Turn any photo into a perler bead pattern
Upload your picture, pick your pegboard and settings, and get a bead-by-bead pattern with real colour codes and counts. Everything runs in your browser — your image never leaves your device.
Preview
Print this pattern
A ZIP with five A4 PDFs of the same pattern plus a clean PNG. Each sheet prints at true size — one cell is one 5 mm midi bead — and carries the full colour list and bead counts. Colours with codes, colours with legend numbers, numbers in black and white to spare your ink, symbols in black and white for when a shape is quicker to spot than a number, and colours alone. You do not have to guess now which one you will want at the table.
Colours + colour codes
Colours + legend numbers
Numbers only — black and white
Symbols only — black and white
Colours only
- Bead brand
- Hama
- Pegboard
- Square 29×29
- Bead size
- Midi · 5 mm
- Grid
- 29 × 29
- Beads
- 419
- Colours
- 8
- Finished size
- 14.5 × 14.5 cm
Colours in this pattern
A photo background often comes out as four near-identical greys. Merge one colour into another, or drop it and leave those pegs empty — the pattern and the bead counts redraw straight away.
- Burnt orangeH60 · 133
- CreamH02 · 123
- ChocolateH76 · 72
- Light tanH27 · 37
- BlackH18 · 21
- CaramelH75 · 14
- PinkH06 · 11
- Light orangeH78 · 8
Colour list
- H60 Burnt orange133
- H02 Cream123
- H76 Chocolate72
- H27 Light tan37
- H18 Black21
- H75 Caramel14
- H06 Pink11
- H78 Light orange8
Beads in total 419
How it works
- 1
Pick an image
A photo, a drawing, a logo you have the right to use. Your browser opens the file itself: nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored, and there is no queue to wait in.
- 2
Choose the pegboard
Every size here is a board you can actually buy — the small 14×14 for keyrings, the 29×29 that comes in most starter boxes, the big 57×57, plus round, hexagon, heart and star. The width in beads follows the board and you can bring it down from there.
- 3
Frame it and clean up the colours
A rectangular photo on a square board leaves two empty bands: zoom in to crop them away, or choose what colour fills them. Then drop the colours you do not want — a background white you would rather leave unbeaded, a near-duplicate grey — and the pattern redraws on what is left.
- 4
Print and place
The PDF prints at 100%, where one printed cell is exactly one 5 mm midi bead, so the sheet slides under the pegboard and you work straight off it. The colour list on the second page tells you how many beads of each code to count out first.
Ready-made patterns
If you would rather not draw your own: each one made separately, with its own bead list.
Questions
Is my photo uploaded anywhere?
No. The conversion happens in your browser, on your own machine. No server ever sees the image — not even ours.
Do the colours match real beads?
The pattern is matched to the Hama midi range, and the list gives you the code you buy the colour by. Manufacturers discontinue colours without notice, so check the list against what you already own.
What does it cost?
The ready-made patterns are free, print files included — browse them, download them, use them. You only pay to export a pattern made from your own photo: once, no account, no subscription.
Which image formats work?
JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF and BMP. Not HEIC — that is what an iPhone camera saves by default, and no browser can display it. Set the camera to “Most Compatible”, or export the photo as JPG.
What makes a good image?
Clear shapes and few colours, something still recognisable as a thumbnail. A pattern is 29 beads across: a face photographed from ten metres turns to mush, a silhouette against a plain background turns out well.
How many beads will I need?
Every pattern says so, broken down by colour. A full 29×29 pegboard is 841 beads; the usual tubs hold a few thousand, so one covers several pictures.
My photo is not square. What happens to the edges?
A rectangular picture on a square board leaves an empty band top and bottom, or left and right. You decide what happens to it: zoom in until the bands are gone and the sides are cropped away, or leave them and pick the bead colour that fills them. Black and white are the usual answers, but any colour in the range is there.
Can I take a colour out, or swap it for another?
Yes. The colour list is editable: drop a colour and those cells are left empty, or map it onto another colour in the range and the pattern redraws. It is what you want when the background has come out as forty shades of nearly-white, or when the pattern asks for a code you do not own.
Can I make a pattern from any picture?
Technically yes — your browser will convert whatever you give it. Legally, that is your call: a photo you took is yours, a cartoon character or a club badge belongs to somebody else. That is also why you will not find any of them in our gallery.
Do I have to print in colour?
No. Each cell carries the bead code as well as the colour, so a black-and-white print is still usable — you read the codes rather than the shades. It is worth doing on purpose for patterns with several close greys or blues, where colour printing is harder to read, not easier.
Which brand do the colour codes refer to?
Whichever you pick. Hama, Perler, Artkal and Nabbi each have their own numbering and the pattern is built from the range you choose, so the codes on your sheet are the ones printed on the bags in your shop. IKEA Pyssla is in the list too, but it is sold as one mixed tub and has no per-colour codes, so its legend shows names — treat it as an inventory of what you already own rather than a shopping list.
How long does one take to make?
The pattern takes a few seconds. The beading is the slow part: a full small 14×14 is twenty minutes or so, a 29×29 with a couple of thousand beads is an evening, and a 57×57 is a project. Starting with the small board is not a lesser version — it is how you find out whether the picture you chose reads at all.
About fuse bead patterns
What a pattern has to contain to be worth printing
A pattern is not a picture of the finished thing. It is a map: one square per peg, in a colour you can go and buy, with the number of beads you need in front of you before you start. Take any one of those three away and it stops being usable — a pretty grid in colours nobody sells sends you to the shop for nothing, and a grid without counts has you three quarters of the way through before you find out you are forty light blues short.
So everything here is built around the colour list. The image is matched against the 5 mm range you pick — Hama, Perler, Artkal, Nabbi or the IKEA Pyssla tub — the codes printed in the legend are the codes on the bags in your shop, and the count next to each one is the exact number of beads that pattern uses. That is the part you print and carry with you.
It is also why the grid is drawn as a real grid rather than a photo of beads. You need to be able to find your place on it after you look away, count along a row, and see at a glance where one colour ends and the next begins.
Pegboard sizes, and how big the finished piece comes out
Midi beads — the ordinary ones, in nearly every box — sit on a 5 mm pitch. That makes the arithmetic easy: a full 29×29 square board finishes at about 14.5 × 14.5 cm and takes 841 beads if you fill every peg. The small 14×14 comes out at 7 cm, which is keyring size. The large 57×57 is 28.5 cm and 3,249 pegs, which is an evening or two rather than an hour.
Mini beads are 2.6 mm, so the same pattern comes out at just over half the size, much finer and much fiddlier — good for jewellery, hard on the eyes and hopeless for small hands. Maxi are 10 mm and go the other way: chunky, fast, and the right choice for a child who wants to be finished today.
The shape of the board decides the edge, not the subject. Squares and rectangles tile together into something bigger; round, hexagon, heart and star are meant as a single finished piece and look wrong cut off at the border. Pick the shape first, then let the picture fit it.
Which photos convert well, and which turn to mush
A pattern 29 beads across has 841 pieces of information in it. A phone photo has several million. Almost everything gets thrown away, and what survives is large shapes and strong contrast — so the picture that works is the one you could still recognise as a thumbnail the size of a stamp.
What works: a pet or a face filling most of the frame, a silhouette against a plain background, a logo, a flower close up, anything with a clear outline. What does not: a group photo taken from across a room, a landscape, a busy patterned background, or anything where the subject is the same brightness as what is behind it. Fine detail — glasses, individual hairs, lettering under about five beads tall — disappears entirely, and no setting brings it back.
If a photo comes out unreadable, the fix is usually to crop in hard rather than to raise the bead count. Going from 29 to 57 beads wide quadruples the work and rarely rescues a picture that was too far away to begin with.
How the colours get matched
Each cell is averaged from the pixels underneath it and then matched to the nearest bead in the range. The catch is what «nearest» means: the obvious way, comparing red, green and blue numbers, does not match how eyes work. It reads two colours as close when they are not, and its favourite mistake is skin — faces matched in RGB drift towards green and look sickly, which is exactly the kind of thing you only notice after you have ironed it.
So the matching happens in Oklab, a colour space built so that equal distances in the numbers look like equal differences to a person. Faces stay the right colour, gradients step evenly instead of banding, and greys stay grey instead of picking up a tint.
One honest limit: the hex values behind the bead colours are approximations of a physical plastic bead read on a screen, and no exact conversion exists. Manufacturers also retire colours without announcing it. Check the list against the tubs you already own before you buy anything, and treat the codes as where to look rather than a guarantee of what is on the shelf.
Printing at true size, which is the part most tools get wrong
A pattern printed at «fit to page» is a pattern you have to read across the room from the board, counting squares by eye and losing your place. Printed at 100% it becomes a template: lay the sheet under a transparent pegboard, or beside it, and every cell lines up with a peg because both are 5 mm.
The PDF here is drawn to that measurement, and it says so on the sheet. If your printer dialog is set to shrink or scale to fit, the note at the bottom of the page stops matching reality — turn scaling off and print at actual size.
The colour codes are printed inside the cells as well as in the legend, so a black-and-white print is still usable. That matters more than it sounds: most people print these on whatever is in the house, and a colour-only pattern is useless out of a mono laser.
What is free here, and what is not
Making a pattern, changing it, swapping colours out and looking at the result is free and always will be, with no account and no sign-up. The image never reaches a server, which is both the privacy answer and the reason it can stay free: converting your photo costs us nothing, because your own device does it.
What you pay for, once, is the file you take away: the true-size PDF and the PNG, both clean, with the full colour list and the counts. No watermark, no monthly charge, no login to lose. Guest checkout through Stripe, and we never see your card.
The ready-made patterns in the gallery are the exception: those cost nothing at all. Every one is drawn separately rather than generated, every one shows its grid, its bead count and its full colour list on the page — and the printable files download free, with no account either.