October 6th, 2010
Yes, that was Ms. Pac-Man’s 1st maze in the picture I posted last weekend. The pictures of Ms. Pac-Man and Sue that I drew and colored a few months ago now use different parts of the maze as a background. I’m getting a bit better at sorting things out in Inkscape before bringing them into the Blender 3-D program so this maze didn’t get mangled like the Pac-Man maze I made earlier this year. That’s why I can give you a better look at the maze like this:
The new black-and-white picture is of the Red Queen, mother of the current Ace of Clubs and wife to the original Ace.
Jake, the last of the lowest-tier thugs from Final Fight, finally got his Street Fighter Alpha-style custom sprite pack on ScrollBoss a few days ago. That link leads to the update news post with an embedded test video that shows what the sprites can do.
Categories: Illmosis updates by James Beaver
Tags: Background Bonanza, Namco, Pac-Man, video games
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October 2nd, 2010
This has been “one of those weeks” so the update is about as lean as it gets. The inked version of the Almighty Grandmaster Wizard pic is up. You’ll see a few details that weren’t in the rough pencil version I posted last week.
I just learned about a happening that’s going down the day after Thanksgiving so I have to get some new stuff ready. That means you should expect some new Background Bonanaza updates. What are those? That’s when I go back and make new backgrounds for older pictures that didn’t have backgrounds before. I’ll talk more about the event as I get more info about it.
ScrollBoss visitors: I finished the Jake sprite set last week and it will be in this week’s update along with a final test video that shows Jake using the jumpkick. He uses it a bit too well if you ask me but you didn’t so I’ll shut the heck up about it, alright? Cool. See? I wasn’t all lazy last week. I have a post on the site’s weblog about it.
EDIT: I got some work done on a background so I figured I’d post a preview. Most of you won’t even have to look at the file name to figure this one out. Click on it to see the full-size render.
Categories: Illmosis updates, Site News by James Beaver
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September 26th, 2010
The man with the microphone is the legendary Almighty Grandmaster Wizard. He’s as old as he is dangerous. Yes, he’s another character from the “When the War Begins Again” concept and he’s more bugged-out than you could imagine. I’m still working on his design but I figured I could show you this one in it’s early state. Besides, I needed something for the update. Another design is based on something that I’ve mentioned in a few places but I don’t think anyone thought it would be a character. That would be the Goatstroker. If you’ve heard me explain the Goatstroker archetype before, this guy is just an example of that and plays a recurring role in the “War” concept. I’m not sure when I’ll have enough of this ready to start giving you bigger chunks of it but it won’t be long.
I finally got around to sorting out all the old work files from Nutroll: the Illness. This reminded me of how nearly every attempt to work on the story was botched by computer problems. Much of it was done on the temp computer (a.k.a. NewOld Computer) that randomly rebooted in the middle of working on panels before I could save my progress. My brain was in complete “FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF…” mode by the time it was done. I took this chance to fix a lot of the word balloon problems and those improvements are now on the website version. There will be more adjustments made to it, especially the oblong teaser page, to get them ready for books like the Illmosis Scrapbook. I also made the first of various improvements to the site’s comic engine and expect to see more throughout this year.
I also fixed the link to the Abobo (Double Dragon) wallpaper on the Wallpaper page.
Final Fight fans may want to check out the latest ScrollBoss update for it’s ultra Cody-ness including a custom Street Fighter Alpha styled recreation of his Cyclone Kick from Final Fight. The pack of Cody sprite edits was updated and someone sent me a pack of his work-in-progress Cody edits.
Categories: Illmosis updates, Nutroll updates, Site News by James Beaver
Tags: the war begins again
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September 16th, 2010
Today is a bit busier than usual. First up to bat is another character from the “When the War Begins Again” nonsense that I keep mentioning. His name is Sheriff Warner and this is the face design that you saw me post a few weeks ago. Sean Chan’s pic is now in flat color mode and most of the linework has been cleaned. Mindsight makes her debut in the character profile section.
Site improvements: There’s a new list-based Character Profile index page script. The only section that uses it right now is the main Illmosis section but that will change soon. Only the main things work for now but expect some fancy additions to be, er, added before I replace the old Nutroll and Twofold profile index pages. I also fixed a stupid bug in the new gallery script that kept certain tag and character searches from being completed.
Categories: Illmosis updates, Site News, Twofold updates by James Beaver
Tags: the war begins again
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September 12th, 2010
Sean Chan finally gets a profile picture and design update that will stick. I had a prelim loose pencil version of this nearly finished last week but I wanted to take some time with it and give him a really good picture. He rates highly enough to show up in the Illmosis Scrapbook so he needs a good picture for it. I’m satisfied with how that one turned out so I can finally cross that picture off the Redemption List. People had nice things to say about Secret Awesome President’s pic last week but I forgot to put up a clear version of his teaser picture from January of this year. It’s in my usual serious art style so it’s a bit different than his latest picture.
The site got some improvements this week, too. The main index pages for the Twofold, Nutroll and G.I.JOE section index pages now have the WordPress news updates instead of the old CuteNews new bits that stopped long ago. There are now news categories for those three things and I manually transferred a few of the old CuteNews updates so those pages have more than this post. I also used Dreamhost’s installers to upgrade the PHP to version 5 so please let me know if you see anything on the site bugging out.
ScrollBoss’ last update featured the Simons SFA-style sprite pack joining Bred and Dug in the Custom Sprite Downloads section with those two also getting some fixes and improvements. Please download them again if you downloaded them before last Friday.
Categories: G.I. Joe updates, Illmosis updates, Nutroll updates, Twofold updates by James Beaver
Tags: Redemption List, s.a.p., the war begins again
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September 5th, 2010
Both of the pictures in this update are of characters making their debut on the website. This first picture is easily the most important and it’s the one that I’ve posted teasers of for months including last week’s post. Ladies and gentlemen, please allow me to introduce you to… the Secret Awesome President.
He plays an inspirational role in an upcoming project I’ve been teasing for a long time. This project DOES NOT take place in the same so-called reality that characters like Nutroll and Twofold are in (a.k.a. the Main Universe) and is almost completely insane. The title of his picture, seen on the gallery page, is also a hint of his mission and challenge. When the war begins again, he will need our help more than ever.
The black-and-white pic is the new design and website debut of Stratagem, a villain who ties into a huge turning point in my Main Universe storyline. He is secret but he is not a president and he’s far from awesome. In fact, he’s a complete douchebag. You’ll see a bit of this in the “Universal Intro” story and A LOT of it in a few M-Wave stories.
There was also a big rewrite to some gallery page scripts last Monday as noted in an update made to the last update post. I’m just mentioning it again in case you haven’t been here since last Sunday. Enjoy the rest of your Labor Day weekend!
Categories: Illmosis updates by James Beaver
Tags: s.a.p., the war begins again
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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 James Beaver
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 James Beaver
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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 James Beaver
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 James Beaver
Tags: Redemption List
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