art, and framed panels, plus 3D builds assembled from several fused sides. Sealing is optional; a light second pass with the iron gives a flatter, glossier face if you want one.