Recreation of the Yoshi Mural

Almost 12 years ago I found out that I was pregnant with my first child. My husband and I had just recently moved into our first house, so I wanted to give the spare bedroom a makeover for the baby. Being a huge retro game fan who loves to paint, I decided to paint a mural on the wall. I figured a Yoshi’s Island DS theme for the room would be perfect for both kids and adults and that I wanted to paint a large mural on the big wall that would feature a group of brightly coloured Yoshi’s. Once completed the mural ended up being almost 10 feet wide and six feet tall. It took a long time to finish but looked really cool once the whole room was finished.

Fast forward to 2021 and we made the decision to move to a bigger house. We had outgrown that one and figured the boys needed their own space and separate bedrooms. The real estate agent that we were listing the house with recommended that I paint over all the artwork in that bedroom before it went on the market. I was sad, I knew that leaving that special room behind would suck but it was so hard to paint over it. Luckily my husband helped a lot because I was crushed.

After we moved to the new house the boys would make comments about how much they missed the Yoshi mural. After being heartbroken with painting over the first one I definitely didn’t want to paint right on the walls again. But I had just recently gotten a tablet to create digital art with so I started thinking of a way to make a print using the Yoshi mural design. Once I started, I realised that I could draw and “paint” a huge version of the mural on the tablet and get a decal for the wall made out of it. Luckily when I did the original painting I took a ton of in-progress pictures, so I just used my original black painted outline and created a digital version of it. No sense redrawing it since I had already drawn it once before. This saved me a ton of time! Using the tablet let me play around with the colours and easily change them if I didn’t like the combination. After a few colour switches I finally decided on the final Yoshi colours and added in my new digital paint strokes.

The new mural was printed and looks great. I had decided to make it a bit smaller so I would fit on the new wall better, so it ended up being six feet wide and about four feet tall. Due to the size it was already a pain for my husband and I to hang, but after an hour it looked pretty good. Just had to wait until Christmas Eve morning when I decided to surprise the boys.

I made sure I was ready with my phone so I could capture their reaction to the new addition to the game room. It’s not exactly the same as the original but it shouldn’t be. This is a new house and recreation of the happy memories from our first house together. I hope this will stay in their memories as one of the most memorable Christmas presents I’ve given them!

If you want to see the boys reaction video, check it out here!