The unpainted “natural” wood tiles definitely looked nice, and I may revisit them later but we are here to make some 8-bit art.  For this, we’ll need more than one color tile.

Original NES Palette

Selecting paint colors was actually much more complicated than I expected.  I’ll probably cover this in another post but in a nutshell, I tried to match the NES color palette as closely as possible

I started with the shades used to make Mario and some other colors I liked within the palette.  Home Depot / Behr sell these cool paint samples for only 2.99.  These paint samples have primer built in and seemed to work pretty well.

Luckily, I had some pretty big boxes lying around from all the Foam Core I ordered.  These turned out to make excellent “trays” for painting the tiles.

Based on a friend’s advice, I used small foam rollers from Home Depot.  The small paint trays are nice because I really don’t need that much paint at a given time.  This cuts down on the waste.

First batch… “Azurean”

White

“Volcanic Blast”

“Peach Butter”

“Lime Pop”

At this point, my house was a bit of a disaster.  I converted my living room into a tile factory for the next few days.  I used 2 coats and the results were pretty good.