I may have a proper post later in the week, but I just want to kick out a quick note to those who check this thing to know what I’m working on at the moment. Now that I’m past whatever weird sinus troubles I had for about a week, I’m getting enough sleep to have the power to draw non-crappily. Here’s the current workload:

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.

A few weeks ago, my old HP computer started freaking out and wouldn’t even make it to Safe Mode. I kept trying to fix it in DOS but it eventually stopped working at all. Someone hooked me up with another computer so I’m back on the internet. This machine blows my old one away but there are still some things that need fixing and updating.

Besides current problems with sound and my scanner, nearly everything else works. One big thing is adjusting to Windows XP after years of using Windows ME. Just about everything I installed worked nicely and I can now run stuff that wouldn’t work for W-ME. The first one that I ran to was the Lego Digital Designer and I’ll probably get that Amazon.com MP3 Album thing once I can hear things on this system. I’ll have to set up DosBox to use a lot of my favorite programs (M.U.G.E.N. tools) and emulators (Genecyst and NESticle for graphic-extracting purposes).

My sites won’t have any big updates until I get the data off the old computer. There isn’t much of a reason to update Illmosis until I can scan artwork again and there are a lot of bits on ScrollBoss that were only on my old hard drive. Plus, I want to wait until everything is stable before installing the Apache and PHP programs that let me test out all those funky PHP features. Of course, all Works-in-progress are on hold until I can pull them off the old PC. The irony is that I finally started making data backups but started with unnecessary stuff so I could delete it to make room for raw video captures. S-M-R-T.

Anyway, I apologize to anyone that I’m doing work for and I’ll try to get things back on track as soon as possible.

Ahem.

The Nutroll: The Illness teaser page is done and uploaded to the site. Finally. By finished, I mean that my shambling, bloodstained shell of flesh limped to the finish line with this thing because nearly everything on this damned planet was trying to keep me from doing this. The sketchbook with layouts for pages 1 through 3 is one of the only two things that I haven’t found since having to move in February. The other thing? G.I. JOE the Animated Movie on DVD. In other words, fate decided that I should stop “Nutroll: the Illness” at the teaser and that I should be denied the glory of watching Big Lob make his move. People seem to like the teaser so far and that seals the fact that I should just leave it as a teaser until I find the original layouts for the next few pages. Besides, I have some website and commission artwork to do now.

Here’s the Thank You pic drawn to show my appreciation for 20,000 visits to Illmosis’ front page. Not bad considering how many people go straight to the galleries instead of the index page. Oh-damn-well. The theme of the picture is “two” and features Two.P from Capcom’s Final Fight, my character Twofold and the ultra-legendary Mr. Wrestling #2. I wanted to draw a bigger piece that also had Duo Damsel, Jack-2 from Tekken 2, Two-Bad from Masters of the Universe, the Two-Gun Kid, the evil twin brothers Tomax and Xamot from G.I.JOE and Two-Face. Between all the work I’d put into the comic and my sinus problems getting bad enough to make my head throb, I cut it down to 3 characters with outfits that had a nice place to stop before getting to the legs. That’s why Mr. Wrestling #2 is in a suit. Plus, I’d never drawn a masked wrestler in a suit, one of the coolest visuals known to the frail eyes of mankind. Two.P is there because I can’t think of a reason to not draw Two.P when the chance makes itself known AND I could cut him off at the bottom of the coat. Not that you asked, but still.

All of those work hours and steak knives may have kept me from debuting the new Illness pages today, but that didn’t stop me from finishing the early version of Illmosis’ new comic page script with Nutroll:

Nutroll Comic Page

See that creepy looking picture that’s the cover for Nutroll: The Illness? That’s temporary artwork quickly colored from what will eventually be the real cover. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to draw it all not to mention that it’s potentially spoiler-based. Once you see the end of Chapter one and see the cover, you’ll get what I mean. The funny thing is that I almost didn’t even have that temp version done because it kept coming up as “invalid file” when I tried to open it up in PaintShopPro this morning. I almost deleted the file out of psychotic rage. Minutes later, everything else running on my computer stopped working and I had to restart. Once I restarted and the ScanDisk check ran, the file reopened and everything else was okay. Luckily, that was the only stupid April Fool’s Joke I got hit with today.

To hell with long explanations. Here’s the 1040EZ why no one on the internet has heard much from me lately:

Work: Started working a third cleaning account two weeks ago but I’ll be back down to two next week unless more sudden news pops up.

Hands: Right hand still has a clickly middle finger and is at 90% and the left hovers between 50% and 80%. Good enough to draw without pain. Progress slowed down by working three accounts instead of two.

Ear vs. Steak Knife: The steak knife is gone for now but I still have some throat pain and a buzzy headache. Progress slowed down by working three accounts instead of two.

Legs & Spine: Not really getting better since having to move during the crappiest week this winter. All these aches may worse thanks to the Ear vs. Steak Knife virus/allergies/whatever-the-butt-it-is. I spent part of last weekend walking with a cane but was still faster than most people walking through Wal-Mart. Progress slowed down by working three accounts instead of two.

Illmosis site comic design: Most this week’s free time went into writing a comic script/template/page design for the site that works like my galleries do. You can see a poot-butt preview version of it by clicking that link. For now, it only needs to be just good enough for the upcoming Nutroll:the Illness including redrawn panels. Guess what? Progress slowed down by working three accounts instead of two and aching hands that hurt when typing.

Sorry for not being around on the internet too much lately. I’ll try to post some good news, fun stuff and reviews once I get the chance.

**wipes brow**

To celebrate 3 years of my art site, Illmosis, I’ve spent a loooooooong time rewriting the site, finally integrating Cascading Style Sheets, prettying up the layouts, making it more flexible, etc. I’ve been uploading bits and pieces since Sunday but the final stuff was added today. I am not exaggerating when I say that uploading the new version of the website was like taking a giant turd dump. Seriously. There’s all kinds of weird little things that worked on the version I run on my computer and the actual website, so I had to figure those things out. It’s a good thing that I started doing it piece-by-piece so it’d be ready for the anniversary day. There are still some things that I plan to add here and there (Desktop Wallpapers section, special graphics for different sections, etc.) but the hard stuff is over with. Well, at least until the next time I upgrade the site after learning more about web design. Best of all, there’s no Flash Player, Javascript, embedded music or any other potential browser-crashing doo-dads stuck in the site.

Now that the grunt work is done, I can get back to the fun part: drawing. If you’re reading this and haven’t seen the site in a while, haven’t been there since yesterday or just haven’t seen it at all, please check it out now by clicking that logo up there. If you have the time, let me know if you like how the site is shaping up so far.

… because you can beat someone over the head with them until they foam at the mouth. Or you can cook with them. I think all four can be sold for scrap, but don’t quote me on that. I apologize to all those who expected something deep to follow that post title, but you should really know better by now.

I have too many overlapping ideas and I need to get things neatly arranged before I upgrade my current level of crazy. As an act of posting something mostly to sort things out in my head, here’s the plans

ScrollBoss: 7th Anniversary - Damn, I’ve been working on this piece of crap for seven years? The hell? Luckily, this one didn’t sneak up on me as late as it usually does so I may be able to cook up something special for it. At the very least I’ll probably debut a lot of sprite edits that I’ve been holding out on. I’d like to do something MUGEN related to make a full-body barrage with MugenBoss, but I don’t know if I have time to do what I want to do. I’ll talk about stuff that I want to do in a future post here.ETA: July 19th, the 7th anniversary date.

Nutroll: the Illness - No, it’s not dead. As I was rewriting what would’ve happened on page 2 and after, I kept getting more insane ideas including many more to map out my comic book universe. The locations where the news reports will come from are fictional and one will end up being the so-called Metropolis (the main city) of the whole universe. In fact, the first location will become a recurring place including a place where M-Wave shops. Plus, various other things put a cramp in my draw-drive and I don’t want to draw and half-assed page for Nutroll.
ETA: After July 19th, the 7th anniversary date.

Graphic Generators - No idea on these either. Other PHP things that I’ve done with ScrollBoss and Illmosis caused me to learn new things that I’ll use on the beta generators (Beat-em-up screenshot and Vs. Screen). One big snag with the Vs. Screen generator was that every character needs a good portrait that fits the style. Thanks to that, the Vs. one may be on hold. I have a ton of ideas for other generators, so it’s no big whoop. Since these future ones will use things that both the Vs. and Beat-em-up fakers will use and need, I’ll just wait until I’ve turned every good function in the first ones into separate modules that each faker can borrow from. That way, I’ll just have to update each function once. I may spin this off into a separate site since some of these generators won’t be sprite based. For now, they might fully debut on the ScrollBoss site. BTW: the little custom logos I made including Guy’s over there are FUN to make. I can’t wait until it’s time to do those for my own characters.

Lego Section - I promised this for Illmosis long ago, but I still don’t think that I have enough to start an actual section like I did for G.I.JOE. I only have a few custom minifigs, 2 mini-vehicles (like Aquaman’s ride over there) and a boring building front, so I’m cool with just posting my work on my blog for now. My stuff isn’t good enough to show on any user-based Lego sites, so don’t expect that any time soon, either. ETA: I have no idea.

Before reading this, please remember that all items have been sorted according to cranial capacity, shoelace length and use of rotoscoped stock footage.

1.) In the “I’ll probably have a better time remembering this if I slap it in a blog post” department, I need to get an issue of Cereal:Geek, a magazine that’s all about 80’s cartoon. A great side effect of not being an animation snob is that I still love the 70’s and 80’s animation that a lot of people seem to hate. Well, I still don’t like the first season of Super Friends (except for the episode where they played the H-B Fantastic Four theme), but I’m only human. Anyway, it looks interesting and I’ll have to pick up that first issue to help support the cause.

2.) In the last post I mentioned the idea that I had of adding tags to the PHP flat file-based gallery system I crappily put together for the site. Last night, I finished it and it’s working on my hard drive’s test copy of the website. The artpages can display the tags of a picture and clicking on a tag name will take you to a gallery with all the pics with that tag. As a living brain fart, I don’t even know how I got it to work last night.

3.) In the “Oh my!” department:
YouTube.com video: Superpoderosas video with Batgirl, Catwoman and Wonder Woman

Gotta go… another thunderstorm’s brewin’… AGAIN…

So the artwork that I was struggling with as I worked on that early morning post was good enough to be posted on the site today. It’s of the infamous classic video game character Karnov. Not only did he switch between being a hero and villain before it was cool, but he pops up in a ton of other Data East games other than his own and also became one of the few non-heroic gaming mascots ever. It isn’t really a great picture, but I was glad to get some artwork out of my system.

Right now I’m working on another update to the site’s gallery system. While it’s not all that great or fancy, it’s nice to have built a gallery system from the ground up. I started the gallery system recently, but I think I’d also like to have art context tags. So that’s what I’m working on now along with cleaning up some older coding. I’m hoping to put together an all-around big update for next week since it’s right before my birthday.