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Residing in Westport Factory, Massachusetts, Kevyn-Paul Dumas and David Hayhurst run their perler-oriented Etsy store known as Cornelius’ Pixel Crafts. Dumas and Hayhurst build and sell a variety of perler bead crafts from series’ like the Legend of Zelda, Pokémon, Super Mario Bros., and more.
Cornelius’ Pixel Crafts with their booth at Pony Con NYC 2016.
Perler crafts are made by fusing plastic beads by placing them on a pegboard and using an iron to create pixel-inspired creations. Most perler artists iron the beads right on the boards, but the artists over at Cornelius’ Pixel Crafts use a method called the “tape method,” where you take masking tape (or moving tape) and tape over the beads to pull them off the board, then iron the beads off the board. According to Kevyn, “this saves the plastic pegboards from warping due to the heat of the iron, and I find that the way we iron using this method makes the finished sprites look and feel nicer overall.” For more information on building perler crafts, he recommends checking out the HardcorePerler blog for more resources on fuse bead-related content.
Cornelius’ Pixel Craft’s Anju and Kafei, based off of the sprites in the Oracle games.
Kevyn’s favorite perler craft he’s built is the Monado from the Xenoblade series, as it is one one of his favorite JRPGs. My personal favorite item, after looking through his crafts, is their Anju and Kafei perlers. They are some of my favorite icons in Majora’s Mask and it’s definitely nice to see them in a refreshing, new style. A few words from Kevyn regarding the Zelda series:
“Zelda was literally the first video game I ever played as a kid, so the series means the world to me. I have tons of fond memories of playing the NES with my mom, sitting there for hours making our own maps for the dungeons and just having a great time. Now that I’m making all these cool characters out of these beads, its like the game is popping out of the cartridge and coming to life.”
Cornelius’ Pixel Crafts is also open to commissions, requests, and suggestions on crafts, so be sure to check out their store if you’re interested in anything particular. They can be contacted through both their Twitter and Tumblr pages. I bought keychains for the 8-bit avatars of Link and Lana (her Cia skin) from Hyrule Warriors and I’ve gotta say, they make awesome additions to my backpack.
My Link and Lana keychains. Love the way they look.
What would you like to see from Cornelius’ Pixel Crafts? What characters would you like to see in perler-form? Let us know in the comments below!
