How to make fuse bead patterns

Before you start, you can try finding sprite art online to use as your image reference for your bead sprite. Alternatively, you can visit fuse bead patterns for ready made fuse bead pattern templates for you to follow. Here's a link to an example of a fuse bead pattern template: Chocobo fuse bead template.
Templates on that site include a list of colors needed and the amount for each, so you can find out if you have enough beads before starting on a project and only realizing you are out of a particular color and can't continue with that project.

After you are done choosing something to base your bead sprite on, get ready to start cracking!
For this particular example, I'll be using Joltik from Pokemon.
Start out with the colours for the primary outline. That way, you are sure that the general frame is there and that there was no wrong placement of beads. It is also easy to find out if you have accidentally misplaced a couple of beads and correct them early on before you fill it in with hundreds of beads.

Continuing on, fill in the colours for the secondary outlines if the bead sprite you chose has any.

Fill in the details like eyes in your bead pattern.

From here, outline the areas which require shading. Shading is easily spotted by seeing which areas are covered by a darker shade of the main color of the bead sprite.

With the shaded areas blocked out, simply fill it in with the area with the shaded color.

All that is left is to fill in the frame (the outline you made) with the base color of the sprite. Because all the details are already correctly placed, it is very easy from here on to fill in the bead sprite with the main colors. For this case, there's only one flat color (yellow) to fill in, like so.

It's very important to place it above a solid flat backing. If you are using the ironing board with soft padding, put something flat and hard underneath. A chopping board was used for this example.
The reason why it is important is because when ironing on a padded surface, if more than 1 pegboard is used, the edges where the pegboards meet will usually sink down into the padding due to the pressure placed on the pegboards from the iron. The iron is the unable to reach beads near that area, so they will most likely end up not ironed properly.
When everything is set up, cover the whole bead sprite with wax paper.

Set the iron at medium temperature. All irons are different, so it may take a bit of experimenting before you can find the ideal temperature setting for your own iron.
Start ironing in a circular motion, making sure that the edges are ironed too. The beads will slowly show up through the wax paper as they begin to melt and stick to it. Ironing until all the beads show up through the wax paper is a good indicator that all the beads have been ironed and have fused together, like shown in the picture.

This step can get tricky.
As soon as possible after you are done ironing, quickly flip the bead sprite and pegboard(s) over and let gravity remove the pegboards (or you can manually do so if the bead sprite has begun to stick). When the bead sprite starts to cool down and contract, it'll pull on the pegs, making it hard to remove it from the pegboards so try to do so when it's still hot and flexible. Be careful not to scorch yourself in the process!

Slowly peel of the wax paper, then place the bead sprite under a stack of books to ensure the bead sprite becomes flat. Yellow Pages and thick, heavy History Books work best.
Leave it there for about 10 minutes, depending on the size of your bead sprite, until it has cooled down.

Repeat steps 7 to 10 (this time, 10 isn't optional) for the other side, just without the pegboards.
When it's done, it'll look something like this.

Congratulations! You have completed a bead sprite project!

This tutorial is more of a guide on how to bead sprite, and definitely not the only or best way to do it. You'll start finding techniques and methods that work best for you during the process of bead spriting and when you do, stick to them! I hope this tutorial has helped anyone who just started on this amazing hobby, and have fun bead spriting! :)