Question about beads.

[Kaeru]

Hi, everyone! I'm new to these forums, but I have a little bit of experience working with Perler beads. I've only ever used the big assorted bags though, and I have a question before I make my first huge order of individual colours.

Is it common practice to mix Perler, Hama, and Nabbi beads? I use the program called "Perler" and a lot of the projects that I want to work on look much more accurate when mixing these beads. I figure the other brands have different melting points and qualities though.. is it safe to mix a lot of each together without ruining a piece? I've seen things made with "Photo Pearls" before (Nabbi beads) and they look much glossier than things I've made with Perler beads. Is this very noticeable in the finished product?

What about transparent beads? I've heard of people using those too (and the Hama ash colour looks like it would make a nice shade of gray) but I'm not sure how it would effect the consistency of the piece. I plan on using mostly Perler brand beads with an assortment of Hama and Nabbi beads for shading.

Thanks in advance! I look forward to posting projects here soon.

[funkymonkey]

I've only ever used Perler, and I've found that even there, you can get bags that don't melt "correctly" if they are old (different bag design). I think they used to use a different plastic blend. I've also gotten some bad melters in assorted kits.

I have used transparent and glow beads for shading though, to some success.

Glow blue used as an additional shade:

Spoiler

Transparent green for color/effect:

Spoiler

[Kaeru]

Thanks for the pictures, that helped. I'm going to go for it and order all of the beads and just hope that they fuse together well. I plan to do art from games that use a lot of colours and for that reason the basic ones aren't really enough.