Screw your Double Rainbows! Triple Complete Birthday, Dood!
Yes, I know a crapton of other famous people have 1/17 birthdays… but this is for NSFW. How long has it been since I did an Instant Ramen piece this complex in one sitting? 12+ hours from start to finish… uh… 2 hours for the line art, I think, and the rest of it was coloring. And 2/3 of the coloring was on that background, which got the most feedback from the chat room.

I didn’t livestream this and just as I thought going in, I PROBABLY SHOULD HAVE (if only to have a recording). Doh!

I would say that I should go lie down because I’m still congested like a plugged-up warp pipe, but actually standing up makes it not so boo. Also my cat is putting his paws on me again in potentially-inappropriate places (because kitty is a lover and not a fighter). Keep on top of the Twitters, and your forks/chopsticks polished for the next alert of Instant Ramen LIVE, doods!

Bwah, I did an extended one-shot Instant Ramen as birthday gift art for NSFW… I think it was 15 hours from start to finish and most of that was the paint job, and most of THAT was attempting to recreate the backdrop of the roundtable set of the TWiT Brickhouse. I’ll do a proper Instant Ramen post later…

So today I was all “buhhhh” and sore and rather out of it, just fading in and out throughout the day and coughing a bit. I thought it was because I had done that stupidly-complex Ramen piece and not taking enough breaks, but I think I might have caught whatever bug mother has since she was super-congested and such, and she had given me her leftover fries when she brought back McDonalds.

This wouldn’t be a problem except… tomorrow– er, today? I’m being summoned to do a virus purge, which involves going outside. Yoshi + sudden temperature changes = NO. x_x Not only are the “re-chills” painful (moreso when it’s after showering), it also drastically increases my likelihood of getting an awful headcold or worse. :(

What to do…? I said I’d do the virus purge, but I would like very much to just let this bug pass quietly without being exacerbated by temperature shifts and what-have-you. But then I’d be a flake for backing out and a jerk for not fixing someone’s laptop in a timely manner… not to mention a total wimp for not wanting to go out when I may be brewing a bug. Boo. (I’d be more willing to go out in the cold if I weren’t already a little under.)

In other news, I’m just now getting to play Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky. I played Red Rescue Team a few years ago, and found that I liked it WAY more than anything from the mothership. Mystery Dungeon-subseries are often written off as being too cute and… other things that suggest that it’s not serious, but they are actually very well-written compared to the mothership titles. Of course, you still get to scratch that “collect them all” itch in the post game… and evolve, too. Plowing through as a Blastoise kicks ass. >:D

The best kind of ramen is the kind that’s made fresh, just for you! Instant Ramen LIVE!
For those who were unable to make tonight’s yet-again-impromptu livestream, the time-lapsed YouTube edition:

By gosh, I think I’ve found the magic combination for converting from Justin.tv autoarchive into a format that won’t get artifacted too badly on YouTube. H.264, WHY haven’t I used you sooner? XD It exports hella fast into a nice, small little thing that uploads to YouTube in about 10 minutes.

What do you doods think, anyway? Is time-compressing the streams into 10-minute fun-size versions awesomesauce, or do you prefer watching at the original speed? (Because I can easily toss the stitched-but-otherwise-unaltered versions on my server if you wanted to loot those.)

Also had quite a few doods in the audience/chat room this time, just some passers-by who were curious about the software and thought this was fan art. XD

In any case, I’ma try to assemble the actual wallpapers before raid time. As for what’s next… uh… oh yeah, something for NSFW since the next episode is TRIPLE COMPLETE BIRTHDAY (one of the hosts, a frequent guest and one of the TWiT tech director doods).

What? Another time-lapse release of the last Instant Ramen LIVE broadcast? Okay!

We’re… getting there as far as video quality goes. But I get the feeling that it’s not going to change much if I go past 1mb/s, since it appears the other half of the problem is something that can’t be fixed (video compression hates line art… which is what this IS, and is less glaring when I add moar color). But now I’ve gotten a means of speedily extracting, polishing and punting to YouTube. :D

Now it’s just a matter of getting more doods to show up and watch, so I can open up Skype for what would ideally be a 3-way+ sass commentary. Yeah, I should be doing these streams much earlier in the evening.

The next part (Blastoise dual-wielding the giant Hydro Pump cannons) will be tomorrow tonight.

I didn’t know whether to flag it as a WIP or completion, but the video below documents more or less what goes on from ink to color and… oh, just watch the damn thing already.

Low bitrate is looooow. Sure, it’ll load pretty fast, but holy crap all the jitter and artifacts and ew. You can be sure I’ll crank up the capture bitrate for future streams and captures. :P
But yes, if you have ever wanted to see how Instant Ramen gets drawn and polished, look no further! This particular piece probably won’t be exported as a standalone piece, but will be included in the immediately-following wallpapers I’m drawing up for Blastoise (crouching with his spear, summoning the pressure cannons for Hydro Pump, and a third one I’ve not yet wireframed).

I would like to livestream as much Instant Ramen as possible, though in reality, odds are I’ll probably stream just the major pieces and commissions.

Semi-related: drawing this kinda makes me miss Blastoise’s PSU/PSPortable2 form. I may go pick up the latter again…