Blog

So, hello again, this is Ben, and I have some news to share with you.

So in case you don't know, I am a Ben 10 fan, like a die-hard Ben 10 fan. It's ben (badum-tish) that way for as long as I can remember.

Yesterday, I was on the Internet Archive, I was looking at some style guides for the original series, both of the ones that have been found, the 2008 and 2010 ones respectively. In these style guides, Cartoon Network provided some backgrounds from the show for promotional use in various Ben 10 products.

What really intrigued me was the fact that these backgrounds were in .PSD format, these were Photoshop files. So, out of curiosity, I downloaded one. What I found was shocking.

These were the master files. Like the original files, actually used to create these backgrounds in the show! You can just hide all of the layers and see underneath. Sometimes, they have production codes on them, and sometimes they have the original background sketches and sometimes even storyboards!

I actually learned a lot from these files, like how they created the art. The grainy look of the backgrounds actually wasn't a technical limitation, but a stylistic choice. It seems to have been done by applying 12% noise to the piece.

Another thing I learned (which is just Ben 10 lore) is that one of the backgrounds, specifically one from "The Galactic Enforcers" is labeled "EXT. NEW YORK STREETS - DAY", arguably confirming that the episode (or at least the intro) takes place in New York, although it's up to you if you wanna consider this cannon.

If you wanna view these for yourself, I have provided the links here. Pretty cool reads, even without my "big discovery".
2008-2009 guide
2010-2011 guide (has more backgrounds)

This is sort of unrelated, but also yesterday, I was looking at the DVD included in the Ben 10 press kit (that was a literal box of cereal lol), and realized that the title cards for the episodes on the disc just weren't there? As someone who's watched these episodes more times than I can count, it feels insanely weird, like a sneeze that won't come out, there could be some other differences I just didn't notice (I didn't watch the whole episode), but I couldn't find anything.

And before anyone asks, no, the disc does not include the infamous lost test footage, I checked. You can download the cereal DVD here.

Anyways, thanks for reading all the way through! Hope to see ya again someday. Ben, out.

Hello everyone, and happy 2026! Last night I got up at like, 3am and couldn't get back to sleep, but also last night, I had a really weird dream that a new Mario game came out, and it was really weird, and I wanna make a blog post about it.

The game was called "Super Mario: Hunner". No idea what the hell "hunner" means but that was the subtitle. The main villian of the game was John Lennon, and there were a bunch of other celebrities in the game, too.

Nintendo just didn't get any of the rights to use the likeness of all these celebrities, so they all sued, a bunch of celebrities who weren't even in the game also decided to sue, along with just a bunch of random people. Because of all of this drama, the game was immediately taken off of store shelves, and no one wanted it, therefore no one bought it.

A lot of people actually considered the game to be "groundbreaking". Not because of anything in, like, the actual game or something like that, but rather because of the fact that the Nintendo Switch logo was purple on the box.

Strangely, despite being a mainline Mario game, it was exclusively released on the Switch 1 and not the Switch 2, but I guess my brain was so used to the Switch 1.

I can't really tell you anything about what the actual gameplay was like, because as I said before, no one bought it. I made a recreation of the box art in Adobe Illustrator, you can see that up above.

Hi, it's Ben! And exactly 20 years ago today, something happened. On Cartoon Network, the first episode of an at-the-time new series premiered. The name of that series, is "Ben 10".

I love Ben 10, if you don't know already. If it weren't for that show, I wouldn't be here, it's what really got me into Animation, Sci-Fi, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

Because of this anniversary, I wanna celebrate by redesigning all of the original 10 aliens. So, without further ado, it's hero time.

Wildmutt: Starting off with Wildmutt, he has a uniform reminicent of Ben's outfit in the original series, which is gonna be a theme. I made his hair sorta look like Ben's, and made him, and pretty much every other alien look slightly younger, just to get across the message that, yes, this is still Ben.

Four Arms: With Four Arms, I decided not to change much, other than removing the gloves, and the chin stripe. Four Arms is already a great design, so there's not much that really needed to be changed.

Grey Matter: Yet again, there's not much I needed to change, but I do wanna point out how he's so small that I just didn't bother to draw the Omnitrix on him lol.

XLR8: Okay, now onto some big changes! Most obviously, I gave him only one leg, this version doesn't really run, but rather glides. I also made him a cyclops. and changed his "helmet" design a little: it's now a shell that now goes only on the top, and he can extend it at will to act as a visor, there would also. You can't really see it that well in the image, but he also has exactly 8 stripes on his tail, as well as spikes on the back, inspired by his look in the reboot.

Upgrade: This is one of the only designs here without that suit, I mad e that decision because the Mechamorphs (Upgrade's species) were created by the same dude who made the Omnitrix (not saying because that could be a spoiler for some), because of this, he had a better understanding of the species, therefore he understood them more and knew that Mechamorphs traditionally don't wear "normal" clothes, I also though the circuitry was just fun to draw.

Diamondhead: onto my GOAT. I broke up the Diamond pieces on the head and the chin to their own thing, as well as making the top part resemble Ben's hair. I also made him much more "lanky" and less "tanky".

Ripjaws: I made him green and gave him a buck tooth, not much more to say.

Stinkfly: I made his head much more oval-shaped because having a big blank spot where the Omnitrix went in the official design just looked really weird. I also changed a bunch of colours.

Ghostfreak: He's the only other alien without the suit. Pretty much just Omniverse's design without the chains and white, I also made some of the lines line up with a bunch of stuff which I think looked really cool, especially with the Omnitrix,

Heatblast: Last but certainly not least: Heatblast. I decided to make his head, once again sorta resemble Ben's. Not too sure how that would translate into motion, though.

I've also made this collage of all of my redesigns, along with my take on Ben, himself. I made this to put up on my art page with everything else, because I was just really proud how everything turned out.

Hope you enjoyed! Sorta unrelated, but I've actually been wanting to open a Ben 10 fan-site for a while. More of an archive than anything, the Ben 10 planet wiki is really good, but isn't the best when it comes to preservation, and there's also a bunch of random knockoffs in the merchandise pages? So I wanna just do that myself, to sorta fill in all the blanks left in by the wiki.

Anyways, see ya soon!

Hey-hey-hey, 2 Posts in 1 day! I made an animation test! I'm experimenting with puppet rigs in Flash (thanks to Flash Power tools), and this is my first rigged animation!

The character featured in this test is named Atom Smasher, and he's a superhero heavily inspired by 50s-70s sci-fi stuff (at least design-wise). I do plan to use him for a cartoon in the future, so stay tuned for that!

I think it turned out great, but I don't really know how to add the thick outlines that I usually put on Characters/Props for him, that's the only thing I don't like about this test.

Hello! It's Ben, again, and it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas everywhere you go!

Yesterday, I went into the city to see the biggest christmas tree in Australia. So with my digicam in hand, I proceeded to do just that. I also took a bunch of photos of all the other X-Mas decor around Sydney, and that's why I made this blog post.

You can hover over the images to see what exactly they are.

I then went inside Dymocks (big book store) and got a cool novelty pen, and a book. I don't read much, the store just seemed like a cool place, and it was. They too had some Christmas decorations up. I also found that Donkey Kong Calender everyone got mad at on Twitter for a while.

I also took some non-Christmas photos of the city:

I noticed that a bunch of the photos turned out really dark, I believe that was because of my settings. Oh well...

Anyways, until next time, is this a live counter or something?

Hello, again. It's Ben! You know the Omnitrix? The Ben 10 watch? In case you don't know, it's a device made to understand all the intelligent beings in the universe, and quite literally walk a mile in someone's shoes.

It does this by altering the users DNA. It also can alter other's DNA, curing diseases and whatnot, and, at least at first, it looked like this:

Although it "evolved" in the later shows, becoming more powerful, etc. in the 2016 reboot it returned to this design, and I have a feeling that it'll show up once again in the upcoming comic. Why? It's quite literally perfect. The design's genius in every way, shape and form. And I wanna talk about why I think that.

First of all, it's a complex design that feels simple at the same time, it perfectly visually represents everything it is, in the show it looks high-tech, it looks big, and it looks alien.

The "pipe" things on the watch also line up exactly with the symbol.

I would explain how the watch works in the show myself, but this scene from the very first episode sums it up way, way, better than I ever could (despite the watch not really being drawn the best).

If you're a science nerd, and look closely, you may notice some similarities with the first photo of DNA, and that is just so cool to me, wether it's intentional or not. When the dial is popped up, it also sorta looks like the surrounding bit in the photo.

When the dial pops up, the watch face morphs from the regular Omnitrix icon, to a diamond-like shape, and it looks, just so satisfying. This morph sequence alone is genius, and recently, when I found out that the inbetween (that also shows up when a species' DNA is being scanned), looks like an actual DNA helix. I lost my mind, so cool.

I also love the alien sillhouettes, as it just highlights how damn good the designs look, even in such a basic form.

Thanks so much for sitting through my geeky ramblings. Ben 10's 20th anniversary is coming up in like a week or something, and I hope to get some Ben 10 themed art out for it. I wanna try and redesign all of the original 10 aliens and of course Ben himself. I also wanna try and make a Zine out of it, as I've wanted to make a one for a while.

Anyways, that's all!

I bought a brand new web domain! It feels super-duper surreal seeing my thing with a ".com" in-front of it instead of a ".neocities.org".

Anyways, now you can go to "bensgotapen.com" for all your Benning needs!

Anyways, that's all for now, so see ya!

Hello! And welcome to my brand new website!

I used to have a website called "RoboNerd's RoboNet", but due to me sorta growing tired of the RoboNerd character/theming, and the website being created when I barely knew any HTML/CSS/JS, and some other reasons, I just sorta wanted to have a fresh start, and that's exactly what this is.

Currently, this website is far, far, far from being finished, but I'm constantly working on it a whole bunch in my free time, and hopefully everything will be up-and-running by Christmas eve. Hell, even this very blog post is probably going to be updated with new info! (Currently, it hasn't.)

I plan to also buy a web domain and new e-mail adress (so I don't have to use Gmail anymore), but I'm broke so that'll probably take a while.

For archival purposes, I have decided to host a backup of the RoboNet, exactly how I left it, it should be up later today.

Anyways, thanks for reading this. Have a great day, night, month, year, and life. And it's good to be back.