Here’s a little bonus for everyone tonight, one week after we launched the site. After naming the site, we realized we needed some visuals. However, there’s probably only 3 or 4 official drawings of Tanooki Mario floating around out there, most of which are nearly two decades old. Of course, the in-game shots of Tanooki Mario aren’t of the greatest quality either. So I decided to make my own.
More info and “full-sized” pic after the break.
Using existing Mario pictures as guides, I “hand drew” 4 different Tanooki Marios in Paint Shop Pro. I originally wanted to color him in the style of the character art from the Sonic Adventure games, so I searched online for a Photoshop tutorial and found one by Tom Forsey.
I clearly did the first one (top left) and next one (bottom left) in that style, but when I did the third Tanooki Mario (top right) with the intent of mimicing the NiGHTS into Dreams boxart pose, I found myself adding a little bit of realistic shading to the “Sonic Adventure” shading I was already using. I decided to keep going with the realistic shading, and drop the line-art and Sonic shading altogether for the most recent one (bottom right) and go for a full 3D effect. Pretty close, and I’m pleased with it.
I’ll be drawing and coloring more over the next few weeks/months whenever I have time, and adding new header banners to go with them – that’s what the drawings were all made for. I’ll provide low-res versions of the four of them below in case anyone wants to try their hand at using them to create some The Tanooki wallpapers or other artwork. Be sure to send them in!
–Christian
