Sorry I haven’t posted in a few weeks. Here’s the reason I’ve been away … introducing the Mario Alphabet!
A few weeks ago the thought popped into my head “I wonder if you could find a Mario character for every letter in the alphabet? … because if so, would there be a cooler/more fun way to learn the alphabet?!“. Sure enough after checking online, I found there were more than enough Mario characters to do it (you could actually do over 5 alphabets and never repeat a character!). After confirming it was possible I of course could have simple gone to Google images or other places to round up existing artwork and just copied/pasted them all into Photoshop … but then the artwork styles would have been inconsistent and worse the image quality would have been very poor for some of the less famous characters who only have teeny tiny thumbnails on the internet. So I decided to draw them all by hand on my iPad (~2 letters a day, 2 characters per letter). It took way longer than I had planned but it was a blast to do!
Please Note: In case it’s not obvious – I did not freehand draw any of these guys! I only traced and (lovingly) painted each one using whatever images I could find from the net. So I take very little credit for this project. The true brilliance here of course comes from Nintendo. Over the past few decades they have created a staggeringly long list of wonderful characters (each one with a great personality/story). So here’s to Nintendo, Shigeru Miyamoto and the cast of talented artists/character designers who have built such an entertaining/creative body of work over the years that has and will continue to entertain kids and adults for years to come.
I may or may not do something w/the Zelda franchise once I recover from this – but this year’s Christmas card has to be my next project!
Want to print?
If you print this out you are super awesome. Take a photo of where/how you put it up and post a comment! 🙂
–> Horizontal Version (~80″ x 4.5″)
–> Square Version (~26″ x 19″)
Individual Cards Images
[miniflickr photoset_id=72157628096510710&sortby=date-posted-asc&per_page=50]
Reference: Photo set on Flickr
I work with kids and am making these in to flash cards for some of my Mario obsessed ones! It’s going to be a great addition to distance learning this year!
Very cool! So sorry they’re not super hi-resolution. Please let me know how it goes or if you get any interesting feedback 🙂 Good luck and thank you for being a cool teacher!
Im using the horizontal line to put in my bitmoji classroom for canvas learning! I would love to be able to print these out for my actual classroom that is Mario themed. These are so cool!
Very cool! Good luck and send pics if you are able to! Thank you for being another cool teacher! 🙂
Using these for my Mario themed classroom this year. Something fun during an uncertain school year. Thank you!!
Very cool! Good luck and share pics if you can. As I’ve said to others – thank you for being a fun/cool teacher!
I work in a school for special needs students and our them for next school year is vintage video games. We decorate the entire school! Thank you so much for this as our primary classroom is focusing on Mario!
Very cool and awesome idea (vintage video games)! Thank you for dropping a note and share any photo link(s) if you get any. Good luck and God bless.