Heroes in a Half Shell… 2D Power

Cowabunga dudes and dudettes!

How are my totally righteous tapperino pals doing on this glorious 2D Tuesday? Well, if you haven’t guessed from the 80s lingo and post title, today’s post has nothing to do with the Simpsons or Easter and everything to do with those amazing ninjutsu and pizza lovers who fight The Foot.  Yup… the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!

So there is a reason for why I chose these green fellas for today’s 2D.  Addicts reader Philip Starkes guessed correctly what mistake I made on my Homer Springfield Map and the prize was he got to pick something for me to write about or a custom 2D.  He is a lover of TMNT and chose his favorite turtle… Donatello in an 8-bit media.

Chance has it that Donnie is actually my favorite turtle too (but my least favorite of the four Renaissance artists that inspired the TMNT names).  Growing up in the 80s, every kid loved these guys and for a nerd like me, the smart turtle with the bo staff was the obvious choice.  He’s the resident scientist, inventor, engineer, and technological genius of the fearsome foursome and all around cool guy.  Also pretty sweet that he was voiced by Corey Feldman in the 1990 movie adaptation.  Can you say pizza all over the NYC?

The 8-bit request of course has to do with the original TMNT games and I felt up to the challenge.  No surprise though that I ended up shell shocked at the end of the enterprise.  First thing to do with any 2D is to pick an image.  I really liked this one (yes, I’ve recently become addicted to fuse bead images).

I decided to start with the head and work from there.  The $270 black snapdragons were the obvious choice for the black.

Thankfully, I had bought a few of the spooky walls during Halloween in case I ever needed to make something purple and they worked great for Donnie’s mask.  I used white fences for the eyes and the dark green $135 shrubs for some of the detailing.

Using my image as a guideline, I then worked out Donnie’s body with more of the snapdragons.

There are a lot of different brown details in this image so I picked the $135 wooden fence for all of the harnesses and straps Donatello has.

For his shell, I used the $270 benches and the $270 boardwalk fences for his bo staff.  There were some challenges with placement and things got tweaked here and there but I am fairly satisfied with the final product.  I tossed the original image for you to compare it to below as well.

What do y’all think?  Is it bodacious/totally tubular or bogus?  I think I may need to tweak this in the future and am open to any suggestions.  The angle and deco limits definitely gave me a run for my money.

Of course, because I wasn’t 110% satisfied with my tribute to my favorite Ninja Turtle, I decided to do a simpler 8-bit 2D just for fun.  It includes snap dragons, spooky walls and the dark green shrubs.  Only addition was the $25 shrubs for more color.

Kinda has a Lego feel to it but I like it.  I also played around with the design with some other detailing but liked my first go the best.

That last one kinda looked like bebop to me lol.  Well, Philip, I hope you like my tinkering.  All you amazing tapperinos stay amazing and radical as usual.  If there are any 2Ds y’all have been working on please share in the comments.  I know there are talented artists out there much better than this guy.  Shout out below with anything else you’d like to say about this, 2D or art in general.

TTFN… Wookiee out!

P.S.  Anyone else see they’re making a new TMNT movie that comes out August 8th of this year?