Hey Hive!
We're back again with another Art Attack! If you're new to the series, this is where I share my drawings and the process behind them. A behind-the-scenes look at my artwork, if you will. This is not to say that I'm very good at art, or that I'm a professional in any way. In fact this is the opposite, and serves as a reminder to how I first started, and lets me track my progress too!
So if you caught my last couple of posts, you'd know that I decided to try out a new medium - oil pastels! My friends inspired me to try them out and I managed to snag a decent oil pastel set for 5 bucks straight out of quarantine! Since then, I've tried a couple of youtube tutorials that produced some pretty reasonable results:
And after these 2 pieces, I was excited to try drawing my own piece in oil pastels and the first thing I thought of was Yoshi's Island!
If you're unfamiliar, Yoshi's Island is a 2D side-scrolling platform game on the SNES that was developed and published by Nintendo in 1995. Basically, you control Yoshi and have to reunite Baby Mario with his brother Baby Luigi and return them to their parents!
Source: Nintendo Life
The game actually aged really well, and has a tremendous amount of nostalgia for me since I bascially grew up playing Mario games. Unfortunately, I didn't actually finish the game 100% since it is ridiculously difficult, as are most games of that age.
But regardless, Yoshi's Island was highly praised, especially for its unique visual style that primarily consists of hand-drawn images. I read that the designers actually did draw the pictures by hand and scanned them in, then proceeded to fill in the gaps a pixel at a time! Now that's true dedication!
Anyway, in tribute to one of my favourite childhood games, I thought it would be cool and fitting to try drawing Yoshi's Island in oil pastels!
For this piece, I didn't want to just copy level 1-1 wholesale, and it was only until I did research for this piece did I discover just how many different and beautiful backgrounds there really are in Yoshi's Island!
Just look at these beautiful prints by Gryphon-Shifter! And this is just World 4!
Source: Deviantart
The diversity in the backgrounds from level to level is astounding. I like how each one has its own motif, but I did want to keep it to classic Yoshi's Island, so I went with this one for the background:
Source: Gifer
For the foreground, I decided to emulate the iconic 1-1 stage. Well, time to get sketching!
I actually had some trouble with drawing Yoshi, for some reason. I just couldn't get the proportions right. So in the end I decided to just trace him. He definitely looked a lot better after that.
Next it was time to outline!
I knew I would have trouble since my oil pastels are quite blunt and I didn't have any way to sharpen them so to avoid going outside the lines, I used markers to colour in the characters and some of the smaller stuff.
Time for the big one - oil pastels!
As always, start light and go dark.
It took a while but that wasn't even the hardest part. The next part was definitely worse - blending!
It was definitely an arm workout blending this much. Now I see why most oil pastel tutorials are done on smaller papers. But oh well. Too late now.
About 20 minutes or so later, I managed to blend everything!
Unfortunately the sky didn't come out as blended as I had hoped. I think it's either the paper quality or maybe I should've done horizontal strokes instead of vertical. I also smudged some areas accidentally. Either way, I think it still looks alright I guess.
After outlining once more, this was the result!
I think other than a few smudges and the failed ombre background, this piece turned out pretty good! I do like it quite a bit and you can definitely recognise that it's from Yoshi's Island. Maybe I'll do another one with a different background on a better quality paper next time.
Thanks so much for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
Check out my previous post in this series!
