Nintendo's Iconic Game Characters Given New Life in Traditional Ukiyo Art Style

So here’s a really fun art project we stumbled across this evening. Artist Jed Henry has been creating amazing pictures of iconic Nintendo game characters, like Mario, Link, Samus, and Donkey Kong [1]. The pictures are done in the style of traditional Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints, and they look fantastic! He says that he draws them with a Japanese brush, and then brings them into photoshop.

You can check them out over on his tumblr blog, or at his Ukiyo Nintendo Facebook group. I’m going to post just two below, and I’ll encourage you to click through to his sites to see the rest.

There seems to be lots of positive “shut-up-and-take-my-money” responses from people who would like to buy prints, t-shirts, or posters. And we’re happy to see that Jed is planning to put prints on sale on August 1 as part of a Kickstarter campaign. I hope he does well.

I can’t help but think that these pictures would make for a great social battle card game, along the lines of DeNA’s Rage of Bahamut or something like that. It’s a shame that Nintendo doesn’t do social… The game plays awesome in my imagination though.