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 James Beaver
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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 James Beaver
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 James Beaver
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 James Beaver
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 James Beaver
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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 James Beaver
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June 27th, 2010
My sinus troubles prevented me from finishing any serious artwork but I managed to get a bit closer to a decent River City Ransom drawing style. Here’s another shot at drawing Alex though a few things still look off. I hope to have a better and full-color version of this done before July is over.
I actually drew another sprite from scratch last week but that has to wait until ScrollBoss’ 10th Anniversary updates in July. You can see a preview in last week’s site update and I think many old video game fans may recognize him.
Categories: Illmosis updates by James Beaver
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June 20th, 2010
Not much to show here this week except for the update to the M-Wave pic. I did a bit of line cleaning but the main thing is that I redrew the energy trails since the earlier version just looked too plain. It finally has it’s own page, too.
I’ve finally made a long overdue upgrade to the gallery system. There are now separate gallery pages instead of dumping the whole picture list onto one giant page. There are a few bugs that still need to be worked out, like when you’re looking at pictures by tag or character, but the pages still do what they’re supposed to do. Expect more site tweaks like this because the site really needs them.
I apologize again for the low content amount lately but the big ScrollBoss anniversary is less than a month away and I have a lot of work to do there. There was another update to the Vs. Maker graphic generator with characters getting more sprites and alternate palettes (or color schemes). I’ll be taking a break from that because I have a lot of pixel art to do for the big anniversary on July 19th.
Categories: Illmosis updates, Site News by James Beaver
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June 12th, 2010
Some people have parties, others just get drunk and many have a mixture of the two. Me? I celebrated my birthday (on the 12th) by drawing this:
It’s a semi-remake of a picture I drew on my birthday a few years back. The full-size version of that pic was accidentally overwritten by a resized version of it so the original color version is lost forever. It looks like I’ll finally have it replaced.
Categories: Illmosis updates by James Beaver
Tags: main universe
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June 6th, 2010
Thanks to a lot of unexpected things popping up (including a some scripting errors on ScrollBoss), I don’t have anything new finished for this week. I dropped the “weekly guarantee” thing quite a while ago but still tried to have something new anyway. The thing that I linked to up there is a preview for something that will happen later this year. It’s a preview pic that I did a while ago but I changed the teaser word back to the way I originally planned it. What is it? It’s one of those projects I’ve been planning for years and I’ve sprinkled clues to it in different places at different times. I finally have the perfect intro so I’m pulling the trigger on it later this year. That pic will get a gallery page in the next update along with a clue that I posted elsewhere. The new project will explain what seemed like a throwaway post somewhere a few years back. It’s all going to come together this year and it will be fully ridiculous. More character teasers will be added over the coming weeks with the final two letting you know what’s up.
The biggest problem is that I’m working on a lot of things that I can’t show yet for ScrollBoss and something else that will be revealed later this year. I plan to have at least one more old feature return to ScrollBoss’ Minus World section on the 10th Anniversary (July 19th) though I’m working on art for more than one. Here’s a preview from the most likely to return:
The few people who remember the goofy Minus World articles from 2001 to 2002 (not to be confused with the different sites named that) may remember what that article was and the rest of you may be able to figure it out just from that clip. I’ll have to save the finished product for July 19th. I’m also trying to put some finishing touches for the 1st new version of the Vs. Mode battle engine since 2002 that will make it less of a pain-in-the-butt to run poll-based battles along with making them more than a popularity contest. The basics have been done for a while but I’m finishing things that will hopefully make it harder to cheat and add more incentive to voters. I’ll be back to work on that right after I add the update post to this site right now. Sorry for the disappointment but I’ll try to have something fun next weekend since it’s my birthday.
Categories: Illmosis updates by James Beaver
Tags: scrollboss, the war begins again
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