Mario reps his console, throwin' up the W-I-I.

I saw a video of Shigeru Miyamoto holding up 3 fingers on one hand and two on the other to spell out "Wii", and it made me think of a gang sign. This project evolved from that idea. I was originally just going to draw an original non-descript "thug" throwing up the signs as I have reinterpreted them, but the idea struck me to have Mario do it. I had drawn an "urbanized" Mario years ago, and always had plans to remake him digitally, and the projects sorta melded together into this.

I made this image to the dimensions of my monitor, for ultimate use as a wallpaper. (The irony of the Wii being a standard definition console, and this wallpaper being extremely HD is not lost on me.)

I used Photoshop for everything, and most of the lighting and shading (and even base coloring) is achieved through layer effects. I created most of the shapes using paths, and filled them on separate layers (which made subsequent changes quite simple). The rim lighting effect (which gives Mario's skin that glow) is done with an inner glow that matches the base color. Bevel, inner shadow, and color overlay is used on most of his body. I created several copies of some layers, applied a drop shadow, and went to work with the eraser to get the desired look of shading (masked by the aforementioned paths, to keep the shadows only where I want them). His head got the most work done in this fashion. His tattoos, which are the U.S. logos for previous Nintendo consoles are blended in differing ways, and with the exception of the GameCube graphic, I drew each one in a separate file before importing and warping to match the contours of his skin.

The spray-painted "Side" was drawn with paths, filled, and had color overlay, inner glow, stroke (the green part), and satin applied. I then copied the merged layer and pasted it to a new layer where I applied a gaussian blur to make it look more sprayed, smudged at 100% with my pen to make the paint drips, and then rendered lighting effects using an alpha channel of the background to give it the plasticy, bumpy texture. BTW, I got the background texture from Mayang's Free Textures. They have such a great selection, that I almost didn't have to make any alterations to the one I used to get it to fit my project perfectly.