Our Super Duper Super Mario Bros. Halloween! Part 1: Background

For me, Halloween is a holiday that I always look forward to. Not for the candy, not for the horror movies, not for the gore, but for the costumes. And no, not the whore-rific kind either. Bleh. I'm talking about a real costume that means something, looks awesome, and is home made. Here's what we did:

 Ta-da!

Okay, so I sort of cheated this year and just reused our cosplay from Fandemonium this year...and a previous Halloween before Brandon and I were married, BUT, I did make these and plus, Kessie's costume took a lot of work, and I wanted her to get to wear that costume as much as possible. :)

As if this wasn't enough for you already, we also decided to go full out on our trunk for the Trunk-or-Treat that our church put together. Check. It. Out.

Yup. We're awesome. ;)

Want to know how we did it?

Background:
The background took the most time, but it was well worth it. :)

What You'll Need:

• A big piece of cardboard that fits snugly in your car's trunk.
• Paint in assorted colors. We just used primary color acrylic paint we got from Walmart. 
• Assorted sizes of paint brushes (also from Walmart).
• A Sharpie.
• A pencil.
• Pictures as references 
• Your creative mind.

What we did first was gather a bunch of pictures from the internet of the characters we wanted in our scene. You can have as many or as few as you'd like, and even characters we didn't put in. But just to save you the time of having to look up a lot of pictures for just the right thing, here are all the pictures we used as references:

My husband thinks this character would be awesome to have, and I must say, I really like it in the scene.

 Our scene was based on the old Super Mario games. Believe it or not, this is Bowser. O.o Not as intimidating as he is now, but it works. :)

 A fish. Why not?

 Gotta have a Goomba.

 ...and a flower thing.

 Don't forget the Blooper!

This one was mostly for the bullet.

This was our reference for the overall scene. You can see that our's is a bit different, but it generally helped with the overall look of things.

After gathering the pictures of what you'd like in your scene, get out a piece of scratch paper and roughly draw out what you'd like it to look like. Like this:

Only...better. And not so dead-fishy.

K, so after that, draw out your scene with pencil. After that, outline it all with Sharpie. You will have to do this at the very end too, but I suggest doing it now so that you can clearly see where and what you are painting.

After that, paint everything! This part is pretty meticulous and will take a long time, so you'll probably want someone to help you. We spent at least 4 hours just painting and that was with 2 of us. Ugh.

Once you're done painting, go over the lines again with Sharpie, just to give it a nice finished look.

And voila! There ya are!

Tune in to the next post for instructions on the pumpkins and Peach and Mario put-your-face-in-and-take-a-picture things.

Picture References: 
Lakitu Picture: http://www.mariowiki.com/User:Super_Spike
Bowser Picture: http://www.corksandcaftans.com/2010/01/12/the-birthday-boss/
Fish: http://gamer7heaven.wordpress.com/art-gallery/8-bit-pixel-art/8-bit-mario-art/
Goomba: http://gamer7heaven.wordpress.com/art-gallery/8-bit-pixel-art/8-bit-mario-art/
Piranha Plant: http://www.etsy.com/listing/85570053/super-mario-bros-piranha-plant-favor-box   
Fish and Blooper: http://www.etsy.com/listing/100092913/mario-bros-blooper-cheep-cheep-duo
Assorted Picture:http://www.flickr.com/photos/riotpatch/5379535086/
Castle Picture: http://gamefans.com/2012/07/24/super-mario-games-go-downloadable-on-the-3ds/mario-underground-end/