I use one of the big square perler bead boards (6"X6") and most of the time I make my own design, but for the video games I used ripped and cleaned screen shots. If you use the 6"x6" borad you need to keep in mind it's 29 pegs both ways, so the image can't be bigger then that. Unless you buy more than one board because they are made to contect to each other now
If you want to do old video game charecters
http://www.retrogamezone.co.uk/ is the best site I've found for getting the pictures. You'll want to print them out, if you have it, using windows veiwer can opting to have it enlarged to fit the paper.
One thing you may notice on the sides of the desing I use I have a dotted lines. That's so I can count how many pixel in lnegth things need to be and beads I should use.
If you buy beads, your best bet is going for the huge combo jar thing, it has lots of beads (22,000). You'll want to save yourself time and just sit and sort out the black beads ahead of time. You use a lot of those and it's easy to sit and watch tv while you sort beads into plastic baggies. Also, if you lose the wax paper,
don't use normal wax paper. It's not really wax paper you got in the kit, it's parchment paper that's made to withstand high temps from baking. =__= about the wax paper, yeah, I found out the hard way. It melted the beads and stuck to them ruining it. It also will smell bad.
New old design. I made this two years ago and I'm just scanning it now. I'ts made out of clear beads, black beads and clean green beads. The scanning does it no justice so I'll have to try and get a digital picture later.
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