Making Mario.

Here we go again!

So I knew I wanted to create a Mario bear and so feeling rather sensible I got my pencil crayons out and drew up a sketch to work from. (This was my first major mod after all!). My initial drawing was of a bear standing up but being new to modding I had no damaged bears to work from. I did however still have 4 identical Archibald’s!! That being said I changed my design so that the bear was sitting, and I must say that the design looked better for it. (Perhaps the World’s unluckiest lucky bag was not so bad after all!)

I thought I would be clever and post my progress on the BTB forum. I did this in small stages and waited to see how long it took until the bear’s new identity was guessed. Amazingly this only took 2 days and my fun was soon cut short! That didn’t stop me from having fun with my new mod though.

Firstly I had to give my bear its dignity back. Once again I *cough* carefully *cough* removed the bears penis and then filled the recess using air-hardening clay. I find that if you mix this stuff with water it is much easier to work with. I then came across my first major task, and this was to remove the wax strip from Archibald’s arm. Now at this point I did not own a dremel or any other rotary tool so the next best thing in my eyes was an angle grinder! A few seconds later Archibald had lost what he was holding and I had been covered from top to bottom in fine white dust.

I focused on Mario’s head to begin with, filling Archibald’s mouth with clay and adding a hat from one of my figures I had collected as a child. It pained me to do this but with a bit of trimming I knew it would look perfect. Sorry,.. Did I say a bit? After 2 hours I had the hat fitting how I wanted it. I filled any gaps with PVA glue. This was a big mistake as I found PVA glue reacts with most paints! The hatless Mario then came in handy when I decided I was going to ‘find’ a moustache rather than make one and whilst I was destroying the figures face I stole his large bulbous nose, this later became the mushroom that Mario would hold.

Now the head was looking rather Mario like but the body looked like that of a normal bear. Using clay again I sculpted overalls and smoothed over the texture of the bears fur. For finer details like the tongue and straps I cut the correct shapes from plastic and super glued them into place. Once happy with the bear I painted it using paints from Games Workshop. The great thing about making your own mods is that you don’t have to worry about copyright, and so I could make this bear look as close to the actual Mario character as I liked. As I was applying the last few spots to the mushroom I decided that Mario should have a pool of sick to accompany his magic mushroom and so once again the clay came out. Oh by the way, this stuff can be dried with a hair-dryer if you are inpatient like me!

Now earlier I mentioned I drew 2 sketches, well at the time I decided to send these to Peter Underhill. A few weeks later I had an Email from Pete to say that a Mario bear was going to be made! As you can imagine this made everything seem very worthwhile and that’s why I suggest everybody gives modding a go!

So, that was Mario, from start to finish. What did I do next? Find out tomorrow! :)