August 29th, 2010
There’s no new art today but there is art that you haven’t seen and art that you mostly won’t see. Yet.
Exponent, one of my super-powered characters, gets character profile with a lot of information. There are two old design drawings that will surely make you frown up in the face at how bad they are but they show some of the early costume variations.
The things that made this update so late is that I made a few more fixes to the gallery display page so that the character-based galleries don’t link to pages that they shouldn’t link to. I forgot how old that system was (2007!) and had to rewrite a lot from scratch. The Tag galleries will get the same treatment next weekend. Part of the break from working on ScrollBoss will be spent giving some much-needed attention to this place.
(EDIT Aug 31st, 2010 – 1 AM: 90% of my free time on Monday working on the gallery scripts again. Now they seem to work exactly the way I wanted them to. I just uploaded these fixes. Everything seems to work but it’s hard to check everything with an internet connection as crappy as mine. Tag and Character galleries should be all peaches and herb cream now.)
Another thing I’ll be doing with that time is getting ready for the first shots of something I’ve been trying to get together for years. It’s nothing big but it makes up for that in it’s amount of crazy. I need to get some things from this project ready for the Illmosis Scrapbook and I think it’s about time I start letting you in on a bit of it. That will happen next week but here’s a preview:
Prepare to be challenged.
Categories: Illmosis updates, Site News by PrimeOp
Tags: the war begins again
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August 22nd, 2010
Today’s picture is the first of two commissioned projects I’ve been working on for a bit. This character belongs to
XuhanShi and it’s the kind of character design I like to draw. Most of the money from this pic went towards paying for the Dreamhost account that this and my other sites are hosted on so thank him helping to keep the lights on here!
I have another commission to work on so I’m cutting things short here to work on that and some other things. See you next Sunday!
Categories: Illmosis updates by PrimeOp
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August 15th, 2010
Due to last week being ridiculous with much of my free time and rest being wasted, I had to spend what little time I had working on the two commissions I mentioned last week. Luckily, they’re fun things to work on so that eased some of the anger I had from that week’s irritations.
Since I don’t have anything new to show you, I put together a weblog-only post about that “Redemption List” that I mention every once in a while. I was supposed to be doing more posts like that long ago but I never got around to it. Sorry for the lack of newness this week and I’ll try to have something ready for you in seven days.
Categories: Illmosis updates by PrimeOp
Tags: Redemption List
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August 15th, 2010
The Redemption List is something that I mention from time to time but rarely ever explain. It’s my mental (in more ways than one) list of my pictures that I think should’ve been better. Many of these were drawn when I was on the road back from the Art Constipation era that started in 2002, a year so bad that being in a minor car accident that I can still feel in my back was far from the worst thing that happened. If you know me, you know that I rarely like my own work but some of these pictures are just bad. Sure, they’re important because I was mentally working my way out of a hole but the worst thing about these is that they still show up in Google searches. Part of it was because there weren’t that many people drawing some of these characters back when I did the first pictures. It nags the hell out of me and it makes me feel like a ghost who can’t move on due to unfinished business in the material world. So I either redraw the picture and make improvements based on my gripes with the earlier version or I just redraw the character. Here’s a few that I think I’m done with:
The Baroness: The picture that started the Redemption List wasn’t even a finished picture. It was this computer-colored sketch of the Baroness’ VS. screen portrait from when I was trying to make her for the M.U.G.E.N. fighting game. It was just a crappy test but people started linking to it, hotlinking it on message boards and putting it on their fansites without even bothering to link to my site because fansites are classy like that. I didn’t want that to be my main Baroness picture so I drew a 2004 pic that just didn’t seem to work for me. It wasn’t until 2009 that the pose idea got some redemption.
This case was mostly because I liked the pose I’d drawn him in this 1999 picture and an attempt to draw it years later was botched from eraser burn and other stuff. This 2009 version is one that I’m completely happy with because I was able to get a more aggressive look to his face. You’ll find a lot more art of Radd these days but it’s usually from the PS3/X-Box 360 revival, the more popular Bionic Commando: Reloaded game or some sort of personal re-imagining from the artist. No offense to anyone else but I just felt like I had to rep the version of Radd that made me a fan of the series in the first place.
This is a case of feeling that I had an odd responsibility to do a much better job of drawing a character that no one else seems to draw. This is Martha, the final boss from the old Combatribes video game by Technos, the same people who made Double Dragon, River City Ransom and Super Dodgeball. Combatribes is one of their more overlooked games. I needed artwork for her because she was going to be in an event on my ScrollBoss site that would require a character profile and a full body picture. Honestly, that first picture sucked. Everything about it was boring including the lightning. Boring lightning in artwork has to be considered some sort of mindcrime. I put it on the Redemption list and figured I’d get back to it some day. Years later, someone e-mailed me about the pic and that stirred up the need for redemption so I made this pic. The whole plan was to keep the picture from being boring. I changed things up quite a bit and gave her the crazy static hair from the pose she strikes in the arcade game right before fighting you in the game and added a slight bird’s-eye-view (but no upskirt action for you!) to give her the grandiose feeling that you’re looking at a final boss. I think I managed not to screw it up this time and, thankfully, the person who e-mailed me about it liked it too.
Here are a few more where either the gallery page explains it all (especially Batgirl) or the explanation just isn’t worth mentioning:
I still have a few pictures and I’ll try to sneak a few more of those in this year.
Categories: Article by PrimeOp
Tags: Redemption List
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August 7th, 2010
I fixed something on the M-Wave pic I did back on my birthday and decided to bring him up to base color mode. I may hold off on doing all the line cleaning and full-color work until I finish a few other things. I still want to do the Illmosis Scrapbook this year so I’ll be working on that in my spare-spare time for a bit. I’m not going to talk about it much now until it’s good-to-go.
It’s good news/bad news time. The bad news is that new content here will still be slow in coming. The good news is why. A round of commissions I made available on dA got filled and a few people in real life need some art so I’ll be busy for a while. I’ll have a commissions page on this site soon for those who want to buy some digital commissions for both drawn/scanned/digital commissions and pixel art. Prices will be relatively cheap since I’m still as “infamously broke” as ever. Seeing as how people are finding ways to make a bit of scratch off my fan art, it’s time I start making scribbles for money. I feel a bit better about doing this since I now have a system that lets me work much faster than before.
Sprite fiends take note: Simmons (Final Fight) is closer to being done. I still have a few more vests to pixel-draw on the Final Fight thug template and many of the head mods for him are done too. I’ll have to push him back to mid-August because of the commissions I’ll be starting on today. I apologize for the delay.
That’s it for this week. Take care and we’ll catch up in 7 days.
Categories: Illmosis updates by PrimeOp
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August 1st, 2010
I wouldn’t call this an update but more of a preview of things I’m working on. All of that anniversary work along with making progress of various secret projects finally knocked me out on Friday. No joke. I got so tired that I felt myself shutting down and had to just lie down for a while. This was the first time I’ve really relaxed on the weekend since April or earlier. Once things have gotten that hectic, it’s time to “relax” by just slightly working on things. Here’s what I call taking it easy.
I’m almost done with the vests for the Final Fight basic thug sprite set. I’ll be working on Simmons’ hair and glasses after that to get him finished in early August. I never noticed that Jake had a billy goat beard in the original Final Fight sprites so that throws off one of the plans I had for smart palette beard stubble for him. Here’s a test of some early Simmons sprites:
I also worked on a picture of Storm:
This one started off with a lot more forced perspective but it seemed to flatten out more and more as I worked on it so now it looks distorted. It originally looked more like she was coming at you. This needs to be reworked but I think a non-crappy picture could come from this.
And because I need to pad this topic out to apologize for not having a proper update, I’m going to show you a preview from a character design I’m working on for one of those secret projects:
Just remember: “I warned ya! Dammit, I warned ya!”
Categories: Illmosis updates by PrimeOp
Tags: pixelart, the war begins again
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July 25th, 2010
My ScrollBoss video game site had it’s 10th Anniversary on July 19th and celebrated all week long including a small update yesterday. Now it’s time to show you some of the things I made for it that I had to hold back on until party started.
A rewritten article for the goofy Minus World section of the site debuted with a new piece of artwork. You may want to read that before checking out the picture even though neither of them make any sense. The other three new things are sprites made for various things on the site. Gilius Thunderhead from Sega’s Golden Axe, Radd Spencer from Capcom’s Bionic Commando and Lord J from Jaleco’s under-appreciated Brawl Brothers (the U.S. version of Rushing Beat Ran) now have sprites here with Radd and Lord J having progress animations that show some steps I made in making the sprites. Gilius and Lord J were traced from re-sized sprites mostly to stay consistent with any future sprites I do of them. The new Gilius sprite is on the same page with the fighting stance sprite from last year.
One use for the new sprites is the new GroupShot Maker. It debuted on the 10th Anniversary and people seem to enjoy it so far even with the minor bugs it has.
Yes, that’s the line-up from the teaser graphic I made for the anniversary though there are a lot more characters added to it. The first update post for the anniversary is
here. The sprite edits include game characters as old as Pitfall Harry and as recent as Samus in the Zero Suit from Super Smash Bros. Brawl.
I’m a bit worn out from last week and all the work that lead up to it so I’ll be slowly easing back into normal operations around here. You’ll still see gaming characters show up here (including more River City Ransom/Kunio-Kun style practice) but it’s time to get back to Nutroll, Twofold and something that you’ll find out about later this year. See you next week!
Categories: Illmosis updates by PrimeOp
Tags: Bionic Commando, golden axe, pixelart, Rushing Beat, scrollboss
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July 18th, 2010
I’m still working on things to make tomorrow’s ScrollBoss update even bigger but I wanted to have something to show for anyone kind enough to stop by the site today. I’m going to show you one of the fighting game scale sprites I made for the update. This is Lord J from Jaleco’s Brawl Brothers (known as Rushing Beat Ran: Fukusei Toshi in Japan) in the taunt pose he does in the game. I re-sized his SNES sprite and traced the basic outline of his body so any future sprites could follow the same scale when I re-sized the originals by the same percentage. This sprite and the others I made for the update will have pages on this site in the next update. Don’t forget to visit ScrollBoss starting Monday for the anniversary celebration!
Categories: Illmosis updates by PrimeOp
Tags: pixelart, Rushing Beat
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July 11th, 2010
Due to the kind words people had about the pic I drew of Alex from River City Ransom, I finally drew Ryan, the second player of that game. I’m working my butt off on the big July 19th update for ScrollBoss (just a little over a week away!) so I only had enough time for a black and white version today. The style is feeling a bit more natural to me and it’s something I’m going to practice for some future artwork. I don’t think I’ve properly expressed my mad appreciation for River City Ransom and I’ll be using this style to demonstrate that in future scribblings.
I’m not sure what I’ll have ready for next weekend since I need to get ready for the big Scrollboss 10th Anniversary update. It’s large and a few things still need artwork drawn for it. Unfortunately, July 19th falls on a Monday and I can’t show any feature-specific artwork for it until then. I’ll still try to have some kind of update here next week so stop by and see how I manage to screw that up!
Categories: Illmosis updates, Site News by PrimeOp
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July 4th, 2010
Here’s another try at drawing Alex from the NES cult classic, River City Ransom. I’m still not 100% sure if I like how his face looks and I’ll have to be sure before I draw Ryan, the second player from that game.
July 19th is quickly approaching and I’m scrambling to get things done for the big, big ScrollBoss update. I’m going to tell you in advance that there may not be an update for Illmosis next week because I need all the time I can get to make sure a lot of new things work 100%. the 19th falls on a Monday so I can’t spoil all of the sprites and other things on Sunday but I may let something out of the gate one day early just for the sake of an update. There will be more than one celebratory update there in July and this site will probably have some sprite-heavy updates until August. Illmosis will be back to getting some much-deserved love then including work and announcements about the 2010 Illmosis Scrapbook.
Categories: Illmosis updates by PrimeOp
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