Hi everyone. Anyone love Mario Paint?

[JamesO2]

Hi, my name's James.

I love pixel art. There's something really beautiful about the irreducibility of it, the smallest scale of detail. I've been obsessed with pixel and digital art ever since I got a copy of Mario Paint back in 1995, along with the Mario Paint Player's Guide.

Then when I got an early Windows 95 PC, I got hooked on MS Paint. I would often jump between my SNES and PC, copying sprites I drew on one machine to the other. Mario paint had a lot more creative tools (animations and music) than MS Paint, but on my PC I had seemingly endless storage space. My folder's will filled with BITMAPS and GIFs I'd downloaded on the early internet.

Mario Paint was such a huge inspiration for me. I used to copy the sprite work from the Player's Guide on MS Paint, and had quite a collection. But I never finished the whole book. Which is why I started this side project of mine, where I'm making an attempt to digitize the entire Mario Paint Player's Guide. As far as I'm aware, it hasn't been done yet. I've seen recreations of some of the pages here or there online, but I haven't seen the whole thing recreated. And I think it's worthwhile to archive these sprite works. They're official Nintendo artwork, yet they seem to only exist online in a crude JPEG scanned format.

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Here's some samples of what I've got so far:



Pages 104 & 105 recreated from:
https://archive.org/details/Nintendo_Pla...5/mode/1up



Zelda scene recreated from these pages:
https://archive.org/details/Nintendo_Pla...5/mode/2up

The book is really interesting, because some of the sprite work is ripped directly from official games, but others are custom, or slightly edited. Like these for example:



Almost all of the Mario sprites are nearly identical, but not wholly identical. They maintain the same shape, but the artists for the Mario Paint Guide decided to go for a totally different shading/lighting angle on basically every sprite. For example, the Fire Mario sprite is a copy from Super Mario World, except his ear is outlined in black, and all color outlines are replaced with black, similar to the Allstars style (including SMB3's glove-less hands).

Frog Mario's hands and shading are different, and Statue Mario's lighting is coming from a totally different angle.

As for Bowser and Ganon, their sprites are loosely based on their SNES appearances, but are totally unique here. Wario's sprite is a colorized mix of his Wario Land 2 sprite, and his Wario's Woods sprite. But as far as I could tell, that exact pose doesn't exist in either game -- it's a unique composite of two game's sprites, with a unique color scheme.

Link's sprite is basically identical to LttP (except in a Mario Paint palette), while only Zelda's rough shape is the same. Her crown and dress are altered. The items from LttP are almost identical, but the color and shading of the sword and shield are unique

These are all official Nintendo sprite-work, that didn't technically appear in any released game. And I feel like anyone who's into sprite rips would also be interested.

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Anyway, I've used stuff on Spriters Resources for various projects over the years, and I figured it's about time to sign up and participate.

[Spriter Theo]

Welcome!

I'm a big fan of pixel art as well, especially sprites. I guess I just love how unique the art style is.

Unfortunately I haven't played a lot of Mario Paint. I never had a copy myself when I was a child, but a neighbor of mine did at one point, so I did play it a little bit (mainly the flyswatter game if memory serves). I didn't know the game came with a player guide, much less with sprite work samples to work with! You would know better than I would, but is the color differences possibly due to palette limitations in Mario Paint? Or maybe these are prototype sprites they used for development? I'm also very curious with Ganon and Bowser's size differences. The player guide versions seem to be close in size to the player characters. I don't know all of the details of the the SNES, but could this discrepancy be due to trying to keep all character sprites within a given grid size?

Out of curiosity, what games did the player guide have sprites from? Where there any strange choices? I also wonder if they had any other sprites like Wario that they took from the GameBoy and then recolored.

I've been using stuff on the Spriter's Resource as reference for a number of years now as well. I signed up a few months ago and have been periodically adding to the Custom Section ever since. 

Welcome again! I look forward to seeing your submissions!

[JamesO2]

I didn't know the game came with a player guide, much less with sprite work samples to work with! You would know better than I would, but is the color differences possibly due to palette limitations in Mario Paint? 
Or maybe these are prototype sprites they used for development? I'm also very curious with Ganon and Bowser's size differences. The player guide versions seem to be close in size to the player characters. I don't know all of the details of the the SNES, but could this discrepancy be due to trying to keep all character sprites within a given grid size?

The color differences are partly due to Mario Paint itself. It had 15 predefined colors you could choose from, plus one dedicated for transparent pixels. Most of these colors don't match with most SNES game's palettes, so the artists who designed the Player's Guide had to make a lot of artistic liberties to choose the best colors to represent shading, etc.

But part of the color difference is due to modern LCD displays too, as the colors shown on the sprites above would have appeared slightly differently on AV cables on a tube-tv, or through an RF switch cable (what a lot of SNES systems were hooked up with back then). For example, you could mix red and blue pixels in a dither pattern and create a unique purple color -- and on old TVs (which is what Mario Paint was designed for) the image was blurred in a such a way that it genuinely looked purple. But again, with modern LCD screens, this trick doesn't quite work as well, as the human eye can better see the distinct pixel differences.

On top of that, the Player's Guide book is printed on paper, so the ink colors are different yet again from the on-screen pixels. A lot of the artwork in the book seems to have been designed with print media in mind, as they tend to look better in the books ink "palette" versus the actual in-game Mario Paint palette. Another issue is that the pixel images in the Player's Guide appear to be actual screenshots of the game's in-game pixel editor. So this means they're screenshots of a fuzzy AV signal, coming out of a SNES, and then printed onto paper. So there is significant image degradation.

So you get some of the same problems that pixel artists have had trying to copy beta pixel art from screenshots in old magazines. I'm creating two sets of the pixel art found in the book: one with the in-game color palette, and one with a "corrected" palette, based on the Guide Book scans. Here's some comparisons, from a page that contains a huge Megaman sprite:



As far as I'm aware, this spritework doesn't exist any game files. It's unique art to the Mario Paint Player's Guide.

And here's some examples from some Street Fighter 2 pages, comparing the Mario Paint version to the official sprite art:

As you can see, the artist who redid these sprites for the Book, didn't copy them exactly, instead making a recreation that is loosely based off the official Street Fighter 2 spritework. Above, I made 2 versions of Ken, because it's hard to tell Orange, Red, and Brown apart in the book (due to them likely using cheaper inks/printing techniques in  the 90's). So there's a bit of guesswork on my part too.

I find all this stuff fascinating, because these are unique spriteworks published by Nintendo, that were only published in print media form.

Another issue, is that SNES didn't have square pixels in a 1:1 ratio, like modern screens. The SNES output an 8:7 ratio, meaning the pixels were a little wider than they are tall. This is actually reflected in some of the Player's Guide art, as well as a lot of SNES games -- the artists took this squash into account. For example, there are some pixel arts that are actually oval on modern screens, because they designed them with the SNES 8:7 output in mind!

Anyway, you can view the whole book online here, so you can see for yourself what kind of art is in there:
https://archive.org/details/Nintendo_Pla...3/mode/2up

You can flip through it with the arrow keys.

There's sprites and artwork from all sorts of sources in there: including Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Simpsons, Battle Toads, Plok, Star Wars, tons of sports teams, and tons more of totally unique works of art. There's even some artwork of Wayne's World and Michael Jackson! It's a wild piece of media. I don't know how much they paid to get all those difference licenses!

Also, thanks for the warm welcome.

[Spriter Theo]

Gotcha, I figured there was some sort of palette limitation in game, but I can't believe I forgot to account for the LCD displays!

Thanks for the link, there's a lot of cool stuff in there! I love the Star Fox team on page 62 and Tin Man and the Scarecrow on page 66 are surprisingly tight! I'm kind of curious about the licensing as well. If I didn't know any better I'd say whoever put the book together just went AWOL and put in whatever they wanted and nobody said anything because it was the 90s. Maybe some sort of deal was struck since this is basically advertising all these different games, but that doesn't really explain the sports, Disney, or Spielberg stuff... Do you know if there was a Japanese equivalent to this book? If so I wonder if it has like Astroboy or Dr. Slump or something.

No problem! I hope you have fun in the forums. I look forward to seeing you around!

[JamesO2]

Gotcha, I figured there was some sort of palette limitation in game, but I can't believe I forgot to account for the LCD displays!

Thanks for the link, there's a lot of cool stuff in there! I love the Star Fox team on page 62 and Tin Man and the Scarecrow on page 66 are surprisingly tight! I'm kind of curious about the licensing as well. If I didn't know any better I'd say whoever put the book together just went AWOL and put in whatever they wanted and nobody said anything because it was the 90s. Maybe some sort of deal was struck since this is basically advertising all these different games, but that doesn't really explain the sports, Disney, or Spielberg stuff... Do you know if there was a Japanese equivalent to this book? If so I wonder if it has like Astroboy or Dr. Slump or something.

No problem! I hope you have fun in the forums. I look forward to seeing you around!

Yeah, it's a really interesting book. Especially with all the "MPtv" stuff, which is an obvious parody of MTV visuals of the time. I really do wonder what the licensing was for this book, if any at all.

As far as a Japanese Mario Paint book, I haven't found any mention online of one existing. Then again, I wouldn't really know what to look for. It's possible there are copies of it floating around on Japanese-language sites, but I wouldn't know how, where, or what to look for.

There's a lot of stuff floating around online in who knows what corners.

[DigiMaverickWorld0rder]

Ooh! I remember Mario Paint from back in the day. I wasn't too good at making anything, from what I can remember, but if there's one thing I always loved about it and could get into, it was the fly swatter game. It was a blast. Even when I died, I never got upset 'cause I found the death animation positively hilarious. The game had so much charm, whether I won or lost I didn't care.

[Spriter Theo]

As far as a Japanese Mario Paint book, I haven't found any mention online of one existing. Then again, I wouldn't really know what to look for. It's possible there are copies of it floating around on Japanese-language sites, but I wouldn't know how, where, or what to look for.

There's a lot of stuff floating around online in who knows what corners.

Fair enough, thanks for letting me know! If I ever find out anything on it I'll be sure to tell you.