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Well, I've put this off long enough (would you believe I started writing this before the overall favorite poll even went up?). Time to post about Scribble again! After Scribble Labs 2 I decided I wanted to try doing more original content for Circuit instead of relying so much on Mario. It went pretty well and was a lot of fun! I ended up doing OC for all of the main scribbles and most of the challenges. My biggest worry was that people might not get what I was going for or write it off as a reference to something they didn't know about, but that didn't happen as far as I've heard. Definitely will be doing more of this in future tournaments.
"The Life Source"
The obvious route to take with this challenge seemed to be turning an ordinary object into something magical. I decided to run in the opposite direction and have an unchanged mundane object, but put it in a context where it's completely foreign to the characters in a way that gives it a sort of mystique. As for how to do that, I did consider something more along the lines of Pikmin, but ended up going with this Toy Story inspired concept instead.
So the question became what household object would be magical to a toy, and I thought, well, how about a battery since some toys need that to operate (in other words, it's their life source mentioned in the title)? The scaling here is kind of out of whack, either the battery's a lot bigger or the toys are a lot smaller than I intended, but it was kind of necessary for the battery to remain the focal point of the scribble in line with the challenge conditions. I think I could've avoided that if the conditions didn't forbid characters from directly interacting with the object at all, but oh well. The PalpCo brand is a reference to Star Wars' Emperor Palpatine and his iconic force lightning.
The action figure's name is Action McCool, my idea for him was to create a sort of 90s macho action hero. The teddy bear is unnamed but I ended up naming his layers Mr. Bear, for whatever that's worth.
White outlines on a black base is something I've wanted to do more of in Scribble for a long time, but I never really found myself getting prompts that lent themselves well to it. Here I took advantage of the toy concept to have them in the darkness under the bed. Unfortunately the transition between the darkness under the bed and the light in the rest of the room is pretty scuffed - I didn't really notice until TB pointed it out. I'm otherwise pretty happy with the scribble overall.
"Hone Your Crafts"
It took a while to come up with a concept that felt solid before I finally combined the concepts of crafting in video games and actual crafts. The original idea behind this concept was the kid making his gear and then wandering off into this survival fantasy environment (whether it's imaginative or literal is up to interpretation), facing down this high level skeleton mage who's just bewildered that someone so ill-equipped to fight him. It came out pretty open-ended though and I ended up liking the interpretation that they were part of the same adventuring party more.
Not much else to say about this one, I just came up with these designs on the fly and spent most of that time trying to make the skeleton look cool. The frog wizard on the cover of his magic book is an unused character from when I started thinking about doing scribbles with totally original characters.
Avoiding direct references to Minecraft was a test of my mental fortitude with this prompt! The skeleton's head and the trees being kind of sort of cubic was an intentional homage, but that's about it.
From the get-go I set out to avoid any sort of battle victory, avoiding the obvious again. I originally had a completely different concept in mind featuring the goblin who unrelatedly shows up later as the unfortunate mountain climber coming up in round 2, but he's very lanky and angular, so I didn't want people to look at it and think "oh, WT cheaped out and just drew legally distinct Waluigi".
Enter Justin Case, the briefcase-headed lawyer celebrating his victory in court! He actually comes from a project I haven't started yet that's sitting in my idea bin. Funnily enough, the kangaroo judge is a salvage and redesign of another character from that project that I ended up scrapping completely and replacing with Justin. I did show the original design to a few people so I guess if you want to get really technical he breaks the no established characters rule and I should be banned from Scribble forever (but maybe that only applies to the main character). Not much in common between being kangaroos though.
I've wanted to try playing around with different angles more since I got feedback in that respect from TPG a while ago, so it's supposed to look like you're seeing Justin at an angle from below. To get a good reference I posed a model of Mario and squashed and stretched it around to get the proportions I wanted, and replaced his head with a cube for good measure. I'm not sure I actually notice much of a difference but maybe it's more pronounced for people with an eye for that sort of thing.
"Don't Climb With Frankenstein"
This one's a pretty bizarre idea but surprisingly came to me quick - these two are part of a group of semi-established characters who have been in my head for a while, and I was keeping them in my back pocket for Scribble so I guess that helped. The Frankenstein guy (not the Frankenstein's monster but a Frankenstein's monster, see it's original) didn't have the stitching on his chin in my original design but I added it here to more clearly distinguish what I was going for - I wanted to avoid people seeing the scribble and thinking "wow that's messed up" before they saw the title and realized what was actually going on. Not much else to say about this one, but it was fun to make!
Don't worry about the goblin guy, he's fine. I wanted to draw a followup picture for the thread where he's knocked out in the snow while some of the other characters from this bunch looked at him nonchalantly, but never got around to it.
This was a pretty rough matchup and honestly I think TB just outclassed me here, so GG's. Even with hindsight of the match, I'm not sure what I'd do different conceptually, and as far as quality goes I think meaningful improvements would be out of my skill range for now.
I ended up passing on Round 2's challenge, I never had the energy to tackle something with that much canvas space. Landscapes aren't really my forte anyway, so I didn't have any good ideas. I felt like I'd be submitting for its own sake instead of participating in the challenge because I wanted to.
"Crafts Honed"
Hey look, it's the guys! They're officially allies now. I'm leaving it up for interpretation if the kid from before is all grown up now and has actual gear, or if this is just how he sees himself in the original scribble. I spent a little bit of time thinking what to do for this prompt before settling on returning to these guys, which just felt right. Continuing the crafting theme of the original, the enemies started out being homages to Minecraft before shifting to Terraria, and now because both games have zombies and slimes you can't tell much of a difference! I considered adding a giant spider to the mix, but couldn't get the silhouette to look very good.
Most of the background being black saved me a lot of time on polishing up linework, so I used that time to try doing some shading work with cross-hatching instead! I actually really like cross-hatching as a technique in Scribble, but I've only used it sparingly in a couple of scribbles because it's very time-consuming, which isn't the greatest thing when you only have 3 hours to draw.
If I had a do-over on this one, I think maybe I would try to do something funny instead? This one was mostly just trying to be cool and I don't think they usually do too well when I do that. Or maybe it wouldn't have mattered either way, Rose's scribble seemed to resonate pretty well with people. Not that I have any regrets about the drawing itself, this is one of my favorites this run.
"This Sucks"
I almost skipped out on this challenge entirely due to time and energy reasons, and ended up tossing a different idea I had when I realized it was too ambitious with those in mind. Then I got this silly little idea in my head and decided ah what the heck, why not. So this one was the first and really only time during the tournament where I willingly broke my no Mario rule, but WT and Shbeeg are both derivative at this point, so, eh...
Obviously, this is a lot more polished than my usual comics, because Scribble deserves it. This is basically my take on what WT and Shbeeg's stylized comic depictions would look like in "HD", so to speak. Because of the limitations of the challenge, this is the first Waluigi Time Comic I've done with no purple in it whatsoever - and yes, this does count as an official comic. Number 74, baby!!! This is all pretty tongue-in-cheek though, I didn't really care about getting votes nor did I expect to win, I was just having fun with it.
"A Little Self-Absorbed"
Yeah, you read that prompt right. I spent a while trying to figure out a concept out of this mess, especially since I was, for some reason, convinced that being alone meant there should only be one character and didn't realize until well after I was done that two people can also be alone, but eh, whatever, the end result is funny. So I ended up with this woman who ends up falling in love with her own reflection in the mirror that was newly installed in the company break room. I figured the boss was the one who purchased the mirror, so in a weird way, the mirror itself was hired... kind of? Look, this prompt is unhinged, don't ask me to try to make sense looking back on it in retrospect.
I spent a lot of time on this one just messing around with the framing, so I never got around to getting the break room itself as furnished or as polished as I wanted to, but I guess it's not a big deal. There was at one point a couch, but it was terrible so I just hid the layer it was on and never looked back. And of course, we have an obligatory variant of the Vending Machine from 'Shroom Mafia 4. I was originally just going to have the contents of the top two panels, but decided I needed the third one to really sell that she's alone in the room by making it empty.
So this is what you get when you have to meet like ten specific conditions in one image. I have mixed feelings about the results of this one, I kind of fell back on just checking the boxes more or less and didn't really feel like I did much that was very creative with this one compared to some of the other entries. Also, I procrastinated and ended up doing all the drawing on the last day of the round, so by the time I got the basic linework down I didn't have the energy to give it the level of polish I usually do for scribbles. There's also some mistakes that I didn't notice until it was too late (one while I was writing this paragraph, in fact). So I feel like this shouldn't have placed as well as it did in the round or the favorite scribble poll, but maybe I'm just being too hard on myself, I don't know.
Might as well talk about what I do like with this, though! Both sides forming two sides of one setting, if not halves of the same picture, was pretty fun, plus the details of the birds only/no Mario signs referencing the character restrictions for the opposite sides. I chose the saloon to try and make sense of all the characters having firearms. Also, naming a birds-only saloon after nightingales and using that to pull off the moon condition while also being unable to show the sky is, in my opinion, the most clever integration of a condition in this, not that there's much competition. Graffiti mermaid and greaser bunny are fun character designs. (I was actually going to make the bunny the bouncer, but dropped that because it didn't make as much sense with the bird thing.)
Technically I probably could've made this easier by going for condition substitutes, especially since both sides had a few that felt stifling, but I wanted to engage with the challenge to its fullest. Or at least that's what I thought I was doing, then winstein took it even further by using all of the base conditions and incorporating the substitutes too! He deserved more points than me and was blatantly robbed.
"The Brightest Bulb"
Ah, a rematch against BBQ Turtle... The last one didn't go in my favor so I wanted to at least try and bring my A-game here, just to give myself a fighting chance. The result is my personal favorite from the tournament (seems like I'm not alone considering this was chosen as my best one this time around), and maybe somewhere in the top five overall? I'm really happy with the vibes especially, the ring of white light underneath the big lightbulb guy against the purple ground of the mountaintop is a really simple effect but works wonders, I think. Then you have the starry night sky, the sweeping clouds... I'm just really happy with this one! The clouds were actually an attempt to do something similar to TB's round 2 scribble, and in execution, came out looking nothing like those because I was having ideas above my skill level, but I think they have their own je ne sais quoi.
I actually panicked at first seeing the prompt, because it seemed like something that naturally lent itself to something more serious, and my wheelhouse is more things that are intended to be funny. But then I got the idea to be overly literal by taking the classic imagery of a sage on a mountaintop and making the sage a giant lightbulb guy, which was a pretty good "oh yeah, it's all coming together" moment and everything fell into place from there. His ancient wisdom is of course an electrician's manual, because what else would lightbulb people be reading? The manual itself is in a way responsible for how this piece turned out - I noticed when I was pretty much done sketching that the composition seemed a little similar to my Rosalina scribble from the first Scribble Labs, so I tried flipping it but then the cover was facing away from the viewer so that didn't work.
Winning against BBQ was the peak of my Scribble career, it's all downhill from here!
"Finally Got Them All"
Reimagining my 2021 scribbles was actually something I'd already been thinking about doing, so I was thrilled when this challenge came up and immediately had a concept to work with (I never got around to starting any of them, so this is all original work for the tournament, don't worry). The only change I made here was incorporating a fourth color since the challenge allowed it. I could've picked any of my scribbles, but going with this one seemed the most appropriate since it was not only my first scribble, but also the first scribble ever seen since it was posted first in the bracket. Pretty neat to bring things full circle! The original prompt here was "Coin", and honestly, this isn't even close to what I would make if I got the prompt today, but I set a rule for myself that it had to be a reimagining of my original concept with improvements in techniques and composition, not just starting from scratch with the same prompt again.
For comparison's sake, here's the original scribble:
This is pretty boring! I'd never scribbled before, and outside of a few example pieces, neither had anyone else, so there was no defined "meta" of what people were doing and what was well-received yet. What followed was this pretty basic Odyssey-inspired piece of Mario grabbing a regional coin that doesn't have much going for it conceptually. The concept sticks, so the big improvement is just making what's here more dynamic and interesting (hopefully??). That basically amounted to making a whole new pose for Mario (I posed a model in Blender to get a good reference) and adding a bunch more visual effects compared to the original's zero. The closest thing to a conceptual change was swapping out the Mushroom Kingdom regional coin for the Metro Kingdom, as that location feels more iconic to Odyssey as a whole. I'm really happy with how the Pauline bust on the coin turned out.
The challenge allowed either reimagining the original scribble or drawing a sequel, and while I intended to go with the former, you could see this as the latter as well, so that's pretty cool.
"From The Hearth"
FWD and I faced off for the bonus round using standard rules, since the bracket had continually conspired to keep us from meeting in the past. This was a pretty tough prompt to come up with a concept for, and I think it shows in how different this is from my usual work. As a matter of fact, it's my first scribble to not feature any characters - I did at one point want to have the silhouette of a couple holding hands toward the front of the picture, but they ended up blocking the scenery and I didn't like it, and I couldn't get the posing right, so the heart-shaped flame is all that's left of my attempt to connect to the original prompt. This one ended up being creation ideas above my skill level, but at the same time... it's not bad? So protip for all you aspiring artists out there, fake it until you make it.
I played this one straight and did the word search, then jazzed it up by adding head icons of all the characters I'd drawn over the tournament. Turns out adding characters was not an original idea!
You can probably tell this wasn't done with physical crayons, I just found a Krita brush that seemed sort of crayonlike and went to town with it. Again, mostly played straight aside from a few community gags like the Awards Star and 7/8 Red Coins (which again turned out to not be original ideas). Fun fact, Purple Biddybuds don't actually exist but I barely used the purple crayon anywhere else.
This one kind of fell into the same trap as the round 4 challenge where I was mostly just checklisting instead of thinking too hard about the actual concept. But yeah, this was me doing as many things that were not allowed or discouraged as possible - 3D models, tracing, shape and text tools, automatic patterns, copying and pasting, transparency (honestly I was mostly just curious to see how this would be handled when it was crunched down to three colors), and all the anti-aliasing! If anyone would condone cheating in Scribble, it's Teller.
"The Life Source"
The obvious route to take with this challenge seemed to be turning an ordinary object into something magical. I decided to run in the opposite direction and have an unchanged mundane object, but put it in a context where it's completely foreign to the characters in a way that gives it a sort of mystique. As for how to do that, I did consider something more along the lines of Pikmin, but ended up going with this Toy Story inspired concept instead.
So the question became what household object would be magical to a toy, and I thought, well, how about a battery since some toys need that to operate (in other words, it's their life source mentioned in the title)? The scaling here is kind of out of whack, either the battery's a lot bigger or the toys are a lot smaller than I intended, but it was kind of necessary for the battery to remain the focal point of the scribble in line with the challenge conditions. I think I could've avoided that if the conditions didn't forbid characters from directly interacting with the object at all, but oh well. The PalpCo brand is a reference to Star Wars' Emperor Palpatine and his iconic force lightning.
The action figure's name is Action McCool, my idea for him was to create a sort of 90s macho action hero. The teddy bear is unnamed but I ended up naming his layers Mr. Bear, for whatever that's worth.
White outlines on a black base is something I've wanted to do more of in Scribble for a long time, but I never really found myself getting prompts that lent themselves well to it. Here I took advantage of the toy concept to have them in the darkness under the bed. Unfortunately the transition between the darkness under the bed and the light in the rest of the room is pretty scuffed - I didn't really notice until TB pointed it out. I'm otherwise pretty happy with the scribble overall.
"Hone Your Crafts"
It took a while to come up with a concept that felt solid before I finally combined the concepts of crafting in video games and actual crafts. The original idea behind this concept was the kid making his gear and then wandering off into this survival fantasy environment (whether it's imaginative or literal is up to interpretation), facing down this high level skeleton mage who's just bewildered that someone so ill-equipped to fight him. It came out pretty open-ended though and I ended up liking the interpretation that they were part of the same adventuring party more.
Not much else to say about this one, I just came up with these designs on the fly and spent most of that time trying to make the skeleton look cool. The frog wizard on the cover of his magic book is an unused character from when I started thinking about doing scribbles with totally original characters.
Avoiding direct references to Minecraft was a test of my mental fortitude with this prompt! The skeleton's head and the trees being kind of sort of cubic was an intentional homage, but that's about it.
From the get-go I set out to avoid any sort of battle victory, avoiding the obvious again. I originally had a completely different concept in mind featuring the goblin who unrelatedly shows up later as the unfortunate mountain climber coming up in round 2, but he's very lanky and angular, so I didn't want people to look at it and think "oh, WT cheaped out and just drew legally distinct Waluigi".
Enter Justin Case, the briefcase-headed lawyer celebrating his victory in court! He actually comes from a project I haven't started yet that's sitting in my idea bin. Funnily enough, the kangaroo judge is a salvage and redesign of another character from that project that I ended up scrapping completely and replacing with Justin. I did show the original design to a few people so I guess if you want to get really technical he breaks the no established characters rule and I should be banned from Scribble forever (but maybe that only applies to the main character). Not much in common between being kangaroos though.
I've wanted to try playing around with different angles more since I got feedback in that respect from TPG a while ago, so it's supposed to look like you're seeing Justin at an angle from below. To get a good reference I posed a model of Mario and squashed and stretched it around to get the proportions I wanted, and replaced his head with a cube for good measure. I'm not sure I actually notice much of a difference but maybe it's more pronounced for people with an eye for that sort of thing.
"Don't Climb With Frankenstein"
This one's a pretty bizarre idea but surprisingly came to me quick - these two are part of a group of semi-established characters who have been in my head for a while, and I was keeping them in my back pocket for Scribble so I guess that helped. The Frankenstein guy (not the Frankenstein's monster but a Frankenstein's monster, see it's original) didn't have the stitching on his chin in my original design but I added it here to more clearly distinguish what I was going for - I wanted to avoid people seeing the scribble and thinking "wow that's messed up" before they saw the title and realized what was actually going on. Not much else to say about this one, but it was fun to make!
Don't worry about the goblin guy, he's fine. I wanted to draw a followup picture for the thread where he's knocked out in the snow while some of the other characters from this bunch looked at him nonchalantly, but never got around to it.
This was a pretty rough matchup and honestly I think TB just outclassed me here, so GG's. Even with hindsight of the match, I'm not sure what I'd do different conceptually, and as far as quality goes I think meaningful improvements would be out of my skill range for now.
"Crafts Honed"
Hey look, it's the guys! They're officially allies now. I'm leaving it up for interpretation if the kid from before is all grown up now and has actual gear, or if this is just how he sees himself in the original scribble. I spent a little bit of time thinking what to do for this prompt before settling on returning to these guys, which just felt right. Continuing the crafting theme of the original, the enemies started out being homages to Minecraft before shifting to Terraria, and now because both games have zombies and slimes you can't tell much of a difference! I considered adding a giant spider to the mix, but couldn't get the silhouette to look very good.
Most of the background being black saved me a lot of time on polishing up linework, so I used that time to try doing some shading work with cross-hatching instead! I actually really like cross-hatching as a technique in Scribble, but I've only used it sparingly in a couple of scribbles because it's very time-consuming, which isn't the greatest thing when you only have 3 hours to draw.
If I had a do-over on this one, I think maybe I would try to do something funny instead? This one was mostly just trying to be cool and I don't think they usually do too well when I do that. Or maybe it wouldn't have mattered either way, Rose's scribble seemed to resonate pretty well with people. Not that I have any regrets about the drawing itself, this is one of my favorites this run.
"This Sucks"
I almost skipped out on this challenge entirely due to time and energy reasons, and ended up tossing a different idea I had when I realized it was too ambitious with those in mind. Then I got this silly little idea in my head and decided ah what the heck, why not. So this one was the first and really only time during the tournament where I willingly broke my no Mario rule, but WT and Shbeeg are both derivative at this point, so, eh...
Obviously, this is a lot more polished than my usual comics, because Scribble deserves it. This is basically my take on what WT and Shbeeg's stylized comic depictions would look like in "HD", so to speak. Because of the limitations of the challenge, this is the first Waluigi Time Comic I've done with no purple in it whatsoever - and yes, this does count as an official comic. Number 74, baby!!! This is all pretty tongue-in-cheek though, I didn't really care about getting votes nor did I expect to win, I was just having fun with it.
"A Little Self-Absorbed"
Yeah, you read that prompt right. I spent a while trying to figure out a concept out of this mess, especially since I was, for some reason, convinced that being alone meant there should only be one character and didn't realize until well after I was done that two people can also be alone, but eh, whatever, the end result is funny. So I ended up with this woman who ends up falling in love with her own reflection in the mirror that was newly installed in the company break room. I figured the boss was the one who purchased the mirror, so in a weird way, the mirror itself was hired... kind of? Look, this prompt is unhinged, don't ask me to try to make sense looking back on it in retrospect.
I spent a lot of time on this one just messing around with the framing, so I never got around to getting the break room itself as furnished or as polished as I wanted to, but I guess it's not a big deal. There was at one point a couch, but it was terrible so I just hid the layer it was on and never looked back. And of course, we have an obligatory variant of the Vending Machine from 'Shroom Mafia 4. I was originally just going to have the contents of the top two panels, but decided I needed the third one to really sell that she's alone in the room by making it empty.
So this is what you get when you have to meet like ten specific conditions in one image. I have mixed feelings about the results of this one, I kind of fell back on just checking the boxes more or less and didn't really feel like I did much that was very creative with this one compared to some of the other entries. Also, I procrastinated and ended up doing all the drawing on the last day of the round, so by the time I got the basic linework down I didn't have the energy to give it the level of polish I usually do for scribbles. There's also some mistakes that I didn't notice until it was too late (one while I was writing this paragraph, in fact). So I feel like this shouldn't have placed as well as it did in the round or the favorite scribble poll, but maybe I'm just being too hard on myself, I don't know.
Might as well talk about what I do like with this, though! Both sides forming two sides of one setting, if not halves of the same picture, was pretty fun, plus the details of the birds only/no Mario signs referencing the character restrictions for the opposite sides. I chose the saloon to try and make sense of all the characters having firearms. Also, naming a birds-only saloon after nightingales and using that to pull off the moon condition while also being unable to show the sky is, in my opinion, the most clever integration of a condition in this, not that there's much competition. Graffiti mermaid and greaser bunny are fun character designs. (I was actually going to make the bunny the bouncer, but dropped that because it didn't make as much sense with the bird thing.)
Technically I probably could've made this easier by going for condition substitutes, especially since both sides had a few that felt stifling, but I wanted to engage with the challenge to its fullest. Or at least that's what I thought I was doing, then winstein took it even further by using all of the base conditions and incorporating the substitutes too! He deserved more points than me and was blatantly robbed.
"The Brightest Bulb"
Ah, a rematch against BBQ Turtle... The last one didn't go in my favor so I wanted to at least try and bring my A-game here, just to give myself a fighting chance. The result is my personal favorite from the tournament (seems like I'm not alone considering this was chosen as my best one this time around), and maybe somewhere in the top five overall? I'm really happy with the vibes especially, the ring of white light underneath the big lightbulb guy against the purple ground of the mountaintop is a really simple effect but works wonders, I think. Then you have the starry night sky, the sweeping clouds... I'm just really happy with this one! The clouds were actually an attempt to do something similar to TB's round 2 scribble, and in execution, came out looking nothing like those because I was having ideas above my skill level, but I think they have their own je ne sais quoi.
I actually panicked at first seeing the prompt, because it seemed like something that naturally lent itself to something more serious, and my wheelhouse is more things that are intended to be funny. But then I got the idea to be overly literal by taking the classic imagery of a sage on a mountaintop and making the sage a giant lightbulb guy, which was a pretty good "oh yeah, it's all coming together" moment and everything fell into place from there. His ancient wisdom is of course an electrician's manual, because what else would lightbulb people be reading? The manual itself is in a way responsible for how this piece turned out - I noticed when I was pretty much done sketching that the composition seemed a little similar to my Rosalina scribble from the first Scribble Labs, so I tried flipping it but then the cover was facing away from the viewer so that didn't work.
Winning against BBQ was the peak of my Scribble career, it's all downhill from here!
"Finally Got Them All"
Reimagining my 2021 scribbles was actually something I'd already been thinking about doing, so I was thrilled when this challenge came up and immediately had a concept to work with (I never got around to starting any of them, so this is all original work for the tournament, don't worry). The only change I made here was incorporating a fourth color since the challenge allowed it. I could've picked any of my scribbles, but going with this one seemed the most appropriate since it was not only my first scribble, but also the first scribble ever seen since it was posted first in the bracket. Pretty neat to bring things full circle! The original prompt here was "Coin", and honestly, this isn't even close to what I would make if I got the prompt today, but I set a rule for myself that it had to be a reimagining of my original concept with improvements in techniques and composition, not just starting from scratch with the same prompt again.
For comparison's sake, here's the original scribble:
This is pretty boring! I'd never scribbled before, and outside of a few example pieces, neither had anyone else, so there was no defined "meta" of what people were doing and what was well-received yet. What followed was this pretty basic Odyssey-inspired piece of Mario grabbing a regional coin that doesn't have much going for it conceptually. The concept sticks, so the big improvement is just making what's here more dynamic and interesting (hopefully??). That basically amounted to making a whole new pose for Mario (I posed a model in Blender to get a good reference) and adding a bunch more visual effects compared to the original's zero. The closest thing to a conceptual change was swapping out the Mushroom Kingdom regional coin for the Metro Kingdom, as that location feels more iconic to Odyssey as a whole. I'm really happy with how the Pauline bust on the coin turned out.
The challenge allowed either reimagining the original scribble or drawing a sequel, and while I intended to go with the former, you could see this as the latter as well, so that's pretty cool.
"From The Hearth"
FWD and I faced off for the bonus round using standard rules, since the bracket had continually conspired to keep us from meeting in the past. This was a pretty tough prompt to come up with a concept for, and I think it shows in how different this is from my usual work. As a matter of fact, it's my first scribble to not feature any characters - I did at one point want to have the silhouette of a couple holding hands toward the front of the picture, but they ended up blocking the scenery and I didn't like it, and I couldn't get the posing right, so the heart-shaped flame is all that's left of my attempt to connect to the original prompt. This one ended up being creation ideas above my skill level, but at the same time... it's not bad? So protip for all you aspiring artists out there, fake it until you make it.
I played this one straight and did the word search, then jazzed it up by adding head icons of all the characters I'd drawn over the tournament. Turns out adding characters was not an original idea!
You can probably tell this wasn't done with physical crayons, I just found a Krita brush that seemed sort of crayonlike and went to town with it. Again, mostly played straight aside from a few community gags like the Awards Star and 7/8 Red Coins (which again turned out to not be original ideas). Fun fact, Purple Biddybuds don't actually exist but I barely used the purple crayon anywhere else.
This one kind of fell into the same trap as the round 4 challenge where I was mostly just checklisting instead of thinking too hard about the actual concept. But yeah, this was me doing as many things that were not allowed or discouraged as possible - 3D models, tracing, shape and text tools, automatic patterns, copying and pasting, transparency (honestly I was mostly just curious to see how this would be handled when it was crunched down to three colors), and all the anti-aliasing! If anyone would condone cheating in Scribble, it's Teller.
