Zombie Mario!

I saw someone wearing a t-shirt the other day that said, "GRAINS!" and had a picture of some zombie rabbits.  I thought that was kind of funny, so I thought about what else rhymed with brains and immediately thought of 'drains'.  So that's where Mario comes in.  He's everyone's favorite plumber - and although he doesn't get his due for his work with toilets (heh, toilet dues)...he's-uh the man-uh for-uh the job!

DDRRRrraaaaaaiiinnnnssssss!

So he's either a zombie or he has a secret mushroom addiction...I mean, how else does he see turtles and why would he dress up like a raccoon?

aaaaacccccccccooooorrrrrrrrnnnnnssss!

(doesn't have the same feel)

And, of course, because i mentioned the raccoon costume - I had to draw him in it...

Mario plays the Wii

I've been holding off buying a Wii because I knew I'd get addicted.  Sadly that resolve to stay away came to an end when I was offered one for free.  So what was I supposed to do but take it?  That was a month ago, and I've been playing Mario Kart ever since.  Its an obsession that just got worse this morning when I finally hooked the Wii up to the internet.

At work someone e-mailed us that there's an art gallery called "Super Iam8-bit" with artwork based on the old 80's video games.  So all of that inspired me to paint this.  I drew a rough in photoshop, cleaned it up on a separate layer, and then colored it.

Of course, I look more like this playing video games:

How I spent my Halloween Weekend - Wario theme

 The entire Mario Party!  From left to right - Yoshi, Luigi, Toad, Mario, A coin box, and Wario (the last two are my wife and I...and as you can tell by how terrific they are, we made our own costumes...the others are cheapy store bought versions)

It's been a long and tiring Halloween week...so much so that we ended up not even wanting to do anything on the actual Halloween night (we ended up walking to downtown Burbank to see a parade of dogs who were in costume).

We spent the week designing our costumes to enter the contest at Nickelodeon.

(I think we lost because our Mario purchased his costume)

My wife painted the coinbox on all sides (acrylics on cardboard box).  I took rain gear overalls and spray painted them purple (you wouldn't believe how hard it is to find a pair of overalls of any color, much less a men's size).  I originally had a different hat that was more 'on model' for the kinds of hats Mario, Luigi, and Wario wear, but while spray painting worked out on the overalls, it wasn't terribly friendly with the hat - so I had to settle for a yellow baseball cap.  I purchased an Indiana Pacers cap (because it was yellow) and used an exacto knife to cut off the logo.  Then I took white felt and cut a half circle (for the hat), and black felt and cut out three W's (one for the hat and one for each glove) and a mustache.  Then I took some white acylic paint and painted the white buttons on the front of Wario's overalls.  The final touch was to take two grocery bags and fill them with wadded up paper to round out Wario's pudgy figure.

You almost can't tell the difference

I also decided to work on a pumpkin design that was a lot harder than anything I've ever attempted before.  It turned out to be quite easy, if a little time consuming.  All you have to do (to get a good design) is print out what you want to do and tape it to the front of the pumpkin.  Then I used an exacto knife to trace the lines into the pumpkin, and a pumpkin knife to cut the chunks out.  It was just that easy!  What nice too, is that I found a little flashlight thing (for 2 dollars) at toys-r-us that acts like a candle, complete with yellow flickering light - and it's better than a candle, because it takes hours to go out.

 In the light it's not as impressive (which is what I blame losing on).

 Here's a close-up of it lit

 and a better shot of it

And, of course, this means I'm going to have to really step it up for the pumpkin carving contest the next year - now that I know this isn't as hard as it looks.

 See ya next halloween!