Realistic Mario Brothers

This photo manipulation was born out of my ridiculous obsession with realisitic Mario stuff. I always thought that the ultimate realistic Super Mario Bros. Would be a live action movie that was more faithful to the games than the 1993 flick, which had very little resemblance to the game. In fact, I originally planned on doing this as a fake movie poster but after finding the images I needed online, I decided it would be cooler to show more of the surrounding mushroom kingdom. My approach to the subject matter was still to treat it as if I was the director of a Super Mario movie and re-imagine certain elements so that they were more feasible in a realistic setting; for example, Mario and Luigi don't have their initials printed on their hats.

Below are the 13 photos used in the construction of this image. I've grabbed them from various sources all over the web. I don't have the names of all the photographers/creators of each, but I've credited the ones that I do know.

Except the dude with the hat on the bottom, the bodies and heads of Mario and Luigi are stock photos that I purchased from Istockphoto.
Luigi's head by Brian Dixon
Mario's head byKevin Russ
Mario's body by Mike Sonnenberg
Luigi's body by Tommaso Altamura

This fantastic Pirahna Plant Sculpture was created by Jaime Margary. I recommend checking out his work. He does a whole host of other creepy looking video game related sculptures.

This castle is brought to you by LilyStox on DeviantArt

This background looks to be compiled from both photographs and some digital art. I don't know who the artist is but I found it at fantasy-backgrounds.com.

If you enjoy this be sure to check out my Shy Guy picture too.

Trying Something Different

Recently, I've been working on a personal project of sorts. I don't want to get into too many of the details right now because it's a bit of a surprise for a select few individuals. Basically, for this project I had to do a bunch of fantasy based illustrations. I decided to take the opportunity to experiment a bit with some techniques I've been wanting to try.

Generally, the work I do mostly consists of very cartoony illustrations done digitally. For these Illustrations I wanted to create a marriage of digital and traditional mediums. On top of that I wanted to take the opportunity to practice my inking with a more semi realistic style. I've drawn in this style before but I haven't done it very often using actual brush and ink. (or in this case, an amazing Pentel Brush pen).

My plan was to give the colors a painted quality. I've seen a lot of other artist do this using a flat painted texture and overlaying it on the colors in Photoshop. When done properly, that method can work quite well, but you can still tell that that painted texture was added later. I decided to do something similar but instead create a painted texture exclusively for each illustration.



Oddly enough, I was somewhat inspired by the recent work that KC Green was doing on his webcomic Gun Show. Apparently he used an ink wash to create the gray tones on his comic then inked the line art over that. I thought it gave it a very nice classic illustrated look. I'm not quite as brave as Mr. Green so rather than do it all on one sheet of paper, I traced my line art on to another piece of paper and used a charcoal gray water color to create the gray tones.



Once I had both images scanned in I combined them in photoshop, keeping each one on it's own separate layer. I made sure to set the layer blending options to Multiply that way the white areas would be transparent so my colors would show through. When adding the color I used some of the texture and scattering options on the Photoshop brushes to maintain the painted look. For the most part, the coloring stage was rather quick since most of the work had been done by creating the water color shades before hand.

In the end, I learned some new things about inking, painting, and digital coloring techniques. And I wound up with about 2 or 3 portfolio worthy illustrations.

After the surprise is revealed, I will do another post featuring all 7 Illustrations that I created for this project.

Update 12/29/10: Check out the rest of the illustrations here: http://jeffmorin.blogspot.com/2010/12/fantasy-illustrations.html