He-Man/She-Ra – Villains – Skeletor and Minions

Here Comes A New Challenger!!!

~ J.Ho ~ 4 Comments
A different kind of contest this time around, at the He-Man.org fan-art forums. The challenge this time was to create an original “evil warrior.” This challenge was put out by the awesome action figure customizing group COTU (Customs of the Universe), and they’re actually offering some prizes. Contest thread is here, and my post is here. Semi-final voting thread is here. I didn’t win, but I was one of the runners-up, and COTU generously offered up prize packages of custom Masters of the Universe accessories! Photos to come in a future post.

And, my creation:

click above for larger view

Malbino is constructed from the following parts:

  • Beastman head
  • Skeletor torso and arms
  • Tri-Klops armor
  • Man-E-Faces pelvis
  • Sy-Klone legs
  • Weapons Pack Power Sword

I already had this character pretty fleshed out in my head before I heard about the contest. The original motivation behind creating Malbino is that I wanted to create characters to wield the various accessories from the classic weapons pack. I hadn’t planned on getting around to this sketch for a while, but COTU’s contest seemed like a perfect place to present Malbino. The pose and concept are very similar to my version of Felinor, due to the fact that the existence of each character revolves around a duplicate Power Sword. And the name is, of course, a terrible pun in the great tradition of Masters of the Universe. Whaddaya know, I just happen to have a complete background written up for him:

* * *

PROFILE: MALBINO is a virtually unrivaled master of stealth and the sword. His sole concern in life is furthering his mastery of the blade by annihilating any and all who would be his rivals. As a result, he is unapologetically belligerent, even towards his so-called allies. He is armed with a replica of He-Man’s power sword, forged by the same master sword-maker who created Felinor’s counterfeit blade. It is unknown exactly how many of these forgeries exist. Intense light has been known to blind Malbino temporarily, but due to the fact that he is an expert blind-fighter as well, this knowledge is of little use.

HISTORY: Originally hailing from one of the most remote corners of Eternia, Malbino studied swordplay under the same teacher as his bitter rival, Tri-Klops. He has travelled the world, seeking out and ruthlessly slaying anyone whom he considers a master of the blade. In spite of having carved a bloody path of destruction through the martial world of Eternia, Malbino is little known, largely due to the fact that he has no interest in public glory and rarely leaves witnesses. Having heard that his old rival is engaged in on-going conflict with He-Man, owner of one of the true power swords, Malbino travelled to Snake Mountain to offer his services to Skeletor, determined to kill the opponent that Tri-Klops has failed to defeat. Malbino’s violent and efficient methods earned Skeletor’s respect, and in spite of Tri-Klop’s warnings, Skeletor has made Malbino one of his lieutenants. However, the wandering swordmaster has no real interest in Skeletor’s conflicts, he is merely interested in finding more masters of swordsmanship to vanquish. In addition to He-Man, Malbino has set his sights on She-Ra, and a skirmish with the Aracnos forces introduced him to Felinor, whom he took great interest in, for obvious reasons. Even amongst Skeletor’s other lieutenants, Malbino has made few allies–he has nearly come to blows with Ninjor and Blade on numerous occasions. However, he has also told Tri-Klops this: “Out of respect for our Master, I will kill you last. For now, we are allies.”

* * *

Don’t Go In There–It’s A Trap (Jaw)!

~ J.Ho ~ 8 Comments
The subject of today’s mega-nerdy post is Trap Jaw, another henchman of Skeletor, described on as “Evil and Armed For Combat.” (Unfortunately, Wikipedia lives up to its reputation for inaccuracy in this instance–“Trap Jaw” is not hyphenated. Shameful.)

click above for larger view

“Evil and armed for combat” is all good and fine, but as you can see, I changed Trap Jaw’s blurb to “Evil Master of Arms.” I prefer it because it’s a title rather than a description, plus it has a pun in there, which is always good for a He-Man character (Trap Jaw has a prosthetic arm with interchangable attachments, for those of you who don’t know).

The pose gave me quite a bit of trouble this time around… this is actually my third go at Trap Jaw. I got as far as starting inks on the two previous attempts, but they were really very awkward. I ended up with a pretty static pose (a trap that I fall into frequently), but since the goal of this sketch blog is completion, speed, and productivity rather than perfection, I was willing to make the sacrifice. Better to finish it off and move on to the next one!

The details of the drawing are pretty faithful to the toy. In fact–not being an owner of the original Trap Jaw action figure, I never realized that his left arm is almost completely armored. However, my obsessive internet search for reference rectified this oversight. I’m pretty surprised that I have not previously come across any Trap Jaw art depicting him with an armored arm. The tubes and wires coming from the blaster on his prosthetic arm were completely fabricated by me.

I took more creative liberty with the colors than I usually do–burgundy has more of a presence in his color scheme as a nod to the cartoon, but I scaled it back just a little bit, so that there wouldn’t be large masses of one uninterrupted color.

This was posted on the He-Man.org fan-art forums. My post is here, the entire thread (including some of my previous sketches) is here.

That Dude is a Beast, Man!

~ J.Ho ~ 6 Comments
His name is Beast Man
Fierce Minion of Skeletor
Savage Orange Rage

click above for larger view

I’m pretty happy with how this turned out–just don’t try examining his musculature–it’s an anatomical mess! Action pose is a little awkward, but better than my Mer-Man or Tri-Klops, I think. As usual, I tweaked the colors a little bit, where I thought it was logical to do so–the biggest change being that I made his arm-pads gold instead of red. I have no idea if there is any precedent for his whip to be made of energy, but the idea of coloring a plain black whip seemed BO-RING. I do know that the villain Blade had an energy whip in the live action Masters of the Universe movie. (+4 geek points)

As usual, this was posted on the He-Man.org fan-art forums. My post is here, the entire thread (including some of my previous sketches) is here.

TERRIBLE TITLE: If At First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try, Tri-Klops Again…

~ J.Ho ~ 3 Comments

A few quick notes–

  1. For anyone who did not notice, I put up a bonus post on Wednesday night. Check it out–it features more J.Ho art as well as some non-J.Ho art!
  2. For those who don’t care about He-Man (who are you people?)–please keep checking back–I have several pieces coming up that have nothing to do with He-Man, and at least two that don’t even have anything to do with cartoons. Really!
  3. There was an issue with the line-spacing in my posts, where I was getting single-spacing and double-spacing at seemingly random intervals. I have fixed it, and conformed all posts to single-spacing. If you have a strong preference for double-spacing please let me know.

Okay, enough with the small talk–today’s entry is Tri-Klops, another evil minion of Skeletor:

click above for larger view

This was kind of an odd one–I started with a really messy sketch, which was so heavy with blue pencil that i couldn’t go over it with ink to tighten it. I was able to do a slightly-refined-but-still-very-messy ink sketch over that. I scanned that in, and tried inking it in Photoshop, but that was too clean compared to the other sketchy He-Man pics that I’ve been drawing. So I cleaned the scanned ink sketch a bit (but obviously retained a level of sketchyness to be consistent with my other drawings), and merged that with the “too clean” Photoshop “inks” to get the final line art. That whole process didn’t take as long as I might have made it sound, maybe an hour or so. The coloring of Tri-Klops was basically uneventful.

This pose is a little more dynamic than the others I’ve posted so far… still a bit awkward, but for the time it took me, I’m basically okay with it. As usual, I took a few liberties in depicting the costume details and colors. I merged the harness of his armor with his belt, because I felt that the design on the original toy was a bit redundant, and I made the green parts of his armor more olive, because I felt this matched the orange better. In a nod to the 200x design, I “covered” his neck. I also changed the colors of his sword, but I’m not sure how I feel about the result.

As for the title “Evil All-Seeing Swordmaster,” well, I’m kind of freestyling there. The original tag for the action figure was “Evil and Sees Everything.” Skeletor is a “Lord of Destruction,” and Merman is an “Ocean Warlord”… all Tri-Klops gets is the same description that I would use to describe a nosy neighbor? Not very intimidating. So anyways, I tried combining what is known about the character to create a more menacing title, while trying to stay within the style of the original toys.

As usual, this was posted on the He-Man.org fan-art forums. My post is here, the entire thread (including my Skeletor sketch) is here.

No, it’s not a sketch of Ethel Merman…

~ J.Ho ~ 4 Comments
… it’s a sketch of Mer-Man–Ocean Warlord, and minion of Skeletor! As usual, this was posted on the He-Man.org fan-art forums. My post is here, the entire thread (including my Skeletor sketch) is here.
click above for larger view
Of my posts so far, this sketch is probably the… sketchiest. The pose is ten kinds of awkward, and the body is just a shade too squat, even by the uber-buffed standards of He-Man action figures. On the other hand, the face turned out the way I wanted it too, and I’m pretty satisfied with the colors… Well, they can’t all be winners.

That’s about all I have to say about that. So now, to fill space as my system experiences a catastrophic crash from a carb and sugar high brought on by my dark lord, Jack In The Box, I will list the sinister contents of my disastrous lunch:

  1. Steak and Cheddar Ciabatta Sandwich (roughly the size of a premature baby)
  2. Miniature trough full of Cheese and Bacon Potato Wedges
  3. Large Order of Curly Fries (I only finished two-thirds of it)
  4. A bucket full of Orange Fanta.
It should go without saying that I skipped dinner.

For more on Ethel Merman:

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:


click above for larger view

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: