A bead plate, rendered in cycles.

The beads-colors are controlled by an image texture.

The vertices of each bead are all uv-mapped to a single point (uv island scaled to 0), so that each individual bead is single-colored.

Originally, I tried to use a particle system for this setup.

But I had to give up, because I couldn't find a way to assign colors to the bead-particles.

I know this is possible with hair-strands using the blender internal renderer, but I wasn't able to find a way to make this work with cycles.

Any suggestions on how to make this work with particles ?