Super Mario Appears, gouache, 5 x 8" (12 x 20 cm)

Super Mario Appears!
The idea first comes to me as a cold-sober hallucination while I’m standing on the mud flats of the Hudson River at low tide. What if the video game character Super Mario were to appear against the sky on the far side of the river? I decide to capture the entire scene on location in my sketchbook.

It’s mind blowing to imagine but also mind bending to pull off, because I don’t really have the strongest dream-it-from-scratch imagination. My lifeline is a little plastic toy version of Super Mario that I’ve got in my sketch bag. If I hold up the toy in the same light as the setting, I can see exactly what to do.

 

I decide on his pose and his silhouette by moving his jointed legs and arms. I have to figure out how to make him look thousands of feet tall. I use the effect of atmospheric perspective to make him look colossal. That means lightening the dark colors and shifting them toward sky blue, while making the warm colors cooler and grayer. He registers as just a faint silhouette against the blue sky gradient.

I’m worried they’re going to think the idea of bringing a toy to a plein air workshop is stupid or juvenile, but they love it and think it’s cool!

A Workshop at DreamWorks
When DreamWorks Animation asks me to give a workshop to a group of their artists about imaginative realism and worldbuilding, I come up with a crazy plan: Why not have them replay this experiment?

I invite 18 of their top concept artists to join me outside the Burbank studio for some plein air concept art. The artists are from various departments: visual development, lighting, story and matte painting. Each artist brings their favorite toy figurine along with their art supplies. The challenge is to enlarge their toy and place it in a real life scene.

I paint my demo in gouache over a blue casein priming. Here’s how it looks part way finished, with the scene blocked in using flat synthetic brushes. I sketch Otis with a water-soluble colored pencil. A second pass at the sky covers up the perspective lines, then I paint Otis and the foreground.

 

Otis the Ocelot.

 

We set up in the shadows of an alley behind a Jack-in-the-Box restaurant. This location is referenced by Frank Zappa in the lyrics of the song “Billy the Mountain.” According to Zappa, the Jack-in-the-Box is positioned “right over the secret underground dump” near “pools of old poison gas and obsolete germ bombs.” Perhaps that explains where the oversize fantasy characters are coming from. A few locals come over to check out what we are doing as we work for about an hour and a half.

Otis on Glenoaks, gouache, 5 x 8" (12 x 20 cm). The maquette helps me visualize the pose, the perspective and the lighting. The cast shadows on the left leg are especially helpful. I probably wouldn’t have imagined them without physical reference.

 

Left: Hejung Park with “Beargguy” on the roof.  Top right: Gabe Gonzalez with Celeste from Animal Crossing.  Bottom right: Nicolas Weis with a Collecta Guidraco popping out of the Jack-in-the-Box.

 

The hero of my painting is my own sculpted stop-motion character named Otis the Ocelot. He’s got glass beads for eyes, wooden spheres for the head and hips, modified with epoxy sculpting compound, and micro neodymium magnets for his shoulders, hips and knee joints. I set him on top of my easel in the same light as the fast food restaurant in the background.

The 2023 Colossal Character Mentors, from left: Kymba Plushner (LeCrone), Jeanette and James Gurney, Marco Bucci, Gabriel Gonzalez, Angela Sung, Gary Geraths, Aaron Blaise, Wouter Tulp, Airi Pan, Jacki Li and Michelle Lin.

Colossal Characters Invade Pasadena
A few years later, I am invited to be a guest presenter at a convention called Lightbox Expo in Pasadena, California. Thousands of animators and concept artists from around the world will be in town to attend the convention. The artists are specialists at imagining characters in various settings. I come up with a crazy idea for an event we call “Colossal Characters.” The goal is to paint an imaginary giant character in front of Pasadena City Hall.

Sketches for Sonic and Super Mario, casein on board.

 

I ask 12 of my professional colleagues to help me out as official mentors so that all the attention isn’t all on me. Each of us wears an orange hat. I tell them that the character they portray can be completely imaginary or it could come from animation, movies, video games, or comics. The interaction between the character and its surroundings can be anything from playful to apocalyptic.

Super Duper Mario, gouache on board, 8 x 10” (20 x 25 cm)

 

Event organizers Bobby Chiu and Jim Demonakos secure the necessary clearances from the police and city officials. TV news reporters and local newspaper reporters cover the event. We invite every artist of every age, whether or not they’re enrolled in the expo. We make buttons to hand out to everyone who participates. More than 300 artists end up joining the event!

I test two ideas in the form of rough color sketches. One shows Sonic the Hedgehog reaching over the building, and the other shows Super Mario reaching down benevolently with his hands. I like the second one better, but I want to show the positions of Mario’s hands more clearly. In the end, my final painting shows Mario sitting on the ground in front of City Hall, reaching his white-gloved hands down to give people a ride. In the sky behind him, his nemesis Bowser materializes in the form of boiling clouds.

There is a joyous feeling in the air as we all gather together painting or sketching from our mind’s eye. We are all glad to be working solely with our own eyes and hands and brains, conjuring our dreams in public. —