Another Completely Original Wallpaper

.....well, at least I decided on the original combinations of colors and the pattern for these obviously copyrighted long tongued dinosaurs. My son caught me playing Yoshi's Island, and he is absolutely hooked with the concept of a dinosaur that eats creatures, turns them into eggs, and spits them at stuff while looking for giant keys and flowers. Too bad he doesn't have quite the coordination to play it himself yet, but he will watch me play a stage, run to mom, and tell her all about the chomper flowers and the special doors.

Also I added a little color to the Toaster wallpaper about 5 seconds after posting it last week, this is the version that's actually gracing my desktop

Illustration Friday Cocoon - Ain't No Butterfly

Here's something big and nasty that may pop out of a big, nasty cocoon. I was inspired to do a sickly green scum cocoon by the old classic "Gremlins", that movie scared the crap out of me decades ago. Unfortunetly, my attempt at drawing one from memory wound up like this:

Brave Little Toaster Wallpaper

Decided to make this wallpaper to further feed my older son's recent addiction to the Brave Little Toaster. I like the original movie which involves a cute quest as the abandoned appliances try to find their owner. But my kid prefers the sequel where the appliances use the help of a rat to recover their master's deleted veterinary thesis by finding one replacement vacuum tube for a supercomputer that then magically reconnects all its broken wires and simultaneously stopping an evil plot to sell animals to Tartarus Laboratories. I admit that Tartarus Labs is pretty funny if you're up with Greek mythology, but otherwise the sequel is not very good. There's another one where they go to Mars; I guess I'm being a little picky if I will put up with living lamps and toasters but think it's "too unrealistic" that they are abducted to Mars....
Eventually I'll have one with a hodge-podge of characters from Winnie the Pooh to Curious George.

Redness

So very scary.

If You Stab a Piece of Wood, It Turns Into This....

Quite a while ago I got a whittling tool, just a handle with a couple replaceable blades on it, and a bunch of small blocks of basswood. I carved up a few of them, one wound up looking like a piece of wood that had some corners hacked off (not shown), one became the little black and red twisted tower thing, and the other became a noble beaver.

Why do bad video games happen to good people?

A conversation about old NES games got me nostalgic enough to fire up my trusty emulator, NESticle. Unfortunately, instead of enjoying old classics like Kirby's Adventure or Double Dragon II, I thought "now that I'm older and wiser, I wonder if Dragon's Lair is any easier?"

It's still impossible. I tried downloading windows media encoder so I could capture video of me playing the ROM, I thought it would be funny to show how many things can kill you on the very first screen, but my review would be pretty damn short since I can only make it about 4 SCREEN LENGTHS into this platform game...plus I couldn't get it to work.

The main problem was that Dragon's Lair in the arcade was popular because it had amazing animation by guru Don Bluth (Secret of NIMH, American Tail, Land Before Time). That fails miserably on an 8-bit system. On games like Mario, you can make him duck in one frame, almost as soon as you hit the button. In Dragon's Lair, the hero Dirk takes 5 or 6 frames to slowly get on his knees once you hit down. The same problem occurs for attacking, jumping, and even turning around, meaning that even though the enemies are slow as shit, you just CANNOT respond in time to do anything unless you memorize it.

Luckily for me, there is already a pretty funny youtube video of some guy bitching about this game.

Illustration Friday - Rescue

Here's a rescue maneuver that anyone living with toddlers should know how to perform. Even if you know it was flushed before the keys went in, there's still psychological damage from having to reach wrist deep into that toilet. Personally, I've fished for toothbrushes more often than keys though.
And now thanks to my genius, if you were scanning Illustration Friday you got to enjoy two thumbnails of this pic since I posted just the link to the picture the first time, and there's no undoing it - my shame will be forever recorded in the I.F. archives.

Rock On, Arctic Monkeys!

I knew I couldn't miss Monday Artday's word of the week "Monkey", so I whipped up this fellow inspired by the band "Arctic Monkeys", who I've been listening to a lot lately. Looking at it now it seems I've forgotten his guitar strap, so if you were hoping for an accurate depiction of a monkey playing bass I hope you're not too disappointed. But I'm happy with the furry little rocker, I guess I'm in a good mood since I didn't have to inhale any acidic gasses at work today. And finally, a list of some of my favorite monkeys of all time:

#5 - Grape Ape

#4 - Gleek or Glook or something, the one from Superfriends

#3  - Curious George

#2 - The one I saw at a Russian circus riding a horse and throwing a ball, while wearing a cute and practical monkey diaper

#1 - Mr. Teeny

Illustration Friday - Expired

Haven't done the old draw n' scan in a while, but here's a new one for Illustration Friday, drawn in pen with a tiny bit of color from Photoshop. What I learned while doing this one is:
1) Should practice drawing noses
2) Should practice drawing hair
3) While cross-hatching adds volume to milk jug shapes, it may make a person look like Two-Face.