I've been obsessed with the Metroid games series pretty much since I was a kid and had played Metroid 2 - Return of Samus on my Game Boy for the first time.

Recently, I bought Metroid Dread for our Nintendo Switch and I successfully passed this obsession on to my kids and now we are making Metroid art of all kind 😆.

Perler Beads

Perler Beads are a great way to transform all kind of pixel art into a tangible form.

Like this:

Or this one (not yet ironed):

3D Printing

Of course, this was also a great opportunity to pursue another obsession of mine: 3D Printing.

I found this cool 3D model of a Chozo statue on Thingiverse.

For better effect, I scaled it up to maximum.

Then I gave it a coating with silver acrylic spray paint.

Finally, to make this statue a really cool gimmick, I 3D printed one of those item balls that the Chozo statues typically hold in their hands.

I used translucent PLA and left a hole in it in which I put an RGB LED, that I'm controlling with a Digispark board (but any Arduino-compatible board will do).

The Arduino-sketch controlling the LED and letting it pulse in a blue/greenish light can be found here.

This is what the final result looks like.