Ego – Raging

Lo-Fi Cosplay that I didn’t do (Part 2 of 2)

~ J.Ho

Very briefly, to summarize Comic-Con (and I apologize if you read my Twitter feed, because this will be repetitive… actually, I just apologize if you read my Twitter feed at all): It was a lot of fun–the most fun I ever had at Comic-Con, and anyone who knows me knows that I am not prone to engage in positive hyperbole when it comes to the beast known more formally as “Comic-Con International.”

Exhibitors and attendees alike–everyone at Con seemed like they were mellower and doing a better job managing their biznizz. The weather was far more moderate than the blazing temperatures + wretched humidity that usually accompany Con. And probably, most importantly, I let go of any perceived obligation to “cover” the convention floor. I met and hung out with a lot of cool people, and I even managed to pick up all the nerd loot that was on my radar.

But, back to me drawing nerdy crap:

Continuing from last week’s post, today I have yet another concept sketch of a lo-fi cosplay idea (that I have yet to actually execute). It’s me as Marvel Comics’ Super-Adaptoid! Or possibly the Super-Adaptoid’s slacker son, Kid Adaptoid. Yeah, I totally copied the idea of Kid Amazo and made that up just now. Anywaaays:

Basically, this idea arose when I realized that you could totally buy up all the Marvel Comics role-play toys (Captain America’s shield, Thor’s hammer, etc), and spray paint them in shades of green to make a Super-Adaptoid costume. The mask would be a modified Wolverine mask (cut to resemble Hawkeye’s mask) grafted on to a modified Iron Man mask.

I said “mask” too many times in that last sentence.

As I was saying, before I so rudely interrupted myself… The wings would be made from scratch (I’m thinking cardboard), and the rest would be pretty easy to figure out with little or no real costuming abilities. Perfect for my skill level! I hope I can get around to making some version of this costume, even if I just wear it while sitting in front of my computer at home. Yeah, I said it, so that you didn’t have to.

Back to commissions for Help The Cheerleader next week!

Post Script: I am well aware the term “lo-fi” refers to audio quality and therefore would seemingly have nothing to do with a sketch or a costume. I hope you will pardon the verbal liberty that I have taken.

Lo-Fi Cosplay that I didn’t do (Part 1 of 2)

~ J.Ho

Believe it or not, I was contemplating some lo-fi cosplay for Comic-Con this year, but due to time constraints and, how you say… LAZINESS, I decided against it. However, since the beast Comic-Con is upon us, I figured that drawing up the cosplay concepts from my head would be appropriate. Here’s the first one, me as a Green Lantern:

PRETTY NERDY, HUH?

I have truly been enjoying working on the sketch commissions for Help the Cheerleader, but being so entrenched in analog media, I’ve really been feeling a craving to do some digital coloring again. It felt good to stretch my Wacom muscles.

Tune in next week for a Comic-Con wrap-up and another costume concept. Also green-themed, but a bit more involved, and drawing from Marvel’s fiction rather than DC’s.

Post Script: I am well aware the term “lo-fi” refers to audio quality and therefore would seemingly have nothing to do with a sketch or a costume. I hope you will pardon the verbal liberty that I have taken.

MACHO WEEK!!! (Part 2 of 3, The Moldy Oldie Edition)

~ J.Ho ~ 3 Comments

MACHO WEEK continues, with a piece of vintage nerdery from my archives, drawn and colored in 1999. TWELVE years ago.

Let’s think about this people. That was before 9-11, before the dot-com bust, before the (still ongoing) energy crisis, before I owned a car or a DVD player. I was fresh out of college, just starting out full time at the day-job after interning there for 2 years (same day-job that I have today, by the way), and living in a tiny studio apartment that paradoxically had a huge walk-in closet (which I filled up with comic books and action figures–mostly Beast Wars at the time).

So… I confess, this was drawn to impress a geeky girl who I was talking to at the time. Believe it or not, the subjects in the illustration were our common points of interest–and there’s the Macho One himself, front and center! Oh, and I’m in the picture too, inbetween Optimus Prime in Pikachu, because apparently I have a raging ego. For what it’s worth, I think the girl was in fact impressed by this. However, things didn’t work out for a number of complicated reasons which I will not bore you with. You know how it goes.

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Man, just look at this thing. It was one of the first things I ever colored in Photoshop, and I thought I was pretty hot stuff, using the Dodge/Burn tool to render the shading. WHAT WAS I THINKING?

And yet, here we are, twelve years later. My drawing is a little better, and my coloring is much better. And I still pretty much won’t shut up about Macho Man, Transformers, Batman, Pokemon, Miyazaki movies, and Bruce Lee.

Tune in on Friday for the final installment of MACHO WEEK!!!

Squawk.

~ J.Ho ~ 6 Comments

Sometimes, like a jerk, I waste hours and hours playing Angry Birds, a game meant to be a casual distraction, which has instead become an obsessive… obsession. Other times (still like a jerk) I post a super-late blog. Here is such a blog post now:

On Friday night I was too tired to draw, so I went to bed with the intention of playing a few levels of Angry Birds and then going to sleep. Fast forward to: me staying up until 9:30am, when I finally went to sleep (cursing at myself all the while). Woke up a few hours later and headed to the Long Beach Comic Expo, where I hung out with Dustin and Peter Nguyen (they are not related!), and drew this. Peter was kind enough to lend me a pen so that I could ink it. I drew another piece too, which I came home and inked, and will be posted this week in a timely manner, unlike today’s sketch.

I’ve been in sort of a rut lately, in addition to being busy with assorted other things. It was very eye opening to me that I was able to go hang with some friends, and even on very little sleep, bust out two drawings very quickly. I guess even weirdo recluses such as myself need to occasionally leave our secret lairs and get a change of scenery.

(But seriously, Angry Birds is really fun.)

Bang Your Head

~ J.Ho

Heh… heheh…

Been a little busy, working on stuff not yet ready to share, and I found myself banging my head against the wall trying to figure something out. I figured it out though! Will share progress as soon as possible (which won’t necessarily be all that soon). Love, Me.

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.

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.

I’m a delight, I swear!

~ J.Ho ~ 4 Comments

If you talk to my close friends, it’s pretty well understood that I prefer a stern talking-to over a kind word. And unfortunately for my friends, I give what I wish to receive. I made this hand-drawn card for a dear friend (link unavailable) who’s going away for a few months:

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It’ll be like I’m right there the whole time, nagging away!

The Waiting Game

~ J.Ho

I’m autoposting another sloppy blog from the work computer, while I grow old waiting for my new one to arrive.

Actually, I am full of lies. First of all, I’m more like a big impatient baby than an old man. And second, I could only grow such a long Rip Van Winkle-esque beard in my wildest dreams! New computer should be here soon-ish, and “real” posting will resume.

Err…

~ J.Ho

[EDITTT: There we go, all fixed… for now!]

Apparently I’m having problems with my web storage, which is why most of the images on this blog are red X‘s. Looks like involuntary renovations are in order.

I’m looking into the problem (and cursing)–in the meantime, should you have a burning desire to look at any of my previous art, feel free to check out my Deviant Art page.

STORMWATCH 20xx!!!

~ J.Ho ~ 2 Comments

When you live within the greater Los Angeles area (as I do), any time there’s any kind of rain, every local news station assaults you with STORMWATCH 20xx!!! Literally, it could be an hour of light drizzling, and you have to listen to STORMWATCH 20xx!!! for a week. It’s basically retarded.

You see, Los Angeles is usually sunny and 70 degrees, so if it even rains a little, every moron out there freaks out, following the lead of our famously awful local news institutions. Car accidents skyrocket, even though the driving conditions aren’t significantly more dangerous, thus turning the streets and freeways into a gridlocked mess. Frankly, people are big, nervous babies about the whole affair. For the record, I enjoy the rain, and I do not lose my mind while driving in it (*knock on wood*).

Well, this past week we finally got an amount of rainfall that might actually qualify as a real storm–flooding, hail, the whole deal.

The rain has even given me a reason to wear a coat and a scarf. Unheard of! However, that is not the reason for today’s post. The real reason is that I have been metaphorically underwater with work (at the day job), and so a quick self-involved post is all that I have time for:

Post Script to my fellow California-ites: Apparently we’re in for more of this rain, possibly on an epic, legitimately dangerous scale? They call it… FRANKENSTORM!!! I wish I was joking.

Sketchy Looking Individual

~ J.Ho ~ 1 Comment

Here’s a self portrait, in which I look agitated and pale (as I often do):

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Sketched in ballpoint pen and colored in Photoshop.

For those keeping track at home, I do have a sleeveless black hoodie in RL, but I do not have a t-shirt featuring my favorite saying (unfortunately). My apologies for this interjection by my raging ego. Regular sketch-blog service will resume next time.

Cardboard and Co-Workers

~ J.Ho ~ 6 Comments

A little something different for today…

If you work in an office anything like mine, there are two realities that you will understand. Co-workers and impromptu crafts.

Any office will experience occasional lulls, and it’s during these times that you look at whatever materials are lying around the office and find a way to craft them into artifacts of boredom reduction. In the case of my office, we often receive and send things, which means boxes, which means cardboard. Sometimes I simply put a cardboard tube on my arm and pretend I’m a cyborg, but other times I draw Skeletor’s torso on a cardboard poncho, and pretend I am the Lord of Destruction. There have been paper moustaches, dioramas of Peeps murdering each other, styrofoam capes and boas, dog snouts made of paper cups, and more. For years, two cardboard box lids with happy faces hung on the wall in front of my desk. I only recently took them down because I want to preserve them somehow (perhaps by having them mounted on wood blocks).

Accompanying you on these lulls and cardboard larks, are your co-workers–the people who are in the trenches with you everyday, the people who you see more than almost anyone else, and the people who understand your countless in-jokes. In my case, these are the people who understand that when I walk up to their desk, and they ask me how I am doing, I will punch myself in the stomach, make a fake barf noise, and they will reply, “I hear ya.”

Yesterday was the last day of a co-worker and good friend of mine, who’s moving on to bigger and better. Erroneously, she had decided that she was sad about leaving–so I realized quickly that I am by far the awesomest thing in the office, and manufactured this cardboard android as a substitute co-worker to accompany her in her new endeavors:

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I had always intended to make an occasional foray into three-dimensional art on this blog, but here I am finally doing it. This crude standee stands about a foot tall, was sketched on a dismantled Fed-Ex box, detailed with magic markers, cut with ordinary old scissors, and assembled with packing tape and a single conspicuous brass brad.

Nerdy Anticipation

~ J.Ho ~ 3 Comments

Perhaps you will recall that I am a huge Transformers fan? And perhaps you will recall that I enjoyed Michael Bay’s first outing in the world of Transformers? And perhaps you will understand that I am bitterly jealous that the sequel, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, premiered two weeks ago in Japan, and was released last week in the United Kingdom, while Canadians living in America (like myself) are forced to wait until this week?

And perhaps you will not be surprised that 24 hours from the posting of this blog, I will be sitting in an IMAX theater watching said movie, at long last?

For the haters, let’s get some things straight here… I’m not expecting Citizen Kane. I’m not expecting Shakespeare. I’m not even expecting Shakespeare in Love. I am expecting pretty much the best special effects around, lots of robots getting blowed up good, and Megan Fox looking Megan Foxxy.

The surge of nerdy anticipation within me is overwhelming, threating to manifest itself as a wave of destructive energy that will burn the surface of the planet to a crisp whilst arguing whether or not the new Revenge of the Fallen Human Alliance toyline portrays human characters in proper scale to their Autobot counterparts. Also, I drew this:

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What started out as kind of a quick sketch to commemorate the release of Revenge of the Fallen actually became a decent exercise in color and lighting, I think.

._.