DIY: Super Mario Triptych

So I have this room I call "the Red Room". Because the theme is 'red', not because of a literary or Twin Peaks reference. In fact, there are several colour-themed rooms in my home, but perhaps we'll talk of that some other day. Anyway, the red room had this one wall that needed a nice big painting or something. Except I couldn't find anything suitable; it was either too small, or had the wrong proportions, or the colour scheme was off. So one day I was walking through town and this local art store had a blowout sale. I came away with three massive 115x75cm canvasses, a bunch of acrylic paint in various bright and happy colours, and a couple of brushes, all for less than 40 euros.

But what to paint? Also, how to paint? I hadn't touched a brush since high school. And then I stumbled across this old Super Mario Bros spritesheet. I always did love the old 8-bit sprite art of the NES era. And my art teacher always told me to paint what I love. I never got what he meant. Now I do.

I'm still fiddling around with the spacing and getting it all level so they're not perfectly aligned but yay! Super Mario triptych! God I'm such a geek. If you spot the error in the middle painting, you're at least as much of a geek as I am. Click on any image to see a larger size/slideshow.

 And for funnies, a couple of "work in progress" animations I threw together from snapshots I took along the way. This is the first painting I did, I was all over the place, ha ha. I learned a lot from it, and I may even give it away and make a new one to replace it. Still, it turned out okay.

This is the second one, it went much smoother. I didn't shoot any in progress pictures of the third.

I had a ton of fun doing this. I'm not sure how many hours I put in, but it wasn't that many. The most time-consuming was setting up the grid, after that it was just "paint by numbers" on a large scale. After spending so much time analyzing and reconstructing these sprites, I am more impressed than ever by just how much personality and expression they managed to eke out of a 32x16 grid and three colours.