Mario and Sonic Unite

This wallpaper began after I was tired of constantly changing my desktop to a Mario and Sonic background and since I don't have Windows 7 and it's montage wallpaper setting, I dicided to look for a background online featuring both of my favorite video game franchises...after Earthworm Jim, of course. I thought to myself "Surley by now someone has whiped up an awesome background featuring both of my favorite gaming heroes." What did I find?

Nothing.

First I checked out the official ones made for their olympic games series. The first one had Mario and Sonic jumping at the viewer. This would have been fine except Sonic just looked awful. Maybe it's just me, but Sonic just dosen't look like...Sonic in that picture. He look evil and ALOT shorter.

Here is said background:
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The other ones were good...but since they were in a winter setting I didn't think it would work all year-round like I want it to. Nothing like skiing in the summer!

Then the fan ones were either Mario and Sonic fighting(Haven't we moved on from that?) Or had generic stock art of Mario and Sonic with weird hallucinogenic backgrounds.

After a long time of Google image searching I found these two pictures:
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This was it! An awesome picture of Mario and Sonic clenching each others hand, ready to entertain gamers of all ages.

Since I use simple paint to make all my backgrounds...because I don't know how other manipulation software works...I was prepared the long, grueling process of removing the black from around the to photos, but thankfully most of it went away when I used the fill in option. There was still some I had to remove like around Sonic's ear, and quills, around Mario's hat, hair and chin(That made Mario look like he had an evil beard.). Overall it was simple. The hardest part was joining the two pictures together.

Now I needed a background. I had an image in my head of joining backgrounds and sprites from Mario and Sonic games together...and after playing around a while I came up with the background you see before you. Though I think that the sunflowers I added clash with the picture.

Finally after a while of editing, I got the logo from this:
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Overall, I think this came out great, though I did have to move my start menu bar to the top in order for me to see everything in it.

Credits:
I would like to thank Sonic Scene for the Mario and Sonic image as well as well as the image I used to make the logo from.
I would also like to thank the folowing people at Spriters Resource:
DEMON2WARRIOR for the sky, castle and bush/trees background from New Super Mario Bros
Jouw for the Forest land tiles
Shadowbot for the Sonic Advance, look palm trees and flowers.
Chaofanatic for the Sonic Rush Adventure ring sprites

...and of course Nintendo and Sega/Dimps for creating these characters and actually making all the images I used to put this together.