Nintendo as Inspiration – Fan Art and Experiments Over the Years
- Feb 27
- 2 min read
Updated: Feb 28
I’m a big Nintendo fan, and many of its franchises have been with me my whole life. They’ve always been a major source of inspiration for me. In recent years, I’ve stopped making as much art based on existing IPs to focus on my own projects, but for a long time they were part of my daily creative routine.
In this post, I’m gathering all the Nintendo-related designs I’ve created over the years.
I loved the character icons from Super Mario 3D World, so I wanted to do something similar and decided to recreate those icons using Animal Crossing characters. In case you don’t know what I’m referring to, here are the originals.
And here are the versions I made.
As I mentioned in the Mitu post, I’m fascinated by the art style of characters when they enter walls or paintings in The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. So why not draw Mario characters as if they were trapped inside paintings?
To give you some context, here are the originals and my sketches.
And here’s the final result.
If Super Mario characters can be transported into the world of Zelda, why not do the opposite? Here’s Link in the style of Paper Mario — Paper Link.
When I used to make YouTube videos, I also created some game reviews, and for the thumbnails I would draw myself in the style of the featured game. For example, when I made a video about Fire Emblem: Three Houses, I illustrated myself in the game’s character style.
And now we reach Pokémon. Besides drawing every Pokémon up to the 8th generation in my own style (you can find them in other blog posts, divided by generation), I’ve also created many other Pokémon-related designs. It’s definitely one of the franchises I’ve experimented with the most.
Let’s start with the screens I used on Twitch when I streamed, inspired by images from The Simpsons.
Originals:
Another fun design I made was Squirtles in the style of Among Us. Can you guess which one is the impostor?
At one point, I became quite obsessed with making Pokémon mashups in a vintage Mickey Mouse style. That’s how these designs came to life.
I still felt I could push the concept further, so I took three retro Mickey Mouse posters and replaced the characters with Pokémon.
The originals:
More recently, I revisited this concept and felt like creating new Pokémon or reworking older ones using that same vintage style.
One of my favorite ideas was, when New Pokémon Snap came out, editing the Pokédex to include entries for my pets. It’s a game I love, and of course I love my pets too, so it felt like a perfect combination.
I even made a template for it. If anyone is interested, I might still have it saved somewhere.
And that’s all the Nintendo-related designs I’ve been able to find. I’m pretty sure there were more, but over time (and after switching computers) some things inevitably get lost.
