Dave Grohl Bead art

Today I can finally reveal a bead project I completed a couple of weeks ago, but had to keep quiet, as it was a present for my wife's birthday. She's a huge Foo Fighters fan (we both are), so I hunted around for pictures and finally settled on this gem:

That's frontman Dave Grohl giving you the finger. I played around with sizes and decided that making it to fit a 50x50cm frame was the best option, in order to give it adequate detail.

The first colour design I made is below on the left. I felt that it included too much dark brown in the hair and t-shirt (as you can see in the pic above, there is little brown in his hair, and none in his shirt), but I didn't want to remove dark brown from the picture completely, so I made another design in black and white, with the intention of using the black and white parts for the hair and shirt, and the colour parts for skin.

I spent just over 5 hours using both designs to place the beads, trying to keep the hair as accurate in colour to the original pic as possible.

Once I'd laid all the beads, I compared it to the original pic, and a few things stood out that needed changing.

Firstly, there was too much Hama Light Grey dotted around the picture. His face and hand were heavily speckled in it, and it didn't look natural. I think the Perler program thinks Light Grey is lighter than it actually is, as it looks less obvious in the design - I may have to reprogram the RGB values soon. So I replaced a lot of the Light Grey with Perler Sand colour.

Next, his wedding ring and middle finger tattoo weren't clear, so I tidied them up and made them more prominent. Same with the red band around his wrist and the lace for the cross round his neck.

Lastly, the face. The Perler program I use always has issues with eyes and teeth, and this picture was no exception. While his eyes could be seen, the colour wasn't accurate, and they were surrounded by Hama Grey. I replaced the Grey with Hama Beige and used Hama Pearl for the whites of the eyes. The teeth were also too grey, so I replaced a lot of them with Hama Pearl, and also tidied up his bottom lip and beard.

The end result is below!