Mar10 Day

09 March 2023

March the 10th is Super Mario Day, so I thought this year I’d celebrate it by making a Mario portrait with Code Ninja, and a Mario animation with Brush Ninja.

I’ve been obsessed with Nintendo since my childhood, it was once my goal to work for them. That’s not looking likely now so I’m going to pay tribute to them insted.

Code Ninja

Mario Portrait

It’s the first time I have made something like this so the code is quite messy, but it’s all there as an example for everyone to use and customize. Just press load, then search for the Mario image.

Tips for Coding your own artworks

To draw this I used the following thought processes.

Break down the image into simple shapes. You can use wide line widths to get capsule shapes.
Keep the colours to a minimum.
Work on elements in stages.
Think about the order things should be drawn so that objects overlap correctly.
Keep things as simple as possible.
To get perfect circles I positioned the cursor then moved forward or backward 0 pixels.
Use lots of comments to make it easy to find where different parts are drawn.

Brush Ninja

Making the animation was fun but very last minute since I only thought of creating it a couple of hours ago. So it isn’t perfect. I planned what I would draw but I didn’t spend any time planning the animation so the process was a bit haphazard, but I think it turned out quite nicely!

The actual animating process took about 45 minutes.

If you enjoy watching this sort of video then give the video a thumbs up and comment and I’ll have a go at making some more!

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