My husband has been fan of Super Mario Bros for over 25 years. So you better believe when my oldest son told us he wanted us to redo his room in a Mario theme my husband was completely gung ho for it. I just wanted to slap up some Mario decals around his room (in a nice fashion of course), but my husband had a much larger project in mind.
My husband decided he wanted to paint the entire first world (1-1) of Super Mario Bros. on my sons walls. To be honest I had some doubts about how well this would turn out but it came out amazing! My husband did a wonderful job!
Do you want to create an amazing Super Mario Bros. Mural on your kid’s walls? Here’s how…
Determining the Room Scale
- Measure the total wall space that you will be working with (excluding doors, windows, ect.). Make sure all of the measurements are in inches.
- Choose the world that you would like to replicate on your walls. We chose Super Mario Bros. World 1-1.
Image by www.Ian-Albert.com
- Count the total number of blocks that make up the world including pitfalls. The easiest way to do this is to count the ground bricks because they span nearly the entire world. To determine the width of the pitfalls I (Crafty Dad) used Microsoft Paint to cut out a ground brick and overlay it on a pitfall to see how many blocks worth a pitfall was. One pitfall equals two ground blocks. World 1-1 had 210 blocks including pitfalls.
- To determine the scale that you will be using divide the total number of inches of wall space (step 1) by the total number of blocks (step 3). My scale turned out to be 2.41 inches which would have made painting some of the world’s details extremely hard.
- To increase the scale to something more appropriate (while in Microsoft Paint) I looked for spaces in the world where I could just remove ground bricks without affecting the integrity of the original image. I decided that I wanted to make my scale roughly 3 inches so I removed around 41 blocks to accomplish this.
Image by www.Ian-Albert.com
- Removing these blocks allowed me to go from a 2.41 inch scale to a 3 inch scale. This was perfect for me but you can tweak this to your own needs.
Creating the Stencils
- Look at the original image and determine what stencils you need to create. For example, I created stencils for hills, clouds, bricks, pipes, mushrooms, the turtle, castle, bushes, goombas…in other words for pretty much everything.
- After identifying all of the items I needed to make stencils for I determined that the single ground brick would be my basic comparing tool. I used Microsoft Paint to cut out one of the ground bricks. Since each ground brick was going to be 3 inches wide by 3 inches tall I was able to determine the size of the other items I needed to make stencils for. For example, I determined that the small pipe was 2 ground bricks wide by 2 ground bricks tall. This meant that the Small Pipe was 6 inches by 6 inches. Do this for all of the items you need to create a stencil for. Video: Comparing Ground Bricks.
- Create a grid on a piece of poster board. To do this I pulled up a single ground brick in Microsoft Paint and expanded it to 3 inches by 3 inches when holding a ruler up to the computer screen. Video: Making the Grid.
- Once the image was enlarged in Paint I was able to easily see that a ground brick was made up of a 16 x 16 grid. I put my ruler up to the screen and measured the distance for each grid block to determine the size of my gridlines on the poster board. This grid allowed me to easily drawn all the shapes and items that I needed to create Super Mario Bros. World 1-1. Video: Making the Stencils
Check out Part 2 to learn how to choose the paint colors and complete this amazing Mario Room Wall Mural. And to see a lot more pictures!
What an awesome idea. I wish we had cool stuff like this when I was a kid. One friend went away for the summer, and his mom did his whole room in a Star Wars theme. But the wall paper was just generic space-type stuff, and so that diminished the effect of having just about every space ship and figure imaginable.
Wow, we kids were a pain back then.
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That was nice of your friends mom! Haha kids are probably more needy nowadays with all the technology we all have. They see something on TV, the ipad, and what not and of course just gotta have it lol. I think my husband did this just as much for himself as he did for my son. He was a fun project for him. He now says he wants to paint a Zelda one. I better watch out or my whole house will be painted in game themes lol.
You did an amazing job. You created stencils using Microsoft Paint! Waiting for the part 2 to know how you completed the project.
Thank you! But all the credit goes to my husband! He probably could do better now that we have some real photo software but he made do with what we had at the time. Part 2 will probably be coming out next week
Wow. That looks REALLY cool. You guys did an awesome job! I never had anything that cool in my room.
And thank you for sharing how you did it! Though I’m not sure I have the decorating/crafting skill to pull something like that off!
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Oh Thank you!! You’re sweet!! I’ll get some better pictures up once I post part 2. I agree with you… I don’t think I would have the skill or patience to do that either. It’s all my husband’s doing. Crafy dad
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Looks great!! Check out my Super Mario room redo. I’d love some feedback!
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Thanks! You did an awesome job too!!
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