Fireball

Ahhh... who doesn't love Mario? Since I pretty much grew up on Super Mario Brothers and my son loves him some Super Smash Brothers, I've got a ton of mario backgrounds. This one is the fire flower that powers up Mario to shoot fireballs.




The image I started with. It looks like a screen grab from an nes emulator.




Getting ready to crop just the flower out of the source image. This is zoomed in pretty tight. I wanted to reproduce the blocky pixel look, so a .jpg image would have funky defects. The source image here was a .bmp



About to scale the image. Note the interpolation is set to none. This means it won't attempt to smooth edges as it expands the image. Normally you'd want this set to cubic, but I wanted the blocky pixel look.




Now that the size is right, I resize the canvas to fit the standard 4:3 aspect ratio. 1600 x 1200 in this case.




Nearly finished, just need to fix the stem/leaf color. I went with a nice dark green, instead of the funky blue-green from the game.




The final image.





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