DONKEY KONG WINS!!

Finished polishing off my first DONKEY KONG illustration last night (though I may still tweak it here and there). Been working on this one for a while in my "spare time" (between 10pm and 3am), but I'm rather pleased with how it turned out. The coloring actually didn't take as long as I thought it would -- as usual, the added effects and details took a bit longer to hammer out than I'd have liked.

Apologies to all you Mario fans out there -- looks like the little-carpenter-that-could bit the barrel! That's right, "carpenter". Mario (or "jumpman" as he was known before being given a name) began his career as a carpenter before he was shamed out of the profession and had to learn plumbing from his brother, Luigi.

Apparently, Mario used to be a bit of a bad guy before Nintendo decided to polish up his image and pit him against King Koopa. I love the game DONKEY KONG, but couldn't we play as the gorilla instead? He's a much more sympathetic character once you know the story behind the game. Apparently, Mario kept DK as his pet, yet treated him poorly, keeping him locked up in a cage and perhaps beating him while the poor ape is forced to watch from behind bars as Mario incessantly makes out with his hot girlfriend, Pauline, right in front of the imprisoned beast! Can you blame him for busting out, kidnapping Pauline and tossing barrels and flaming fireballs at the creepy carpenter? I'd do the same thing! Mario was later recaptured, of course, only to have his son come and rescue him and take out Mario in the process. Is it any wonder DK went crazy and eventually holed up in a greenhouse, communing with insects (see DONKEY KONG 3)?

Anyway, this time, much to the distress of Pauline, Donkey Kong wins and Mario eats a barrel. Hooray! I wonder what ever happened to Pauline anyway? Mario seems to have taken the golddigger route, ditching the sassy lass for the royal Princess Toadstool. I think you made a big mistake, Mario -- sure the princess is loaded (except their currency is probably mushroom-based), but Pauline is way hotter! Your loss.

Critiques and feedback are appreciated, please. The second DONKEY KONG illustration is underway and I'll post more progress on that when applicable.

MARIO!

Here's a quick peek at Mario for my second DONKEY KONG illustration, currently in-progress!

DONKEY KONG inks!

Finally finished the inks for my first DONKEY KONG piece. I wish I had a larger scanner. I had to ink each element on separate sheets of bristol (DK, Mario, Pauline, the girder) and scan them individually, then piece them together in Photoshop. I think my scanner is wearing out, too, because it seems to be starting to slightly distort each scan so it's not as easy to get scanned elements to fit together anymore. Oh well... gotta have money for a new scanner, and that's not happening right now.



Colors will follow soon!

DONKEY KONG UPDATE!

Things are moving along at a snail's pace with my 2 DONKEY KONG pieces. I'm in no hurry to get them done, and I can only work on them late at night after the freelance work is done. This is a cleaned-up pencil drawing of the first piece with some odds and ends adjusted and tightened up -- the most notable adjustment is the size and position of Pauline on DK's shoulder. She seemed a bit too large in the first pass.



Next is a tightened up sketch of the second layout with the background and setting elements fleshed-out and the positioning of the objects adjusted. I really like how these are both turning out, so maybe I won't feel the desire to go back and redo these in 6 months, as seems to happen with many of my pieces (if you call them "pieces" instead of "drawings" it makes you sound like a real artist).



Finally, there's a page of DK head studies that I forgot to include in an earlier post.



I'm also including a cool DONKEY KONG QUILT that my magic computer showed to me the other day. It's done by Carolina Patchworks. It's nearly there and I wish it was a more pixel-perfect translation, but hey -- it's a Donkey Kong quilt! That alone makes it cool.

DONKEY KONG IS... STILL COMING!

More DONKEY KONG sketches from the ol' sketchbook, as well as some other cool samplings of DK fan-art.

Thorsten Hasenkam produced this first piece of fan art. Nicely produced piece with a seemingly oblivious Donkey Kong. Bonus points for being hand-painted, but I'd like to have seen a bit more relation between the characters of the piece. Seems like two separate images tossed together in the same frame. The pixellated blocks save it by tying the whole thing together from a design standpoint, if not thematically. I like his other work, too. His paintings feel like a fun mash-up of Glenn Barr and Shag.



Next up is a charming and adorable little hand-made Donkey Kong by Anna Chambers. All I gots to say about this one is "I want one!" Anna, let's trade!



Here's a fantastic feat of paper-engineering spearheaded by Ian Rickard. Some folks at the Jack Baskin school of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz built a huge-scale replica of the DK game board with about 14,000 post-it notes in 4 stories worth of windows in their Engineering building.
There's also a time-lapse video of them setting it up.



To round things out, I'm gonna close this chapter with one of the most bizarre reimaginings of Mario and his simian nemesis that I've come across. What's even more bizarre is that it is an officially licensed piece that was acually used as packaging art for an Intellivision game cartridge port. It's like they very loosely described the concept of the game to some freelance artist who'd never heard of such a thing as a "Donkey Kong" before. Mario seems to have ditched his job as a carpenter to become some sort of Mexican 90's superhero version of the god of thunder, complete with golden hammer, while the decidedly un-gorilla-like Donkey Kong holds the homely Pauline captive in some sort of boundless Tron-type laser-scape and hurls shiny untapped kegs of beer at our mullet-sporting hero! It's so bad, I want a poster of it! I should research this a bit and find out if there's an amusing story behind this piece of art.



More tomorrow!