WA WA Welcome to the Paper Mario tutorial! After you finish this video, you’ll be able
to design, draw, and animate any character you want in the Paper Mario style. The art
style between games is significantly different, so I’m focusing on The Thousand Year Door.
By the way, promotional art for the games doesn’t match the actual style, so be careful
if you use those as reference. Even though it would be amazing to get a Paper Mario game
like this.
We’ll be doing everything in 2D. Use your programs of choice - this tutorial isn’t
specific to any one program. I’m drawing in Illustrator and After Effects today.
Let’s start by sketching a character design. The game has tons of unique creatures, so
there are really only a few guidelines to follow.
Eyes. Most are some type of plain dot, dot inside a circle, or accessory that covers
eyes. Mouths. Some characters have one, some don’t,
and some only have a visible one when talking. Arms tend to be stubby - an upper part and
a hand. Legs are very rare. Most characters have floating
shoe feet, partially or fully covered feet, or no feet at all.
Due to the variety of species in Mario, it helps if there’s something in game that
looks even a little like what you want. For instance humans will be similar to Mario,
Luigi, Peach, or one of the other humanoid characters. A mouse could be this or this
or this. So if you wanted to do a tiny wolf and used Ms. Mowz as inspiration - bam. Then
you also have an idea of what its animations would look like.
Waluigi’s mouth is inspired by Flavio. When he talks it’d be animated like this.
As we move to the next step, I’d like to thank this tutorial’s sponsor Skillshare.
Since you’re here on YouTube I’m sure you’ve seen your fair share of tutorials
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It’s time to draw the Paper Mario puppet pieces. I’m vectoring each piece to have
better control over lines.
Outlines are not black. Except for eye pupils, every character part has a colored outline
that is a darker shade of the main fill color. This applies to things inside the body line
too, so accessories get their own line. Line ends are sharp at the tips.
Line thickness varies a lot. In some places Luigi has thicker outlines than Mario. Bowser
has pressure sensitive lines, but the Punies have even, thin lines. The general rule is
the bigger the character, the thicker their lines. So characters of the same size have
about the same type of lines. Details are thinner.
There are rare no-outlline exceptions. Mario and Luigi’s overalls, hat emblem, white
pattern on Yoshis. So if an outline is causing too much clutter, try removing it.
Color your pieces.
Probably the hardest thing about Paper Mario style is pieces have soft shading. On the
edges of a piece you have a hard highlight, but it’s not a lighter color, the shadow
is simply erased. Use gradient fills and an inner-facing stroke color to get this effect,
or brush the shadow on and erase or transform.
Rig your character. Set the pivot points. Duplicate arms and feet.
The first animation I’ll show you how to do is a turn because it is affected by how
you rig your character. When Paper Mario characters turn around, they are NOT flat art. This would
be wrong.
If your program doesn’t have 3D space, you can make a turn by squishing and skewing your
art. The art will be flat but honestly only people who’ve watched this tutorial are
likely to know *this* is what a style accurate turn looks like.
The fastest way to properly set up a turn is to slightly space out key pieces on the
Z axis. Too much and limbs will fly off. Most professional 2D animation programs have a
3D multiplane feature you can do this in. Free ones generally do not.
In order to make sure your pieces don’t end up like this on the flip side, only rotate
the puppet halfway. Then flip the puppet on the X axis and rotate back to 0 degrees. Adjust
the starting angle of the rotation’s second half. Add easing.
To flip the other way, reverse keyframes. Every character has a unique idle animation.
Most characters with feet rock up on their toes. Set your down keyframe. Set your up
keyframe. Copy and paste the first keyframe to the end. Add easing. You can give your
character personality by changing the timing of individual puppet parts and the cycle itself.
Run animations with feet are incredibly easy. The feet swing around the body the same as
a pendulum. Arms move barely, if at all. The body moves up and down, so you may add some
bounciness to accessories and hair.
In the end you’ll have three keyframes with your character up in the air and two keyframes
touching the ground.
Mario has a back facing run, but his partners stay the same perspective. If you want to
be fancy like Mario, you need to frame-frame animate shoes. Regular shoe, bent shoe, unbending
¾ shoe, and ¾ shoe.
Now you have a Paper Mario character with basic animations. You’re free to experiment
with other actions, poses, and animations you want to add to them.
Visit my channel for other tutorials on how to copy various popular 2D animation styles,
plus lessons about animation in general. If you love Scribble Kibble, I have official
merchandise at my Redbubble store. And you can help create original animations by joining
my Patreon.
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Oh. Ohhh. That’s horrifying. It’s like pink teeth.