Meet the artist who makes stunning real-life pixel art with tiny plastic beads
Sarah Roberts is an artist living in Surrey. She makes pixel art mainly out of Perler beads and crossstitch which she makes available to buy. Readers can follow her on Instagram @pixel_artist and go to etsy.com/shop/pixelartist1 to make purchases. We recently caught up with Sarah to hear more about her inspiration and the process behind her distinctive art.
Your artwork is amazing. Do you have an artistic background?
I have always been interested in arts and crafts since I was young. After I left school, I was lucky enough to find work in that industry, working for several prop companies and a well-established jewellery company (doing stoning, enamelling and quality checks). I learned and developed the beautiful finer detail which enhances the beauty of a finished piece of work.
What inspired you to create artworks based on popular videogame characters? After my nephew and niece were born, I wanted to become the cool auntie. I once again started looking back into my old childhood videogames that my brother and I used to play on the Mega Drive and Game Boy after school, such as Streets Of Rage, Sonic The Hedgehog, Double Dragon, Duck Tales and so on. I wanted to see if I could make some artwork for their rooms and as my nephew grew older he became a gaming YouTuber (THE SGB) so I had to keep up with him on what is hot in the gaming world and what is not.
Many are produced using Perler beads. Why do you use them? My work is produced mainly by cross-stitch, where I can use a variety of colours to give a more detailed result when making smaller items. For example, earrings, keyrings and magnets. For larger pictures I tend to use Perler beads which, along with Artkal and Hama, are types of fused small plastic beads which you can arrange on pegboards in a design of your choice, and either iron or use a heat press and wax paper to fuse them together. This creates a solid piece of art that can then be framed or made into a wall hanging. I mainly use Perler and Hama beads in my work because they have a large selection of colours with different tonal ranges for me to create a final piece of artwork that I would be happy with. They are perfect for retrogaming art because retro games are made from pixels! So I just use a Perler or Hama bead to represent each pixel of a videogame. My larger pieces are made up of about 3,558 beads which give a detailed representation of the game I’m trying to recreate in my artwork.
