Perler Beads Go 3D with This Incredible Pokemon Diorama

This is my 3D Pokemon House Project. I made this as part of a Pokemon themed contest entry on Instagram. It took me 1.5 weeks to make it. It started out as a simple project where I was just going to have the little Pokemon characters, Ash and Pikachu battling it out with another trainer and a Pokemon, but then I decided to add a house in the background with some plants. After more thought, I decided to turn the house into a 3D project and make it a giant piece with a garden and fences and more plants.

I used only black, white, gray, dark gray, and transparent gray beads to make the piece in keeping with the original Pokemon Red and Blue gameboy colors. I used most sprites and patterns from those games but I had to come up with my own patterns for the sides and back of the house plus the garden soil area.

The layout board was designed by myself as was the 3D house design.

The 3D house was the hardest part. As I setup the first front side of the house, I realized I beaded the roof when I should have done the roof separately. However, this turned out to work in my advantage. It let me to lay the roof in behind the raised roof beads of the front and it fit perfectly. I did this on the back section too. In the end, the roof pieces laid like perfect gingerbread pieces into the whole project.

The only thing I had to remake was the roof because I missed one row of beads, and the fence posts because they didn’t sit side by side perfectly after I was done. I instead beaded them together like a fence and then popped them into the board.

Each stand up flat pieces is set into the board with a few beads at the bottom of the piece that sit in a hole in the board. Sort of a tab and slot system. When you make the board, you leave the holes open but they don’t always fuse perfectly open, so sometimes you have to cut them out with an exacto knife.

If I did this again, I would probably change how I did the sides of the house with the tab and slot system. I would have just made it perfectly square and glued it like normal. The tabs didn’t help here and it just looked terrible in the end. Also I would have put a normal bottom on from the beginning instead of trying to glue it down without a flat bottom to give it more of a base.