Fuse beads are ubiquitous. These small, multicolored plastic beads are sold as toys and can be (meticulously) assembled on pegboards to produce any sort of patterns.

It’s easy to dismiss fuse beads as merely a children’s pastime. In reality, though, their potential for creative expression is huge.

We’re going to look at one such form of expression, which is photo-realism, where beads can form a realistic image by acting as individual pixels.

The very idea might not seem to jibe at first, considering that fuse bead patterns usually are all about simple shapes and pixel art aesthetic.

Different brands of fuse beads offer different ranges of color options, but none of them come close to giving you the millions of colors of say a computer screen. So, how can we possibly represent images with fuse beads?

The secret lies in utilizing the concept of dithering.

A dithering algorithm intentionally uses noise to smooth out errors in compression. In our case, the compression we are applying is the limited set of colors available. Using a website like Beadifier, we can easily import an image and generate a dithered pattern based on the colors of beads we have.

See it in action:

Beadifier supports using common brand color palettes, like Hama, Nabbi, Perler, and Artkal. You can pick out exactly what colors you have at hand, and generate your pattern from those particular colors.

You can also perform simple contrast and brightness adjustments, and even image cropping, right from the website.

There you have it. Beadifier opens up the door to creating stunning fuse bead patterns from your images, all with a few simple steps.