J.Ho Originals

In space, no one can hear you ARRR…

~ J.Ho

Asteroid-alloy sword, check
Laser-flintlock, check.
Space treasure chest full of cosmic coinage, check.
Robot skull-and-crossbones, check.
Leggy space pirate, check and CHECK.

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Avast, you scurvy space dogs, we be boarding Friday with our daggers in our teeth and our cutlasses at our side, and we’ll be raiding the weekend for all it’s worth! FORWARD, LADS! THE SOLAR WINDS BE AT OUR BACKS! ARRRRRRR….

(Yes, I have lost my damn mind yet again.)

(I almost forgot–still treading water at 8 missed posts to make up. More art coming soon, promise!)

Pillow Fortitude

~ J.Ho ~ 4 Comments

This basically really happened. It has been one of those weeks.

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By the way, those throw pillows are based on the actual ones on my couch. YEAH, I’M A DUDE WHO KNOWS HOW TO ACCENT HIS LIVING ROOM, SO WHAT?

This should have gone up on Tuesday. For those keeping track, I have missed a total of 4 posts (that includes Tuesday as well as my previous illness-induced delinquency). Don’t worry about me forgetting to make those posts up, the number is etched in my brain, lit up with the red hot fires of shame.

True Tales of Bronchitis #1

~ J.Ho ~ 2 Comments

First, I am acknowledging that this post is late.

Second, when I say I’m hacking up Lovecraftian horrors, I really mean it:

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I pencilled this while I was actually sick, and finally got around to inking and coloring it. The lettering, you can see… is a bit jury rigged. I drew the sound effects by hand, and did sloppy lettering in Photoshop. I’m capable of doing a rudimentary version of professional lettering in Illustrator, but I confess, I was just too lazy. In retrospect, I should have simply hand-lettered the dialogue to match the hand-lettered sound effects.

For some time I have been meaning to shift the focus of my blog to begin including sequential art. So, I guess this is the start of that. I honestly can’t claim that I have any idea how this will go, but let’s just see what happens…

Horrible Post Title #974368: Stop badgering me for a post!

~ J.Ho ~ 2 Comments

Okay, no one has been badgering me for a post, even though I have been neglecting this blog due to being sick as a dog. I haven’t been too sick to post this whole time, but once I was back on my feet I had a lot of catching up to do at work and so on. So I do apologize to you, my hypothetical (and possibly imaginary) dear reader. I missed three posts, which I’ll be making up over the next few weeks, while resuming regular posting.

For now, here’s a drawing of a badger that I did a few years back (the colors however, are brand new). It was a study for this post.

 
Incidentally, if this cranky badger had a lingering cough, it would be a pitch perfect depiction of how I’m feeling at this very moment. Just saying.

Shinobi Me

~ J.Ho ~ 1 Comment

So first I drew myself as a Naruto-style ninja, and then Jazyl did the same. This got Jazyl, Dylan, and myself talking about drawing ourselves as a Naruto-style three-man ninja cell.

We talked about our characters a little, Jazyl continued to refine his design, and I even pencilled my avatar out (though I never scanned it and therefore never showed anyone). But as happens, we all kind of got busy and forgot about it. That was 3 years ago, and last week Jazyl posted this:

click above to visit Jazyl’s gallery

 
BAM! Such an awesome piece, that I’m totally honored to be portrayed in (that’s me on the right with the mohawk, naturally). Please do yourselves a favor and check out Jazyl’s Deviant Art gallery, he’s a great illustrator!

So, the gauntlet has been thrown–now Dylan and I both need to draw a group shot of the three of us as ninjas. For me, the first step of that process is finally inking up and coloring the picture I drew of my own shinobi avatar:

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The original story for our characters was that we were going to be ninjas from the village of Hidden Wacom. Three deadly digital art ninjas, if you will. As you can see, my avatar is armed with ancient relics–a Wacom Graphire II tablet (shoulder), along with a stylus (pendant), and mouse (hand guard). And yes, for those who are wondering, I’m still rocking all my digital art with a Graphire II from like 1999.

This is a more basic design, so I will probably change things up when I draw the completed group shot. I feel like the bar has been raised! Also, Jazyl has developed the story more, and now he has assigned our ninjas to the village of Hidden Paint, which definitely sounds classier. In the end, each piece will be it’s own take on the matter, but I think that’s the fun part. I’m making the ninja group shot a short-term goal, so stay tuned–more on this as it develops!

JASONBOT.COM starts here!

~ J.Ho ~ 2 Comments

Please correct your bookmarks and readers as necessary!

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Greetings, Programs!

Welcome to my new blog, now hosted on my very own domain: JASONBOT.COM!

You will find that all of the posts from my old blog have been imported to the new site–however they have not yet been altered, which means that some links are going to redirect you to the old site. My apologies for that! Over the next several weeks (possibly months) I will be working hard to make sure that the links in every single post are updated. I’ll also be overhauling the post tags/categories, and just generally trying to class the joint up. The details aren’t important, just stick around.

For those interested in a little background–I started my old blog on New Year’s Day of 2007, with a goal of posting 2 color sketches a week. I took about 6 months off in the latter half of 2010, however, by my calculations–adjusting for the the intensified posting while I was working on the Help the Cheerleader commissions–I still averaged roughly 2 drawings per week. So, with 5 years in the can on the old blog, it seemed like a good time to begin anew.

Whether you’ve been with me since the beginning, or only just stumbled upon this blog, thank you for reading! I hope you stick around for my nerdy scribblings and my geeky ramblings.

A special thanks to Kevin Church, who I obliquely referred to in my very first blog post, and who very generously worked his magic to create a blog template (for this site) that fit my needs and wants!

Okay, that’s all for now. Regular posting should resume this Tuesday. And off we go!

Happy New Year, you nerds!

Wolf Down All Your Candy

~ J.Ho ~ 3 Comments

Take note, waiters and waitresses: If there are colored pencils left behind at my table because children were amongst the previous occupants of said table, I will draw a werewolf on my placemat:

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Basic line-work was all finished at the restaurant, a few months ago. Further color pencil rendering, computer clean-up/effects/type were done this morning. Because I care that much about you, Dear Reader.

Happy Halloween! I’m gonna watch Troll Hunter and have a Newcastle Werewolf ale tonight.

AWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Corny.

~ J.Ho

Still working on Help the Cheerleader commissions, naturally, but this week I’m taking a break to post something else…

If I happen to come across an orange and a yellow marker as a pair, my brain immediately sets itself towards the drawing of a candy corn-motiffed woman who is armed with a candy corn chained flail and vaguely Audrey Hepburn-esque style. And here she is:

I drew this several weeks ago, but since October and November is the season of the candy corn, I saved it until now.

G.I. Ginger

~ J.Ho ~ 1 Comment

In a bit of a time crunch this week–here’s something I drew while the blog was on hiatus:

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In the interest of full disclosure: the gun was loosely photo-traced for the sake of pseudo-accuracy–that’s not a technique that I typically employ. And for those who are interested in such things–it’s a Heckler and Koch UMP 45. And lastly, I will end this post with… an awkward sentence… thing… like so.

[RABBIT PUN OR ROBOT PUN HERE]

~ J.Ho ~ 1 Comment

I set up another Sculpey project for my niece and I, very similar to last year’s project. It’s not just the Year of the Rabbit, it’s the Year of the METAL Rabbit, so I chose a robotic rabbit as our subject. Here are the results:

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The gold rabbit with the red eyes is mine, the silver one with the dark blue eyes is my niece’s, and the terra cotta one at the bottom is the prototype that I made while planning the project. If you’re curious about the process, please check out last year’s project (the process we used for this year was very similar). I would point out that my rabbit has extra “rivets” in the ears–I wasn’t sure how I felt about that (maybe it’s too busy?), so I didn’t have my niece add that to her sculpture. All in all, I think these turned out nicely!

One of my brothers-in-law observed that the rabbits have a Cylon-esque quality. However, knowing myself, if there’s any subconscious sci-fi influence at work here, it’s probably from the Daleks! For the record, if this post had been made a month later, the title would have been EASTERMINATE!!!

This isn’t "goodbye"… this is, "see you later, after an undetermined interval of time… probably."

~ J.Ho ~ 1 Comment

With a heavy heart, I am putting this blog on temporary hiatus.

At the moment, I kind of feel like Life is stepping on my neck. I’m just a little too busy with the day-job, a little too burnt out overall, and a little too dissatisfied with some of the lazy posts I’ve been putting up. Plus there’s all the other stuff that goes on in life, miscellaneous things that I’m trying to work on outside of the blog, not to mention Comic-Con coming up next week… woof.

So I’ll be taking off an unspecified period of time, with the intention of refreshing my outlook, and renewing my dedication to this blog, and to my productivity in general. Before I go, I leave you with this:

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Of course long-time blog readers will recognize this as a callback to a much older post. Sure, I might be a big baby who can’t take the heat… but at least I’ve improved artistically, right? I think it must be destiny for me to take a break–as I finished this drawing, I realized that I was in fact wearing that shirt.

Thank you for your patronage, Dear Reader. With any luck, I’ll be back soon.

Lazy Summer Afternoon

~ J.Ho

I enjoyed a relaxed, lazy summer afternoon this past weekend:

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Please pardon the frosty palette–we have been blessed in Los Angeles with some nice overcast days and cool temperatures. The blistering heat will arrive soon enough, so I’m enjoying this while I can.

Not Quite Cuckoo

~ J.Ho

I’ve been itching to get back to some sculpting, and finally had a chance over the long weekend. This was supposed to be a cuckoo, but the crest got a bit too big, and instead it looks like some kind of gold-colored cardinal:

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The burnt tips on the crest and tail feathers are strictly a happy accident–I let this thing cook for too long! The gold Premo Sculpey that I used was a bit harder and slightly more crumbly than the other types of Sculpey I’ve tried, and unfortunately there were a few cracks after the baking. I don’t think volume or size was the problem, as my previous tiger project had no cracks whatsoever (the bird is just under 2 inches tall, while the tiger is closer to 3 inches tall, and obviously much longer). The transition between the neck and chest is somewhat awkward, and the head got flattened a bit along the way, but overall I’m pretty happy with how this turned out.

Sculpting is a lot of fun. Maybe it’s because it’s a change of pace, or because I’m not so familiar with the process of it, but I find the whole experience to be really relaxing. Hopefully I’ll be able to set aside some more sculpting time in the near future!

For, Forer, Forest

~ J.Ho

Just had an itch to play with some color in Photoshop. This probably took me about an hour:

AND BY THE WAY: all image links are now officially fixeddd! Enjoy all the super nerdy drawings on my super nerdy blog, from the present day stretching back continuously into the ancient, ancient past of early 2007! Thank you for your patronage and patience.