I remember when I was in middle school, so many of my classmates were using and combining these small beads to create colorful works of art. Today when I was walking home from East River Park, I saw a small store near my apartment that was displaying a bunch of cool bead art in its windows and wanted to share this unique style of art.

Bead art is essentially using several individual small beads (about 2 cm tall) and connecting them with small amounts of glue (or string) to form a cohesive, larger image. You can kind of think of bead art as a new form of mosaics. Often bead art recreate popular images or icons seen in other places especially from video games and television shows.

The aspect I enjoy most of bead art is how it can create images that look almost digital. Many works of bead art have this sense that they are pixelated. They make me feel like  as if I was looking at something from an old video game created in the 1990s or something created using a digital image program.

Overall, I really like the idea that, similar to a mosaic, you can use small fragments to create a cohesive image. Beads were objects that I viewed as insignificant especially with how small and disposable they are. However, bead art can really make a person appreciate how useful and creative these tiny things can be.