ScrollBoss spending December celebrating how insanely magical 1989 was for video games. The December 27th update was my favorite despite the ridiculous amount of sleep I lost working on it. I’ve never kicked out so many sprites from scratch at once and the Death Adder sprite is probably the best pixel art I’ve done yet. The updates may have looked big but no one would believe all the unfinished stuff there is for this including sprites, articles and even a theme song. I’ll save some of that for the 25th Anniversary of 1989 if I’m still working on the site by then.

Twofold month on Illmosis with a preview of the Twofold #1, Twofold’s sprite. and new logo

The Halloween update on ScrollBoss with Castlevania:SOTN sprite edits and a Alucard sprite from scratch, the Altered Beast werewolf and Rick from Splatterhouse. Plus, that Morrigan sprite edit turned out better than I thought it would.

A nice chunk of the Art Redemption List got some justice this year by drawing much better versions of things that I did a horrible job on the first time.

Art that turned out to not be crap:

The Vs. Maker Graphic Generator. It’s an experiment that has taken on a life of it’s own. It’s always fun to see people come up with team-ups and fights that I never would have thought of. Those custom mini-logos are fun to make, too.

The restart of Nutroll: the Illness that mainly got stopped (again) by the malfunctioning computer I was using. I almost literally flipped out due to all the computer freezes while trying to color the first page. Page One will be fixed before I get back to work on it in early 2010.

My favorite thing of the year is the reaction to this picture. This was just one of those crazy things that pops into my head a lot and figured it just needed to be drawn. I’d like to thank everyone who took time out to say how much they liked it because you made my 2009 a lot better than it would’ve been otherwise. As Brawn once said, “Mushy, but true.”

Alright, it’s time for me to get back to work on stuff for 2010. I’ll be working on a comic page tonight and I’ll have some announcements to make here in the coming weeks.

It was added in latest Illmosis update and it has it’s own gallery page. The ridiculous thing is that I had to set up the lighting to make it look more 2-D just so it would look right when I knocked it down to 256 colors for the site logos.

I was too wiped out from the Halloween ScrollBoss updateto start working on something big for the 5th Anniversary so I decided to dedicate the whole month to working on the site itself and to my own characters. The character profiles will go through small upgrades during the month and I’ll be adding more of my characters to it. I just finished programming the new profile gallery feature that will have artwork and sketches that aren’t in the main art galleries. There will be a lot of really old stuff on there that shows what these characters evolved from. This link has a preview of a page with the old filecards I made for my characters from about 1990 to 1992. My artwork was pure eye-horror back then but I still like to look them since this was a bit after my art teacher, the great Mr. Emil Perunko, got me into coloring my artwork. Don’t worry, there will be new and newly colored artwork, too. Before the month is over, I’ll finally be able to show you the rest of this:

Yeah, it’s going to be another busy month.

Most of you won’t know who this is so let me tell you about him. He debuts in G.I.JOE the Movie in a scene where the Joes’ resident hard case, Beach Head, tests out each member’s skills only to be annoyed by their personality quirks. In Big Lob’s case, he treats the obstacle course like a sporting event complete while giving his own third-person commentary of his actions. This irks the hell out of Beach Head, which makes him sound like a grouchy comics-only G.I.JOE fan who lives within the cartoon itself. He didn’t appear in later episodes of the cartoon probably because production of the show went to another company after the movie was made. He never got an action figure or appeared in the comic book. He just disappeared. No Colorforms, Shrinky Dinks, Underoos or vinyl pencil case art. Dude just disappeared.

I knew dozens of G.I.JOE fans while I was growing up and none of them had a problem with Big Lob. Most of us wondered why Hasbro never gave him his own figure. That was until I got online and saw how he seems to be one of those characters that some people like to complain about. A few will even try to tell you that nobody likes the character. Whatever, man. Look, Big Lob is a strange character and is probably crazy but who wasn’t on that cartoon? That’s what made it a fun show to watch for kids who hadn’t become morose, uptight sad sacks yet. So while he may not be a mainstay like Duke and Snake-Eyes or one of those figures like Hit ‘n Run or Repeater that hardcore Joe fans (including me) are crazy about, let there be no doubt that Big Lob has a posse. Now he has a piece of fan art to back that up.

As soon as I got home from work, I drew a really quick two-panel comic of Nutroll dressed as Count Floyd and put it on the index page to let any visitors know what was happening over the weekend. Then I started the creature art marathon which stars the characters you see to the left of this post. Click on the thumbnails to check out their Illmosis gallery pages. I started with Slimer/the Green Ghost from Ghostbusters as a warm-up. He’s a weird mix of the (un)live-action and animated versions since I like both of ‘em. I followed that up with the werewolf from Altered Beast. This was a giant pain in the butt that killed most of the momentum that I had because I pencilled him three times before I got a version that I liked. The problem was that I kept trying to draw him in a wild, feral pose but the Altered Beast wolf is more of a brawler. I was inking the picture until around 7 AM Saturday which meant that I didn’t sleep much. When I hung out with my friends that afternoon, I sat in the car and pencilled Solomon Grundy’s pose as they shopped in a rummage sale. After all that and having some fun at my niece’s birthday party, I came back and spent a really long time fixing up the pose and then inking it. I finished it that night but sleep deprivation kept me from doing anything else for Saturday other than watching Pan’s Labyrinth, one of the most amazing movies I’ve ever seen. I woke up Sunday and went to work on the Lego Skeleton which took longer than it should have. I wanted the picture to look as close to a real minifigure as I could with minor tweaks to get the pose right but use the shadows to get a more horror-style vibe.

At this point, the Skeleton seems to be the early favorite with Grundy as a close second. That’s close to what I expected except I thought Grundy would be more popular. I didn’t get a lot done in the end of it all, but considering all the ScrollBoss recoding and commission art pencil work I did earlier in the week, I had a bigger Illmosis update than I expected. That counts as a win in my book. I may not be able to do it like this next year but I will keep the event name for the month and may have Count Rollula or another Halloween mascot announce the pictures. If I do anything like this for ScrollBoss, I’ve already decided to call it Danger Terror Horror Theater. Yes, I’m just that damned corny.

…that’s me. Yeah. Self-photo taken in the medicine cabinet mirror. I’ll have my “Folder of Scribblings” with me that has copies of color art seen on Illmosis. If you see me walking and I look like I’m angry, don’t worry because that’s just how I look. Now that I think about it, a lot of my characters look like that too. Just say, “Hey, Prime!” or whatever you know me as wherever you know me from. If you have nothing better to do, I’ll show you pictures of crap you’ve seen on the site and a bit of stuff that isn’t on the site yet.

Yes, I’m still using that old picture because I don’t have anything more fitting to put in the front. Yet.

These were going to be in the blog header but I didn’t like how it looked when everything was put together. Nothing spectacular here but it makes me wonder how much effort most colorists put into rendering beans.

1.) The main thing is a group of commissioned artwork that I keep bringing up. For some weird reason, I’m having trouble drawing one pose that I’d sketched weeks earlier. I’m slowly battling it and may be able to get it right soon or I’ll switch to another character.

2.) I’m still putting my first two ‘universe’ comic stories together in my head. I’m hoping that the first one is enough to give people a basic gist of the universe’s feel and past without resorting to info dump. Plus, it’ll be interesting to see if people get (or care) about one of the big things that I hint towards in the first one. The first story has no real action (except for single shot of people kicking butt) while the second one starts off like the end of a story and ends with the beginning of almost every story that happens after that.

3.) I’m finally toying around with a program that I should’ve been checking out long ago. It’s caused me to have tons of new, random ideas that I’ll never get around to fleshing out, but I plan to have some fun on the side with it. Besides, if I get good with it, ScrollBoss will have some interesting new content. No, I’m not telling you what it is yet, but I will when I get some screenshots (or more) together.

4.) Website sections still being worked on (but not much right now) include Illmosis’ Character Profiles (if you refresh the one that I linked to, you’ll see the random profile pic script at work) and ScrollBoss’ Game Index. I need to update MugenBoss’ item system before I start asking people if they want me to host their stuff.

If you felt a disturbance in the universe on Friday night, that’s my fault. For the first time ever, I managed to find a Ground-Zero Entertainment kung-fu flick on DVD that didn’t crash during the movie or Wu-Tang video, show that it was made from a heavily-wrinkled video tape, have their VHS tape player’s menu screen pop up in the middle of the movie or just burst into flame for no good reason. I’m still shocked that I was able to watch everything on it. The movie, Return of the Deadly Blade starring Yasuaki Kurata & David Chiang, was an okay flick for the $3 that I paid Big Lots for it. Not great, but not horrible. The bonus music video was for “Chessboxing” and is worth at least $1 by itself. There’s a lot of other short bits like trailers, actor bios and a video of Poppa Wu droppin’ knowledge while playing chess. I think I’ll go back to giving Ground-Zero more of a chance after this one.

The main cleaning account that I’m working now has an actual break in it. Due to that, I started bringing a small notebook and pencil with me to catch any mental droppings that roll off my brain. I seem to get a lot more ideas and my creative flow is stronger than it was when I was doing two break-less accounts. Back then, I’d have dozens of stray ideas a week but could only remember a few by the time I got back home. Now I’m sketching out all kinds of random stuff including character redesigns, poses and even lettering pixel widths for future mini-logos. I feel some sort of mental momentum happening. With any luck, that’ll lead speeding up my drawing time and getting more work done.