Stop! HAMA Time...
Megatron's_Fury isnt just the fearless leader of the Decepticons, oh no! When he is feeling calm and relaxed he can often be found tinkering around on art projects or something else you simply wouldnt expect someone like him to be involved in, it's all very strange. Below you will see a selection of Hama bead art he has decided will make for a cool addition to his Games Room.
When asked how many more Retro games he could have bought instead of the 40 thousand plus beads to make them he went very quiet and i'm sure I saw a tear run down his cheek. Then he made Transbot and was instantly forgiven.
Ok, so what's Hama then Megs?
Well retro lovers HAMA or PERLER as it is sometimes known in other countries is one of those art's and crafts that can so easily be applied to our favourite hobby.
The beads themselves come in 3 main sizes, Mini, Midi and Maxi the ones I use are the middle sized ones (Midi) and these 5mm plastic beads are sold as either seperate colour packs or in large tubs that contain a mixtre of colours which are usually half the price,mainly because you have to sort through them yourself which most folk find a real pain, me being weird I actually enjoy sorting through them plus it means I can get twice as many beads for my money...Score!
Essentially you arrange the beads onto plastic boards that have pins on them, the boards I use are 29 x 29 then when your happy with your design you place Ironing paper over the top and use the iron to gently melt the beads together so when cool it just pops off the board.
Larger art requires you to fix together multiple back boards in order to have the space needed, essentially your only limited by your immagination, amount of beads and plastic boards.
How does this apply to retro???
It's quite frankly a perfect fit, if you think back to the classic games from as early as the original Vintage era of the Atari VCS, ColecoVision etc, through the early home computers such as the BBC micro, Acorn Electron, Spectrum, C64 etc and finally through the whole 8-Bit and 16-Bit console era you will see everything was made using sprites.
Sprites are as you all know tiny little blocks that when placed together form shapes and characters so using coloured beads to replicate this approach means I can perfectly recreate all those amazing characters from the games we all grew up with.
On top of all that it's just lots of fun, seeing a blank board eventually turn into say Mario or Sonic is a great feeling, you get a real sense of accomplishment. It is however massively time consuming even if you have templates to work from.
Considering as I said all the early games were made using sprites, finding things to make is so easy, all you need to do is type into Google a character followed by Sprite Art and page after page of potential future Hama art appears before you.
Sounds cool, how many you done?
Too many.. lol! At the last count is was over 200 and i'm still not done, my aim is to make every possible important game character from the Golden Era of gaming in order to make it a focal point of my Games Room. I've taken pictures of lots of them but there are still loads finished I need to get uploaded and then of course theres the ones i'm still working on right now. The plan is to then place them in front of the section the character belongs to ie Sonic, Ristar etc in the Megadrive section, Transbot and Alex Kidd in the master system and so on. Right now i'm about 90% of the way through and when I stand back and look at it all I really like it, it's totally worth the money spent on the beads so far.
With retro collecting sometimes you can hit a brick wall where theres nothing around you want or prices for the format your interested in are stupidly high and it can get a bit boring so doing these HAMA bead sprite art projects is a way for me to carry on immersing myself in the hobby I love to bits. Also owning a large collection of classic games mags such as Mean Machines and Total Nintendo means I always have screenshots to look at for inspiration, god bless old games magazines and their zoomed in pictures.
I honesly cannot recommend HAMA bead's enough, it's a brilliant way to waste time, you get something awesome out of it plus if your a big guy like me it's always fun seeing the sales assistant's face when you whack a few thousand beads down on the counter and he/she has no idea how to approach the conversation of why are you buying these, Brilliant!
