I love playing Paper Mario games. My favorite in the series would have to be Paper Mario and the Thousand Year Door for the Nintendo Gamecube. To be honest, though, I have not played any of the more recent entrees, so I can't say for certain if those were any good or not. To celebrate Nintendo's famous plumber, I recently finished illustrating this piece and will talk about the process.

The Wire Frame

Paper Mario is stout and has no legs. His body components can easily be simplified into circle shapes all stemming from his round body. I felt like there was very little I could do about the pose. There is only so much you can do with holding his hammer and so many other drawings look virtually identical. Still, I gave it my best shot at trying to do something different.

The Sketch

I used official Paper Mario artwork to reference the design. I didn't just want to go by my memory because it had been years since I last played one of the games. The overalls and hammer have a very unique composition to them, different from any other iteration of the character.

The Line Art

It's funny how I made a big deal about drawing with a lot of pressure on my screen, resulting in thick line art. And then I go and draw Paper Mario and actually had to go beyond my reasonable limit of thick lines in order to capture the accurate aesthetics of Paper Mario's design. I am a fan of the thick outline, but Paper Mario takes it to a whole new level.

The Flat Colors

For most of my work, I tend to choose colors that are pretty desaturated and faded a bit. I guess I'm not a fan of the overly bright and colorful Saturday morning palette. When finishing the artwork, I actually had to brighten the reds and blues to make it look more accurate to the tones from his official artwork. It's Super Mario, after all. It's a very colorful game.

The Finished Illustration

Although Paper Mario makes a point to utilize the flat nature of paper, the world that this character inhabits is still three dimensional. Based on the angle of my pose, I made it more obvious by rendering a background that, too, was angled and had some depth to it. I love how the environment in Paper Mario games are also made of paper and thus creates a layered effect such as a staged backdrop from a play.