Guide

Each row is one bead color: a ring swatch, a print symbol, the manufacturer's color code, the color name, and how many beads you need. Order by the color code, not by the color on your screen — monitor color and physical plastic are not the same thing.

The small bar under each code is the match quality: it honestly tells you how far that bead is from the original sprite color:

• ΔE ≤ 2Near-perfect — you can't tell the difference by eye.
• ΔE ≤ 5Close — visible side by side, fine on its own.
• ΔE > 5Noticeable shift — this palette has no good match. Try another palette, or pick a bead you like better by hand.

ΔE uses the CIEDE2000 formula, which measures "how different two colors look to a human" rather than "how far apart the RGB numbers are". A ΔE of 2.3 is widely accepted as the just-noticeable difference.

• Artkal S · 5mm soft172 solid colors · 5mm per bead
• Artkal R · 5mm hard87 solid colors · 5mm per bead
• Artkal C · 2.6mm soft170 solid colors · 2.6mm per bead
• Artkal A · 2.6mm hard144 solid colors · 2.6mm per bead
• Hama Midi · 5mm65 solid colors · 5mm per bead
• Perler · 5mm102 solid colors · 5mm per bead

More colors means closer matches. 5mm is the de-facto standard bead size — start there. 2.6mm mini beads produce a piece half the size at the same grid resolution, with finer detail but more eyestrain. Soft beads fuse easily and stay flexible; hard beads hold their shape but are less forgiving of iron temperature.

The list recalculates instantly when you switch palettes — the same pattern may need a different number of colors in another palette, because a smaller palette merges several close sprite colors onto the same bead.

Board 29: the longest side is capped at 29 beads — exactly one standard square pegboard. One board, no splicing, best for beginners.

Fine and Original: keep more detail, but need several boards spliced together. Original is "1 sprite pixel = 1 bead" — the highest fidelity this sprite can offer. Scaling up further adds no detail and only wastes beads, so the algorithm only ever shrinks, never enlarges.

The "Boards" stat above the pattern tells you how many boards you need and how they are arranged.

For a color printer choose Color + symbols; for black & white choose Symbols only. The symbol set deliberately avoids I, O, l, 0 and 1 — you place beads one at a time by counting, and misreading a single symbol means a whole patch of wrong colors.

Every 10th grid line is darker as a counting anchor. Counting from a bold-line crossing is far more reliable than counting from the edge.

Cover with ironing paper, medium heat, no steam, press in small circles, and stop as soon as the bead tops just start to close. Over-ironing seals the holes completely and turns the piece into a flat plastic slab — you lose the bead texture.

Ironing both sides makes a sturdier but thicker piece; ironing one side keeps the ring texture on the front. Press flat while it cools or it will warp.

Patterns are converted from Gen-5 pixel sprites (96×96, palette-based). Official high-resolution artwork doesn't work: its anti-aliasing quantizes into 200+ colors that no one can build. Pixel sprites need only a dozen or so colors and are natively aligned to a grid.

Bead color data comes from the open-source project maxcleme/beadcolors, a community-maintained collection of manufacturer color charts. Manufacturers may change their formulas — always verify against a physical color card before ordering.