VG Icons - Mario and Yoshi

I'm feeling kind of blocked and I'm trying to free up creative energy. I think if I just keep drawing it will get better, so I've decided to crank these out once in a while.

As anyone who knows me knows, I love video games. I have written a list of about 100 video game characters that I consider iconic. I'm going to start sketching them in the style I'm still trying to get right, which as you can see is sort of cartoonish but also naturalistic.

I want to keep these very quick and gestural. I've been much too deliberate lately, relying on photographs for almost everything. This should help me loosen up.

Maybe after a while I'll start finishing these with color, but for right now I want them to serve as an exercise to sharpen my drawing skills. I spend so much time researching things and writing about them, sometimes I forget that I'm a visual artist!

I especially want the proportions to be reasonable (I hate comic books these days because they are so out of proportion, women with huge knockers, men whose shoulder span is ten times the width of their heads, etc.)