Who would have thought such a cool home decorating concept could be done so easily? Now you can produce the same trippy effect Valve used to create Portal. Naturally we don’t recommend you go hurling yourself through the mirror. But if you have some free time in the week and want to add some videogame flare to your home, try your hand at creating your own portals.

For my latest melted beads project I decided to remain old school, this time with Link from The Legend of Zelda (NES).

I found a lot of sprite designs online for this one but none were lage enough to maximize the 29×29 pixel grid. Again I used PCStitch to convert images I had found and edit it to make the desired design using the Pyssla beads 10-color pallet…

For my second perler beads project I chose one of my all-time favorite arcade game icons, Peter Pepper from BurgerTime (1982).

Click through for the pattern…

Inspired by the cross stitch projects (and by our very own Jenni Lada), I picked up a pack of Ikea’s plastic beads and decided to give a go at some 8-bit art.

Since I live pretty close to an Ikea, I picked up Ikea’s bucket o’ beads (aka Pyssla, US$5.99) which contains ten colors, most of which are appropriate for old-school avatars. For my first project I opted for a Racoon Mario from the classic NES game, Super Mario Bros. 3. For the working base I used Ikea’s Pyssla bead shape set (US$2.00) which includes four colored shapes. The largest is the white square with 29 x 29 pegs.