A dream of extraordinary magnitude

I would like to give thanks for the following:

• For my family and my friends for still betting on the most worthless horse on the track!
• For the relief from the artistic constipation I caught back in 2002. With any luck, I’ll catch some creative diarrhea in time for 2008.
• For those who fought for what was right especially when no one was looking.
• For the people that check out my sites Illmosis and ScrollBoss. No one looks at this blog, though. Seeing as how this place is filled with stupid posts like this, I’m thankful for that no one else is actually reading this.
• For these beautiful things: 25th Anniversary G.I.JOE figures and the box sets that play the theme song, Taito Legends 2 for being full of old-school gaming goodnes, Dr. Thirteen, Gumby, the new Booster Gold series, the Sinestro Corps. Crossover, the All-New Atom by Gail Simone, the Rey Mysterio: the Biggest Little Man 3 disc set, whoever was behind Steven Richards and Little Guido Nunzio getting more screen time in ECW, whoever lets Santino Marella get on the mic on RAW, female wrestlers (like Victoria, Beth Phoenix, Mickie James, Gail Kim, Jackie Moore, Ms. Brooks and ODB), everybody that worked on the Shaw Studios/Dragon Dynasty DVDs and whatever mad genius at Lego came up with the skeleton horse.

Categories: G.I.JOE, Lego, Random Thoughts, Video Games, Wrestling by PrimeOp

I’m waiting for RapidShare to give me more minutes so I can download something and I’m too tired to draw or work on sprites. So I’ll tell you about more technofail.

1.) Right now, our cable system is freaking the hell out. Channels keep flipping between states of silent frozen images, frozen images with audio and static. Sadly, none of the frozen pics had audio that was inappropriate. I was hoping to catch a still picture of a mudslide while listening to a man talk about diarrhea, but no such luck. Even worse, no HARD jarring was nowhere to be found.

2.) I picked up a Ground Zero DVD of “Midnight Angels 3” at Big Lots for two reasons. For one, it had a cute actress holding a pair of nunchaku (also known as “NUMBCHUKS”) standing in front of a Wu-Tang Clan logo. That’s three of my weaknesses right there on the cover. Then I find out that Lo Lieh is in it. Finally, it was only $3 so I give it a shot. A bit of a mistake here. The movie was hard to watch whenever it wasn’t an action scene. Those were pretty good. The rest was poot butt at best. In the beginning you could tell it was made from a tape. A bad, bad tape. Whoever made the master DVD for this didn’t even bother to stop recording when the movie was over because the end credits are followed by minutes of static. For the final touch, they didn’t even bother to print anything on the DVD. Except for the name of the movie being on the center ring, it just looks like a plain DVD that some dude down the street burned. Even those $1 Brentwood DVD’s have full color printing on them. They did a nice job on the cover, so I’m shocked that they lamed out on the disc itself. Really, it’s sad to see something with the Wu-Tang logo have such poor quality. But in the end, the Wu save this DVD because it also features a crystal clear music video for Ghostface Killah’s “Cherchez la Ghost” as an extra. Hot damn. In other words, I’ll take a chance on more of these DVDs hoping to luck up on more Wu Videos.

Categories: Television by PrimeOp
Tags: no hard jarring, technofail

First it was the inkless printer. About 2 weeks ago I decided to roll El Cheapo style and try a ink refill kit for $15. After using the mini-hand drill included with the kit to hand carve a hole into the top of the ink cart, I find out that now the paper now has a hard time moving through it. So that $15 was for nothing… but at least I didn’t pay full price for a new ink cart. I barely even used the damn printer except to print some Lego torso stickers, the reassembled layout sketch for this pic and some coupons.

Last week was when my mouse, the USB-to-oldschoolian mouse connector or the computer itself starting bugging out. It jumps all over the place and sometimes tries to click on everything while scooting across the screen at the speed of light. Other times just the cursor will freeze while everything else works with a few rare moments of the computer freezing up. I tried using another optical mouse I had and it did the same thing. I should dig up that old non-optical/non-USB to test if that’s what’s up. On top of that, my old digital camera just figured out how to Instant Hell Murder a fresh pack of batteries in less than 24 hours without even being on. What a Greedo Smurf.

I love how all this happens after I do this big site upgrade and get excited to make new content for it. It’s just cold, man. So don’t expect any full-color artwork for a while. You know… for anyone that actually looks forward to anything on that site.

**crickets chirping**

Categories: Uncategorized by PrimeOp
Tags: technofail

It was a tough choice between the Rey Mysterio – the Biggest Little Man set and the entire Filmation series of Aquaman, but Rey won out in this case. The Cruiserweight division was one the main reasons I watched WCW Monday Nitro and Rey Mysterio Jr. always pulled off some insane move that blew my mind. Those matches were my introduction to the Lucha Libre style of wrestling and I’ve dug it ever since. I haven’t watched anything from the set yet because I’m saving it all for Sunday. I’m already hyped up for it because reading the match listing reveals matches vs. Dean Malenko, Juventud Guerrera, Juvi’s dad Fuerza, Ultimate Dragon/Ultimo Dragon, Psicosis, Jushin Thunder Liger, Super Calo and Blitzkreig. Some of my favorite matches in wrestling had Rey vs. Malenko and Rey vs. Ultimate Dragon, but I’m dying to see that match with Blitzkreig. I’m a bit disappointed that there’s only one 6-man tag match, but I’m just glad that this set has what it has. Of course, I’m saddened about the lack of La Parka but maybe he’ll do a run-in on one of these matches. Still, three discs of Rey doing his thing is well worth $20 and I hope sales on this can lead to some later releases with more Cruiserweight action.

When I got this DVD set at Wal-Mart, it was bundled with a DVD preview of the latest Smackdown vs. Raw game that’s about to drop soon. While I’m looking forward to getting SvR2008 one day, Fire Pro Wrestling Returns will be my next wrestling game purchase. I don’t have any of the fancy new gen machines, so I’ll hold off on SvR2008 until I get one. I’ve only played the GBA version of Fire Pro, but I immediately got into the depth of it and I’ve heard the PS2 version ups the ante much, much more. The two-dimensional graphics don’t put me off at all and video that I’ve seen of it shows that it’s just as or maybe even more fluid than the current 3-D wrestling games. Plus, the chance to customize everything from wrestlers (and you can make HUNDREDS), factions, tag teams, rings (even draw your own logos), and even referees is too insane to pass up. Even better: it’s less that $20. Aw yeah.

Categories: Uncategorized, Video Games, Wrestling by PrimeOp
Tags: Fire Pro Wrestling, La Parka, Rey Mysterio, SvR2008

**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.

Categories: Illmosis by PrimeOp

Categories: Nutroll by PrimeOp

Fail.
Browser freeze.
Computer freeze.
Fail.
Hotlinkers.
Too many things embedded at once for no damned reason at all.
Fail.
Crap.
Fail.
Fail.

and fail.

… so if I’ve never added you back, it’s because I check out someone’s profile that freezes my computer and I’m too angry to even go back to the site. For months.

Not that you asked. BUT STILL…

Categories: Random Thoughts by PrimeOp
Tags: myspace

In In the last unexciting episode of Truetorial with the spunky Wendy Milan being fully inked. I scanned the pic in pure Black and White mode at 600 dpi. How big is that? 2492 by 6263 pixels. To look at that at full size, it’s probably twice as wide and six times as tall as your monitor.

No, I don’t have one of those fancy-pants programs that automatically cleans line work into vectors. Lots of smooth tool and redrawn lines with 2 spoons of ‘Despeckle’ and ‘Gaussian Blur”+”Sharpen” on the side. My computer isn’t powerful enough to color it at this size and would crap it’s soul if I even thought about it so I shrink it down to 836 by 2100 pixels. Still unsure about a few things so I posted a preview of it on the Prime Central Station board. Z_Sabre_User pointed out that the leading leg looked a bit oddly shaped. I think the way that the tall kneepad covers up where her knee is gave her leg that sausage look. So I went back to the original and added a slight curve to it and fixed a few other things I didn’t like. Glad I didn’t fully clean the lines at first because it’d have sucked to re-clean that mess twice.

With crisp lines in effect I add a transparent Multiply Layer with base colors that are partially taken from the sprite’s lightest colors. All the shading is done on more Multiply layers. The shiny lighting was made with transparent Normal layers just to lighten it up a bit and Dodge layers which adds that funky, fully-saturated look that enhances the shininess. Once it was fully colored in, I posted it on the Prime Central Station board and sweated Bullet Bills until a few kind people told me that it wasn’t completely fugly.

That’s the end of this truetorial which shows just about everything I do when I do what I do, especially the mistakes. It’s not that I think I’m great or even good, but I think it’s a fun way to show the missteps made on the way to finished artwork. As for why I drew Wendy, you’ll have to wait a while on that.

Categories: Art, truetorial, Video Games by PrimeOp
Tags: Jaleco, Rushing Beat, tutorial

While most people are blaming recording artists for the wall-to-wall foulness in current mainstream Hip-Hop and R&B, people who listen to more than just profit-seeking pundits know what the real deal is. The record labels and media outlets have the most control. You’d think that’d be obvious, but pundits look cooler if they take it straight to the artists instead of attacking the real cause. Really, if any of those artists changed their message, their label would drop them like a bad habit after Viacom would refuse to air their videos. And if you don’t believe that, Bruce Banter from Playahata.com has a story for you about Keke Palmer:

Here’s a few clips from Atlantic records tries to turn Akeelah the Bee into Lil Kim:

Keke Palmer, is the 14 year old girl who played Akeelah, in the movie, Akeelah and the Bee.She and her mother Sharon have a huge problem with the upcoming record deal they signed with Atlantic Records in March of 2006. The problem is that the record label wants to market the 14 year old as a sexpot but she does not want that image.Keke admits “From the very beginning Atlantics A&R representative tried to get me to record inappropriate music, and my parents and I resisted.”

Who’s behind this nonsense? Well the Senior A&R rep, Mike Caren, was the main antagonist, he kept on saying , ” Keke is urban”, so as long as they refused to record the raunchy tracks that he sent them, he refused to pay for the good clean music they brought him.At one point he even stopped Keke from recording by not paying for studio time.

If that isn’t messed up enough for you…

She is only 14 years old, and when she signed the deal she was only 12 years old, “what did they think she would be singing about?” Anyway, they kept their word and did very little to promote her cd. They refused to provide marketing reports, even when Das management kept asking.Then on Sept 14th they received the report, 4 days before her cd release date of Sept 18th.

That’s just insane. You have the kid from Akelah at your record company and you don’t promote it because it jibes more with her image from a hit Hollywood movie than it does typical bass-ackwards urban radio? If the Congress wants to investigate something in the music industry, they may need to look into this. Of course, any execs that want a 14 year old girl to sex-up her image may need a different kind of investigation.

Categories: Hip-Hop, Music, Soul by PrimeOp

For some odd reason, a half-dozen people like my artwork of video game characters. Sometimes. I’ve decided to post one of my fan art methods because this blog needs more visual content. Instead of putting it in a tutorial that explains how you should do it, I’ll make a truetorial that shows how everything usually goes wrong.

Step 1.) Reference

First, you need to gather some visual reference. Internet image searches can help a lot but depends on the character’s fame. If you’re drawing a popular character like Master Chief or Lara Croft, you’ll find buttloads of pictures (and loads of pictures of their butts if you don’t turn on ‘Safe Search’). If you decide draw someone from an obscure SNES side-scrolling beat-em-up, you’ll probably just find a few random graphics on a fan site ran by some crumb bum. If you can’t find the pose you’re looking for, you’ll have to get your own reference. Pause the game if you have it or take a screen capture of it like I had to here. I do a sketch of the pose a few times trying to get all the limbs in the right places and add my own spin to it. This is also a good chance to get some of the surplus fail out of my system.

Step 2.) the First Attempt
After days of almost drawing the picture and then remembering that I had to do other things for about 3 other people, I wait until Saturday, a day where I’m usually stumbling around like a zombie from an accumulated lack of sleep. I take a first attempt at it that to solidify a few more things. Sometimes, it’s a mess of lines that I plan to go over later or just note not to do things like that. With maybe 4 hours of sleep in my system, the first attempt here is horror beyond imagining. It is so ugly that I spend the rest of the night thinking of giving up drawing forever and ever. At least once I think about awkwardly jumping out of the second story window head first with the futile hope that the odd impact would break my neck and kill me instantly. Anything to not think about how I drew that. I crawl into bed, curl into the fetal position and fall asleep while listening to “Living Inside Myself” by Gino Vannelli hoping that tomorrow will be a better day*.

Step 3.) the Second Attempt
After six hours of sleep, I take a second shot at the picture while noting everything that didn’t work the first time. The torso width and big boots match the sprite better even if it’s weird to see her with a realistic face. More adjustments are made to those weird shoulder pads after I see how they look in other animation frames. After I decide that I don’t hate how it looks, I break out the .08, .05 and .01 Micron pens and begin to go over the pencils with ink. This one turned out okay but there’ll still be digital fixes to be made. I tried to avoid giving her muscular legs, but I’m rethinking this one now. I’ll probably have to fix that. I’m not happy with the big, goofy boots now, so I’ll tone those down. Her face gives off the exact vibe that I want it to and I like how the ponytail turned out. She’s a cutie-head who looks like she’s posing for a picture which also plays into one of the ScrollBoss-related reasons I drew this. I can’t too much time on it because I still have a lot of work to do with upgrading the Illmosis site with funky-fresh functions and features. So the amount of further effort that I put into this will be determined by how much attention it gets where I post it. No, I’m not an attention whore, but I let feedback and interest decide what I’m working on when juggling multiple projects that need to be prioritized.

That’s it for part one. Be sure to tune in to part two whenever I get around to finishing the pic.

Edit: Part 2 is now ready right here.

* – Yes, that’s a joke. I just got to a point where I put the picture to the side and watched Kool Moe Dee on Soul Train. Besides, the window has a screen that can’t be moved. So there’s that, too.

Categories: Art, truetorial, Video Games by PrimeOp
Tags: Jaleco, Rushing Beat, tutorial