Let's try draw Mario: learn to draw with friends

 Being a Nintendo fan growing up in the 80's/90's I have probably spent thousands of hours staring at Mario, the Italian plumber who strangely enough got his start by chasing an ape up a tower of steal scaffolding.

 Mario continues to be the top icon of video game characters more than 30 years later and has become as recognizable and well known an Mickey Mouse.

 But through all those years there is one thing I never did with Mario, attempt to accurately draw him with pencils.  And this is where the Learn To Draw With Friends contest by @tonyr has motivated me to try drawing Mario with pencils for the first time!

https://steemit.com/ltdwf/@tonyr/learn-to-draw-with-friends-week-five-ltdwf-45-sbd-in-prizes-to-be-won

 To save lots of erasing and headaches I first loaded the image into Gimp (a free Photoshop replacement) and laid down evenly spaced guidelines creating a loose 3x4 grid over both the digital image we will work from, and also on the paper we will be drawing on to.

  Using a light 2H pencil I eyeballed the proportions making sure things are still more or less in place whenever I cross a grid line while drawing. It's important to take your time and get it right in this first step.

 Once I have the basic outlines close enough I erased the guidelines and cleaned up some messy bits. Two steps in and we already have a picture of Mario!

 Next I started attempting to match the line values (thickness) with a 2B pencil, this image is not as simple as it looks at first glance. There are a lot of different line weight values and subtle curves in this image. It's at this point that I start to realize that I've seen this image countless times but I never REALLY looked closely at it.

 Mario - Nintendo.com

 Once the lines were roughed out I darkened them in with a dark 4B pencil and fixed up a few errors from earlier. I should have worked larger to better capture the line values but live and learn for next time right :D

 

 And I finished this up by gently filling it in with color pencils. And there we go, we have our own little Mario to live in our sketchbook. If we wanted to color in the image heavier then we would also want to redo the line work with black ink to get proper contrast since a 4B pencil is closer to gray than black.

 Thanks a lot for taking a look and be sure to also check out the other entries in the #ltdwf contest.

@ckurtish