Lego Mario, Mega Man, and Link

A couple weeks ago, my brother acquired the 25th anniversary edition of Super Mario All Stars: a collection of a few classic titles from the Mario series, along with a CD of music and sound effects from the games and a book documenting the history of the world's favorite plumber.  The cover of the book looked something like this:

 

Yeah. . . .  When I saw it I couldn't help but create a version in Lego. 

Not that I was the first to come up with the idea, or anything.  There's a bunch of Lego video game sprites running around the Internet already.  But this was one of those big light bulb moments for me, because lately I've wanted to try something different from what I normally do with Lego.  And this hit me just right!

A slightly lesser known interest of mine is video games.  I don't really play them much at all anymore, but I love the characters, the art, the music, the stories--pretty much everything about them.  On top of that, many of my childhood memories involve video games in a major way.  I grew up with these characters and have a history with them.

So I decided that video game sprites would be my "new thing" with Lego, and soon began to work on more.  This one of Mega Man is my favorite so far:

 

I've really enjoyed the change from three-dimensional scene building to two-dimensional pixel art.  Even though I'm following pictures as a guide, there are challenges to this style that I've never really encountered before, and I love the way the finished product looks.  From a distance, it's even easy for me to forget the pictures are made with Lego.

In addition to that, I now have a use for many colors that have normally gone neglected in my collection: for example, the light blue for Mega Man.  Link, from the original Legend of Zelda, gave me an opportunity to make use of my lime green and burnt orange:

Link was the most difficult of these builds for me, because I didn't have very many pieces in the right colors.  In fact, I had to double the dimensions of the picture because I didn't have any burnt orange in a size smaller than 2x2.  Even after that, I had to do a lot of stretching, and ended up using all but two or three of my burnt orange pieces.  I wouldn't have finished if it weren't for a surprise visit my mom made to a Lego store on a trip some time ago (and no, I didn't put her up to it!). 

So those are the first of my Lego video game sprites.  Expect more in the near future; there are a lot of characters I want to try.  I make no promises, but if you'd like to see a favorite character of yours, feel free to let me know!