The World of Super Mario – Part 1

Introduction
As a kid, I remember spending hours playing the original Super Mario Brothers on the original NES, with those awkward, rectangular controllers. For many people, these old games bring back a warm, comfortable, nostalgic feeling full of fond memories.

So, for old time’s sake, let’s re-create some of that classic 8-bit artwork from the original Super Mario Brothers. In Part 1 of this tutorial, we’ll take a look at the landscape elements, the building blocks, the skies, the question blocks, the warp pipes, etc. that make up the Mario world. Later, in Part 2, we’ll explore the animated sprites- Mario, Luigi, the goombas, the koopas, the piranha plants, the power up mushrooms, etc.

While this is a Photoshop guide, really, you could do this in MS Paint just as well. All you need is the pencil tool and a little patience. So let’s look at the building-blocks of the Mario world.

The Above Ground Color Palette
The original game h ad a limited color palette that made up the above-ground landscape. We’ll start with the colors from Level 1, since it contains the most basic building blocks of our world. The colors we’ll be using are:

#FFFFFF – clouds, highlights, etc.
#000000 – shadows, outlines, etc.
#5482E4 – sky
#3CBEFC – cloud shadows
#FCA244 – question block base
#E45E14 – bricks, ground
#ECD2BC – brick highlights
#BFCE1C – bushes, warp pipe highlights
#04AE04 – hills, warp pipe shadows, bush shadows

The Basic Brick Tile
All of the tiled textures in the game are 32x32px in size, so let’s begin with a 32x32px square in the brick color (#E45E14).

Adobe Photoshop Tutorial - The World of Super mario - Fig. 1

Now we need to draw our black lines to separate the bricks. Each brick is We’ll start at the bottom and work our way up. Each outline is 2px in width (or height) and each brick is 6px tall. So first, let’s do the horizontals.

Adobe Photoshop Tutorial - The World of Super mario - Fig. 2

Now we’ll do the vertical lines. Each brick is 14px wide. We’ll work our way down from the top row, which contains two full bricks.

Adobe Photoshop Tutorial - The World of Super mario - Fig. 3

Finally, u sing the brick highlight color (#ECD2BC), put a 2px line along the top of the brick tile if the brick is to be in a single row. If you’re tiling bricks more than one tile high, then you wouldn’t do this step.

Adobe Photoshop Tutorial - The World of Super mario - Fig. 4

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Added Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007 at 7:53 pm under Drawing & Painting.