The Mighty Manotaur

And there's that minotaur I said I was finishing up.

Public Transportation

Some things I doodled on the train back and forth to London. I guess I worked on a minotaur too, but I'm actually finishing him.

Port Tihq

Little fishing village in a comic universe I've been working with. Sort of like if people discovered a second Australia back when all of the different empires were out exploring and colonizing places, but this one was full of dozens of species with the same degree of sentience as humans. Now, in the modern era it remains a self-contained Darwinian society with haphazard central government. Large cities are the most "Westernized" with top-of-the-line technology, unified legislative bodies, and the most socialist programs in effect. Further out from those you get rural areas where creatures still live in clustered townships with electricity, but the ruling power is much more along the lines of small-town behind-the-shed politics. Even further from that is the wild zone, the Old West of the island. No electricity or official government, where anarchy only functions due to the threat that a bigger fish might come along.

Most of the humans on the island are related to people who moved there as fugitives. Any sentient creature can legally kill another for food or in self defense in any part of the country, so humans typically don't choose to relocate there unless they're running from something worse than the threat of maybe someday being eaten by a giant talking lizard.

Help?

I've been getting an exorbitant amount of weird Asian moonspeak spam comments on my posts lately that I think are possibly trying to convince me to buy timeshare condos or bootleg leather belts. Anyone know how to filter spam out of the comments without turning them off completely?

Annnndddd.... I guess here's a scowly Kratos pinup so this post has some art in it. Remeber, chicks dig guys with exceptionally developed depressor labii inferioris muscles. Nothing says "MANLY" like an expression of perpetual dissatisfaction.

Bust Commissions

This is basically how I made rent this month.

Dread Sarcopt Menu Console

Menus for the Dread Sarcopt, the large slot is for the active character or item, the smaller ones display the animals on your team or the items in your inventory depending on which option you have toggled. When a character speaks the box swaps to the leaf background to display the text.

Still need to make the popup menus for the help, load, and quit buttons, but theyll probably be in the same style with the tethered logs and leaf or wood backgrounds.

Nicky Two-Vests

Cast of characters I'm working on for a comic written and created by Brett Parmenter and TJ "Dave" Dimos. They're still in-progress but we wanted to line them up and see what they looked like together so far, make sure the colours weren't clashing and all that.

I need a hero

More Dread Sarcopt stuff, it looks like we'll have the sprite running around in the environment and do most of the emoting with icons in the dialogue box. I'm sure there will be some specific bits of animation when she's interacting with other animals and using items, but for all intensive purposes this will be the bulk of her acting.

The sprite's a really simple three-frame walk cycle. It's kind of funny because it means walking forward and walking backward would be the same animation, so if you stare at her waddling in place you can make her moonwalk with your mind.

Of bunnies and blaster canons

Final design for the bunny hero in Dread Sarcopt. I should have the walks for her sprite finished sometime soon. Just really simple three-frame ones, then all of her emoting will probably be done in character icons in the dialogue box.


Working on a comic pitch package for some buddies, so I should be able to show off the cast of that soon, but in the meantime here's a joke that started with the best intentions but went horribly wrong about halfway through when some friends and I were talking about drawing in different styles.

Hunt for the Dread Sarcopt

Some character concept work for a point-and-click adventure game I'm doing with my buddy J.R. Hill, of Time for Cute.com.


It's the story of a bunny on a quest to save her friend from the giant fish monster who bit their boat in half. Along the way she can collect items or make friends with other animals and utilize their skills to help her on her quest, by land, sea, and air. J.R.'s doing the writing, music, and programming, I'm doing the design and animation stuff, and helping out with the brainstorming.

Science Fiction Double Feature

I'm not sure if anyone in the western world doesn't have funtiems memories related to Rocky Horror Picture show. Be it sneaking around to watch it without getting caught when you're younger, awkwardly watching it with judgmental parents, awkwardly watching it with parents who are entirely too into it, being locked in an isolated woodland cabin with a handful of friends and no music other than the original soundtrack on vinyl, being mistaken for a hooker walking home from a live stage showing, tricking someone who doesn't know what to expect into watching it for the first time and seeing them freak out when Tim Curry pulls off his cape in Sweet Transvestite, or being tricked into seeing it for the first time without knowing what to expect and freaking out when Tim Curry pulls off his cape in Sweet Transvestite, everyone seems to have a Rocky Horror story to tell.

I've heard people complain that the movie is overrated and I think I'd have to agree to some extent. As much as I love it, the film on it's own probably can't live up to the hype that surrounds it. It's the Rocky Horror social and cultural phenomenon that makes it something special, though. I think that's the magic of cult movies, very little of the appeal comes from watching them alone in your basement but the real fun of the whole thing is spreading the movies on to your friends like some kind of underground cinema virus.

Now you're a man, a man man man

I always wonder when I see people (okay, predominantly teenage girls) write stories about manly man characters acting completely emasculated. I guess swooning over staggeringly sensitive men who act like no interesting and competent human being ever would isn't unexpected for young women but why choose these dudes dripping with machismo? I suppose it's entirely possible to be attracted to the aesthetic of the macho soldier types but still be so unapologetically girly that they still want to see them acting like shy, sensitive Twilight stand-ins á la any novel with Fabio on the cover, but then you have the alarmingly popular trend of people who not only rewrite the character to act like a stammering, flower-picking ponce, but completely redo their aesthetic to make them young and long-haired with delicate-as-a-flower features. If you say you like Ganondorf, but in your head Ganondorf is a seventeen year old Japanese vampire prince with hair like a Kingdom hearts character, who goes to starbucks and gives Link butterfly kisses.... well... you don't really like Ganondorf at all.

At least I know that if I ever want to carve out a chunk of the teenage girl market for myself, I can sell fancomics about a 98 pound Marcus Fenix going to highschool and taking bubble baths. Hey, who am I to judge? Maybe all the face-poundings that came with dressing like an emo-goth-skater-hipster and writing sad poetry are what motivated Mr. Fenix to pick up a weight set and start carving out his way to Delta Sergeant.

That said, here is a picture of something unabashedly manly. consider it an apology from me to all of you on behalf of Girls On the Internet. Depending on how things go he might end up showing up in some comics, and I guarantee it will involve nothing but eating meat, blasting heavy metal, firing guns, and amassing harems of bikini models.

Terminators is serious bisons

When I was watching Terminator 4 and John Connor was shaking up the resistance to break into Skynet and rescue the boy who would become his father, I thought the movie was getting ready to present us with Connor's grim realization that he is personally responsible for the entire war against the machines. If his father died and he was never born, then Skynet would have no reason to send the Terminator after him in the first place. With no original Terminator, there would be no arm left as evidence and ultimately Skynet would not be constructed at all.

I suppose it could be argued that if Skynet was worried about not having the chance to exist they could just send a whole Terminator back for proto-skynet scientists to dissect and put the machines ahead of the game. Though if that was the case, I'm not sure what's stopping them from doing it anyway.

Time travel is messy business.

Abdominal muscles and you

Oh yeah, did up another one of those tutorials, this time on the musclebound male physique and how it relates to character design. You know... for those days when you have a huge cast of beefy dudes and you aren't sure how to vary them beyond giving them different hair cuts...

... I'M LOOKING AT YOU, STREET FIGHTER II: THE ANIMATED MOVIE...

It may seem like I'm ragging on bodybuilders here, but that's not the case, I think more people just need to consider what the difference between muscles for show and muscles for work is. Not every guy who can kick your ass is gonna have diamond cut abs.

This is also posted in one piece on my DA gallery for people who want to download it but don't feel like saving four different files.

More commissions

Some other things wot I was paid monies for.

The only political leader who will never disappoint you

Mike Haggar, star of the Capcom game Final Fight along with those other two jerks who weren't Mike Haggar.

commissions

In no particular order, some things wot I was paid monies for.

THIS IS DELICIOUS

Updates on the Bison bison, coded for MUGEN by the talented PotS and animated by myself.

I can't actually play the game because it won't work on my Mac, but people have been uploading videos with him to youtube so I still have the chance to see him in action.





If you'd like to play with him, just drop me a line. I've got the files and I can mail them along to you

And One More Thing

Some miscellaneous updatables...

A character cast I've been developing recently. Not going to go into their details right now, though. I think I'll be saving that for something else.

Some item art for the currently in-progress Lurapets site. Keep on the look out for it to open to the public at www.lurapets.com




It just occurred to me that I haven't posted a still of this intro pan from my film anywhere, so here's one that you can look at to your heart's content.

Fuzzigator March

Did this one up today for fun after I finished a bunch of Lurapets Items.











He compliments the Mudkip from last year.

BISONNNN

I've been working on something else this week, but at a friend's encouragement I think I may actually hold onto it and use it to put together a pitch for the Nickelodeon International Open Mic thing. It's probably not a likely sell because it started as more of an Adult Swim show type of sense of humour, but it'd be good practice.


So instead here's a sample of a Bison bison I made yesterday for a friend of a friend to turn into a M.U.G.E.N. character.
The gif format kind of messed up the colours, he looks more like this but I hear he might be remapped anyway so it could be a moot point. I realized how much fun it is to blow off steam with these short cycle animations, you can just toss 'em out and be done and onto something else in a few hours.

Garbage day

Does anyone remember Cosmic Osmo? I think that was my most cherished childhood video game. Something about the atmosphere of the whole thing. Even though it didn't have a goal beyond "explore this weird solar system" I think playing that was the most immersed in a game I can ever remeber being. I'm pretty sure I've seen games since where the whole goal is just to run around and try to find what you can click on, but none of them had the same... just... MASSIVE SCOPE that made Cosmic Osmo what it was.

I was thinking that a point-and-click game of this variety would be fun if a big part of it was devoted to exploring a world like that. Like set up the Suburbs, the Basements, the Sewers, and Factory or something and cram them full of Easter eggs that you could always go back and root around for. The conventional style of point and click adventuring would allow you barter, trick, and deduce your way into more areas to explore in, but there would be plenty going on in the different rooms aside from the standard gammut of tools to pick up. Maybe also make it sort of a choose-your-own-adventure idea, where sometimes you have to choose between opening a path to one area or to another one completely, then having multiple endings available depending on the choices you make.

Originally I was picturing the characters in my head to be something bland and serious business-y. Like, a totally neutral looking model of a human that could be the nameless avatar for people to apply themselves to. Then I started wondering what motivation a totally average Joe-Somebody would have for rooting around people's garbage and going into their houses in the first place and stumped myself. Then as soon as I started giving distinct features and personalities to the main characters, the idea for the story really started to click itself together. It could just be a game about two bag ladies who ventured into the suburbs on the night before the bulk trash pickup because they know that people in suburbs always throw out the best crap. Then all the weird stuff starts to go down, but the creatures bait them on with the promise of treasure at the end if they persevere.

Multiple endings for the game would give completely different ends to the story, like there could be one where the two of them manage to do right by the shadow creatures and are eventually lead to piles of gold and treasure, another where they become the crowned queens of the underground beasties, another where they wake up back in their cardboard alley hut assuming that the previous night's shenanigans were all just a dream, things along those lines.

It's entirely too easy to take contrasting characters like these and give them diametrically opposing personalities as well, but I'm not sure I like the idea of that. I don't think there needs to be "a friendly one and a crabby one" or a "smart on and a dumb one" or even any clear one in charge who cows the other around. I think they work well as two generally well-meaning people, the short bandana-clad one being a little ditzy and gullible while the taller one is more prone to stress and second guessing. So both have flaws that give them some personality, but they're on respectfully equal footing in the friendship.

New Summer Challenge time

Okay, time to get my money's worth outta this here free blog.

Now that the film is done and I have nothing to keep my BEASTFAST ART PRODUCTION schedule up, my new goal for myself is to come up with a new concept every week and devote at least a page of concept art to it a day. I have other things I'm working on too, but this'll give me some focus instead of running in circles and feeling like I'm spinning my wheels. And maybe eventually I'll learn how to draw environments too. Either way, I should be posting an entry every day or two with new sketchbook pages and more ideavomit for whatever the story is.


This week's concept du jour is something Mel and I came up with while we were sneaking around in the middle of the night to pick at people's trash and find fun things worth scavenging. I did manage to find a Watchtower bible to rebind into a sweet sketchbook but THAT'S A STORY FOR ANOTHER DAY....

Anyway, the idea was for a 2D point and click adventure style game. The suggestion that a big cat-house thing out for collection might be haunted surned on the idea that you would have to rummage through trash to get spooky creatures hiding in the dark to help you. I went home to ponder over it some more and thought it would be cool to have a sort of Jacob's Ladder kind of alternate world going on, where you would basically start the game in a normal suburb at night. Eventually something a little out of the ordinary like a talking cat or something to that extent would up the weirdness. You would get keys into houses that would be empty but otherwise normal, and be able to find more peculiar things inside of them that would attract weirder shadowy creatures looking to strike up bargains out on the street. Eventually the interiors of the houses would start to get more shabby and decomposed, until finally they're just empty rooms with monsters waiting inside to talk to you.
This second page of stuff isn't really anything to get excited about, it's all VERY HEAVILY referenced from the 99Rooms (an awesome site I reccommend you check out if you are at all interested in artsy graffiti or urban decay). Anyway, very few things are cooler than spooky, delapidated buildings, while very few things are lamer than suburbssssss... so I got to thinking that the garbage picking could just be the start of the adventure. Like just the first world you have to explore. Eventually you could make your way into a basement that would just lead you through to catacombs of old factories, and that's where the real meat of the game takes place. I think it's something that would be akin to an urban version of Myst, where the environment is the most important aspect of the whole thing. Things shouldn't just be blatantly in-your-face blaugh scary Silent Hill style keeping you in the dark, but the whole world would be ore focused on making things seem just off enough to be unnerving. I'm thinking akin to the execution of Gorrister's level in I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.

So that's Sunday and Monday's art, the Tuesday Wednesday stuff will be up whenever it gets scanned and assembled and all that. I'll blab about it some more when I get my next post together.