So you want to make a Paper Mario styled sprite, huh?
Well then, today’s your lucky day (as long as you were looking for a TTYD or SPM style sprite, anyways).
The Paper Mario style is very clean, simple and stylized. The most important things to keep in mind when recreating this style are proportions and craft.
So what do I mean by proportions?
Example 1 features my character Goombert with his normal proportions. If you were to measure his height using the length of his head, you would find that he is roughly 6 heads tall.
Example 2 shows the Paper Mario version of my character compared to his normal form. Notice how big the head is compared to his body. Even though the two look like the same height next to each other, the Paper Mario one is 2 and a half heads tall.
Note: If we were being 100% authentic to Paper Mario, Bert would most likely only be 2 heads tall and have no visible legs- just feet. However, angry gremlin Bert isn’t what I wanted this time, so I followed Lord Crump’s proportions and gave Bert tiny legs/feet instead. Notice how the character’s height is still mostly the same. I did not add long gangly legs to his model- I fit tiny legs in where the waist and big goomba shoes would be in the stockier design. Exchanging the big shoes for tiny legs and feet keeps the character design balanced and not excessively weighed down. If he still had the big shoes in addition to his legs then his design would seem more like something out of Kingdom Hearts than Paper Mario.
In that small amount of character real estate it is essential to condense the information of your character as much as possible without erasing their personality. Break the character up into simple shapes- Goombert’s face is just a flattened pentagon, and his body is a rounded rectangle. Keep the character’s clothing simple as well.
So we’ve talked about the proportions. Now let’s talk about craft.
yousharknotpass
amandla
blakekathryn
gracieabrams
germansingergirl
theartofmadeline
