He-Man/She-Ra

Surprise! A Nerdy Fan-Art on a Friday Afternoon!

~ J.Ho ~ 2 Comments
For the uninitiated, this is kind of a complicated one. In the She-Ra cartoon, the bad guys were a totalitarian regime known as “The Horde,” and they were lead by a cyborg-ish guy with a skull-like face named Hordak. Skeletor, incidentally, was originally Hordak’s apprentice, but I digress. Hordak’s boss was an entity named “Horde Prime,” who was also supposedly Hordak’s brother. The only pieces of Horde Prime that were ever seen by the viewers were two glowing eyes and his gargantuan metallic hand (whether armored or robotic, we don’t know). And the only reference to his appearance mentions that he has two heads. Aside from the cartoon, there are also one or two minor and completely contradictory appearances of Horde Prime in the UK comic books.

All in all, this has lead to a lot of discussions amongst He-Man/She-Ra fans about the nature and appearance of Horde Prime. Here is my interpretation:


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A lot of hardcore He-Man/She-Ra fans don’t like Horde Prime, because he takes away from the impact of Hordak, who was always billed within the toys as the leader of the Horde. The strongest argument of opponents of Horde Prime is this:

If Horde Prime was the leader of the Horde, then why was Hordak’s face on the emblem of the Horde?

And this is what got my geeky little brain rolling. The basic assumption that I make in my illustration is this: it is not Hordak’s face on the Horde emblem. For my version, the armor was based on the UK comic book version, while the hand was based on the cartoon depiction. His head and face are, of course, based on the Horde symbol (or by retro-continuity, the basis for the Horde Symbol). As for the secondary head, I just wanted to give him his extra head in an unexpected way. Oh, and I assume that Horde Prime is, like Hordak, a shapeshifter, so the secondary head can retract and morph back into an eyeball. I view Horde Prime as Hordak’s brother, who started out roughly-human sized like Hordak–over time, his shapeshifting abilities developed further, and eventually he was able to use his powers to increase his size.

The discussion thread about Horde Prime on the He-Man.org art forums is here, and my post is here.

For more on Horde Prime:

BONUS POST: "I got an Orko." "What’s your Orko got to do with me?"

~ J.Ho ~ 2 Comments
Every two weeks, the art forum at He-Man.org holds an character re-design challenge. The subject is almost always an obscure character so as to inspire a bit more creativity. This particular sketch of mine is the first piece of art that I posted in the forums (this was just a few weeks ago, in mid-December). You can see my post here. The whole thread is here, and the voting thread (where members of the forum decide which re-design they like best) is here–my entry landed in 3rd. A bronze isn’t too shabby, right?

Dree Elle is the girlfriend of Orko, from the He-Man cartoon. And if you don’t know who Orko is, I honestly don’t know what to do with you. Fine, fine, you can read about Orko here. Anyways, Dree Elle is basically a female version of Orko, but she’s more competent, and she has sexy bedroom eyes. Frankly, I think she’s got it going on, girlfriend. *snap*

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My version of Dree Elle has just a few modifications–I swapped the colors around a bit, making her gown lighter than her hood rather than vice versa, and added some bracelets and gold trim on her cuffs. The purpose of the shawl/cape was to give her better defined shoulders, and I changed her scarf to a veil so that we could see the silhouette of her slender neck. I felt that this emphasized her femininity just a touch, so that she wouldn’t just look like Orko in drag. As for the caption, Dree Elle and Orko both belong to the Trollan race. And apparently, I was mistaken in hyphenating “Dree Elle,” which is actually making my borderline OCD brain a bit crazy.

Fun Fact: The original title for the this post was “Nowadays everybody wanna talk like they got something to say/But nothin comes out when they move they lips/Just a bunch of gibberish/And m*********s act like they forgot about Dre (Elle)”

What’s a Skeletor?

~ J.Ho ~ 5 Comments
Who am I kidding–I CAN’T WAIT UNTIL TUESDAY. So here now, is my inaugural sketch, the Lord of Destruction himself:


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I ‘m also posting this on the forums at He-Man.org–you can find the thread here (my screenname on He-Man.org is Bootleg, so you’ll see that stamped on any art that I post there).

For those who don’t know, Skeletor is the arch-enemy of He-Man, the most powerful man in the universe. Skeletor’s hobbies, like most 80’s cartoon villains, include sinister cackling and incompetent attempts at world domination.

This is actually the sketch that got me rolling on the whole sketchblog idea. I busted out a pretty quick sketch of Skeletor, inked and everything, because I was just really itching to do a finished piece. I chose Skeletor because he’s a character whose costume I have pretty well memorized (yes, I am a dork), so digging up reference would not slow me down. Color-wise, I took a few liberties where it seemed logical to do so. As for why he’s wearing a Batman-like cape… I guess I just felt like drawing a Bat-cape.

For those of you who are familiar with my artwork, you will notice that this sketch is much simpler and looser than my normal anal-retentive clean and detailed illustration style. Basically, I am trying to loosen the hell up, so that I can be a little more productive, instead of agonizing over every little detail.

My normal process is something like this:

  1. concept sketch (any medium)
  2. loose sketch (blue pencil)
  3. tight pencils (.5 mechanical pencil, F lead)
  4. inks (usually tombo brush pens and sakura microns)
  5. colors (photoshop)
The process for Skeletor, and for 95% of the sketches that you’ll see on this blog is more like:
  1. rough gesture (blue pencil)
  2. tightening/inking (extra fine pilot v-ball pen and pentel sign pen)
  3. colors (photoshop)
So you can imagine that the process is much quicker this way. My coloring style is still pretty clean (and i’m still sooo slow in photoshop), but so far this is working. I might experiment with some looser coloring styles in the future.
Comments and criticism welcome.

For more on Skeletor: