Yup. With a few shapes I would use the pathfinder tools in Illustrator to help make things easy. A good example of this is with the Bob Omb's key/winder. I started off with two big circles and a small rectangle to connect it to Bob Omb's body. They using the pen tool I drew in some curves to connect the big circles and the rectangle. That's when I combined them and then cleaned up the path by removing unnecessary anchor points and then converted them all to bezier and touched up the anchor handles.
Then after that I simply made two circles and position them where the holes would be and basically "hole punched" them.
For something like the Goomba's head, what I did was got a rectangle and then put an anchor point at the top, and then one at the bottom, and then one either side. I then morphed it to resemble a kind of triangular shape. Then I looked at a reference image to take notice of more detailed points (such as the little upwards dip at the bottom of Goomba's head) and added a few additional anchor points (about two to go with the existing point at the bottom) to get the curving right.
To get any of the complicated shapes, a combination of using a primitive shape and then just morphing it and combing it with other primitive shapes seems to work well. At other times when using a primitive shape will just be too bothersome (for mouths and eyebrows especially, or anywhere in which a line-based approach would be more efficient) I just use the pen tool and mark the specific points (corners of the mouth, etc.)
I haven't been doing enough incremental saving to show each individual step (there's a lot of tweaking) but I went from the first Goomba to the second Goomba using this strategy. I drew a basic outline from memory and then looked at an image to put more points in. By rights I should be looking at an image from the word go but hey, I was sleepy at the time.
EDIT:
And here's a finished version of all of them, in one easy-to-view picture.
I might need to work on the shading again, I'm not sure. I like the shading style, but the way I shaded Blooper's arms and tentacles seemed a bit inefficient to me.
Next steps? Adding facial expressions and basically creating "sprite sheets" of sorts for each character. Then with that, I might try animating a few basic walk positions and so on.
Why I'm doing this, I have no idea, because I have no intentions on pursuing any of this as a career (primarily because my skillset does not extend beyond ripping off Nintendo characters in the form of simple cartoons) but eh, it's enjoyable.
Last edited by a moderator:
