Let's talk about Mario Artist Paint Studio, first.
It was the first that came out, and it was bundled with a mouse.

You don't actually need the mouse to play it.
It might technically be the least interesting one of the bunch, but it is nonetheless important to the suite because it has all the tools for 2D drawings.

It has three main modes:
- 2D Paint, for traditional painting. It can also be multiplayer with less features.
- Animate, which is more of a flipbook animation mode where you can draw a bunch of frames. It has its uses that I will talk about later.
(see next tweet)

- 3D World, where you can explore varied worlds and actually retexture everything.
- Gallery. It's not a main mode to me, it's just a slideshow.

About 2D Paint:
It is pretty much the simple Photoshop in Mario Paint fashion. You can draw with different brushes, cut and paste, and use premade stamps and backgrounds to your likings.

There's one thing you don't really think about that said that it is in the details: you can actually erase & unerase things that you've drawn in case you did a mistake.
There's a nice rainbow brush that you can use that is pretty funky.

And while I won't go into the deep details of it, it is rather pleasing to mess with to do all kinds of things, from literally Bob Ross to absurd a e s t h e t i c s.
These are all exemples that I've made in the past.

You can also use the Game Boy Camera, either directly or use one of the saved pictures. You can even colorize the picture in whatever way you want.
There's also support for the Capture Cassette for direct capture of NTSC video from your camera of the time or simply anything else.

When it comes to animate, you have actually a bit less features when you draw frames directly.
At least you can have a ghost of any frame you want when you draw.

Paint Studio drawings tends to be supported across the suite, while animations are not... except:

You can actually import an animation to Sim City 64.
If you name the file "シム", you can import them as a citizen in your city.

3D World is a bit of a weirder mode.
You can select a world, from the sea to wacky creatures on Mars, and explore, take pictures and retexture. There's no real interaction with them, it's all scripted animations on repeat.

...This mode is literally easy mode Games Repainted.

For each world, some creatures have to be unlocked to be editable, and for that, you have to explore and take pictures of them, not unlike Pokémon Snap, in a way.

When it comes to texturing, you can really just draw over every texture for the creatures or even the world itself.
Just do whatever you want it's almost as full featured as single player 2D Paint.

Of course, the photos you can take in 3D World are saved as a regular image, and can be used across all modes of Paint Studio and the others in the Mario Artist suite that makes use of such images.

When it comes to the prototype of Mario Artist Paint Studio itself, the differences are not that big. It may even seem uninteresting because most of the features were ready but in a mostly unpolished state.

The major feature of the prototype was Gnat Attack. It was 4 levels looping into harder versions, until it crashes.
It's a fun mode, but you can tell it's not as polished.

Mario Artist Paint Studio is a weird title.
It was developed by Software Creations, it used to be a sort of god game called "Creator", that honestly reminded me of Spore but with a more creative focus.

The development actually went for about 4 or 5 years, which is ENORMOUS at the time. You can actually look at footage of this title from 1996 to 1999.

Nintendo HQ and Nintendo of America apparently fought over this project.

Eventually Nintendo HQ won and rejected most of the ideas to shape it into Mario Paint 64, early on.

It still had the music editor, which I actually spoke to the programmer of it, see this Twitter Moment: https://twitter.com/i/events/781608457011073024

Then it was decided that Nintendo was about to work on at least 3 other projects on top of it, and make the whole thing a suite: Mario Artist.
- Picture Maker (Paint Studio).
- Talent Maker (Talent Studio).
- Polygon Maker (Polygon Studio).
- Sound Maker (Sound Studio?).