The Kirby- Mario Connection

Hello there!

This is the week where I take sometime away from drawing a bit, readying for work and watching swarmy romantic comedies to bring you this:

Yarn Kirby and Paper Mario! Drawn by me. :D

If some of the past posts didn't make it somewhat obvious, Kirby and Super Mario are my two favorite video game characters! Yes, since the tender age of eight when one of my cousins let me play her bulky Game Boy... something clicked in me. Before that, everyone I knew was Mortal Kombat, PlayStation, or 'Sonic, Sonic, Sonic!'- thirsty and.... I didn't care. I saw too much of them that I wanted to play something different.

Hence my introduction to Kirby's Dreamland.

Sure, it's a simple  and short game; the cutesy apparence of the characters and audio were at an eleven. BUT... that didn't stop me from loving it. And Kirby himself. There's something about the simplicity of him and his universe. Plus, my SolStars mascot, RaiStar Twinkle slightly resembles him:

Look into his eyes!

Oddly enough, RaiStar was my first creation at five years old; I didn't play anything Kirby related until I was eight. Strange huh?! What became just as strange was that my cartoons even resembled the Super Mario games, too! Now granted, Mario I REALLY got into when my parents got me a Nintendo 64 when I was twelve (I was late to the game, I know). My first game was Mario Kart 64. A month later, Mario Tennis 64 came into my household. And at the beginning of that summer, the game that would make me love video games the way the Looney Tunes made me love animation came in: Super Mario 64.

So, here I am eleven years later.... wondering if it was such a coincidence that these two characters influenced me somehow someway. The greatest fact of all this? It was all unintentional! I didn't care to take influences from video games in my youth. During my teenage years, my personal artstyle started to truly form (all this time more Kirby and Mario were being played), and my classmates would do nothing but critisize my cartoons because 1) 'They're too kiddy!' and 2) 'Looney Tunes and Nintendo are played out! Waaaaah!' All I said was, "At least I HAVE a style!" Then, my smirk was born. ;)

Most of those people (or critics/ jocks) stopped drawing, let alone caring about the visual arts. It's strange that so many of my artsy friends fell into the realm of "EVERYTHING I DRAW MUST BE FROM A COMIC BOOK AND ANIME!" and yet.... I just kept drawing influences from everywhere art related and developed my still- growing cartooning style. I'm not even shameful to say this; Kirby and Super Mario helped that.

And to end this, video game soundtracks began helping too! If any musician or band can make an original theme similar this:

I will GLADLY pay to use it as a SolStars theme song! Until next time, folks!