Who's got two thumbs and hasn't posted a blog yet this week?

THIS GUY!

*gesturing to self*

Blog is painfully late, but will be posted tomorrow (Sunday).

In case you were wondering...

Time is in short supply. Work on vaguely referred to stuff continues. Come back for a real post late Friday or early Saturday. Word is bond.

FYI...

Crushing sinus pain + cumulative sleep deprivation. Post will be up late Friday night or early Saturday. So swears J.Ho!

Big thanks to Brian Warmoth and Comics Alliance! And an apology for my terrible timing!

Brian Warmoth wrote a very generous article about this very blog over at Comics Alliance, which came completely out of the blue!

Please check out both Comics Alliance and Brian Warmoth's personal blog:

• comicsalliance.com
• warmoth.org

I cannot thank Brian Warmoth and Comics Alliance enough for putting my art in front of so many viewers. But I will try: THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!

However, this means that I have chosen a terrible time to put the blog on hiatus, which I apologize for. Unfortunately current circumstances are what they are, so I'll still need a bit of a break. Rest assured, that with encouragement like this, I will definitely be back sooner rather than later. See you soon, folks!

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

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:

click above for larger view

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.

For, Forer, Forest

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.

Temporary Delay!

Today's post will appear later, possibly not until early Wednesday (Pacific Standard Time). My apologies for the delay.

Alas poor Computros, we hardly knew ye!

I am in the process of redirecting all of my old blogs to my new hosting. Images from this year are already redirected; images older than 2010 are online for the moment, but soon will be offline momentarily while I work behind the scenes. I'll keep you posted, because I know you're all dying to look at ancient ultra-nerdy drawings that I've done.

Naturally, just as soon as I set up new web-hosting and started to get things in order, my computer AKA Computros, succumbed to enough malware to put it on its deathbed.

Computros has been struggling for sometime, and I knew that I would have to find an upgrade sooner or later, I just didn't think it would happen like this. I always thought we would have more time. This sketchblog would not be possible without my silent comrade-in-arms... Computros will be sorely missed.

My new computer will be arriving next week. I do not yet know its name. It will be my new ally in sketchbloggery. It might be faster, and have more RAM, and more storage. But Computros can never be replaced, only succeeded.

FUTURE GENERATIONS WILL SING SONGS OF YOU, COMPUTROS!!!

This blog is being posted hastily from my work computer after hours--please humor my sloppy posts while I get the new computer set up.

Robotech Tuesdays: Max Sterling

Quick note before I get to today's post... I'm going to be changing my web hosting soon, so any art that's older than, um, last week, might be offline for a bit while I transfer things over. My apologies for the inconvenience.

Hey kids, look: it's ace Veritech pilot Max Sterling!

Err...

[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.

Happy Holidays, I'm a Forgetful Moron!

It occurs to me that I promised a bonus post today. And have not delivered. Well, it won't be up by the end of Friday (which is in a scant few minutes), but it will be up before you wake up for Saturday morning cartoons. Tune back in in a few!

Greetings New Visitors! (Also: An Addendum, In Which I Explain How I Unknowingly Plaigarized An Idea)

First of all, hello to any new readers dropping in, and a HUGE thanks to Kevin for plugging my Halo Kitty post on his widely known and beloved blog. As a result of Kevin's post, my daily visitors jumped up, oh about 1268%. O_O

So, after the surge in page hits, I was looking at my blog's stats, checking out how people found my blog. Several LiveJournal pages mentioned my Halo Kitty post too (presumably someone on LiveJournal saw Kevin's blog, and things spread from there), but I also saw several hits referred from a comments thread on a Danish website discussing Halo. I'm always curious what the Danes are saying about me, so I ran some of the comments through a translator. One of the commentors linked my image saying "The rumours say that the sale hasn't gone in Japan so well, and that MicroSoft therefore works on a new version to the Japanese market." Very funny, yes? Well, the next person that replied said that Halo Kitty was old news, and gave a link--unfortunately the link was dead.

Well, this got me curious. Earlier in the year when I had drawn this image, I did a google image search for "Halo Kitty", and came up with a few images of Spartan heads Photoshopped onto cats, and one image of a Halo Kitty head Photoshopped onto Master Chief--I figured my concept was different enough, so I ran with it (well, I ran slowly, since I took several months to get around to coloring it). That was then.

A few minutes ago, I googled "Halo Kitty" and came up with this image, virtually identical in design to my own image, but predating me by three years. THREE YEARS. As it turns out, there are several Halo Kitties that predate mine. The one I just linked (posted November 2004) appears to be the most well-known--two others predate that. One from April 2004 and one from October 2004.

So, I am unoriginal, and a horse's ass, but unintentionally so. My apologies to the creator(s) of the original image(s). To anyone dropping in for the first time, I hope you'll stick around--I still have pictures of platypi with three-section staffs (an original idea, as far as I can tell), badger-pits, and of course various obscure nerdy characters from He-Man.

EDIT: There are a million more, CLICK HERE

(This post will be linked in the original Halo Kitty post.)

DISASTER!

Something is apparently wrong with my hosting... images are loading slowly, or not at all. I will look into this and fix it ASAP. Sorry for the inconvenience!

UPDATE: I have no idea what's wrong. It looks like all images are loading now, but slowly. If there are any tech-heads out there, I'd be glad to entertain theories.

UPDATE on the UPDATE: Erm... the problem fixed itself. No clue what happened there. O_O

Wherein I talk about my friend's new comic, and ramble on a bit about next week's blogging schedule.

I had originally planned to post a Harry Potter sketch to commemorate the release of the final book in the series, but something even more interesting popped up this week--

My comrade Josh Williamson's comic, Necessary Evil is being solicited in this month's Previews catalog! The comic is pencilled by Marcus Harris, inked by Vinny Navarrete and colored by Winston Suk. Josh created and wrote it, and Desperado is publishing it. Oh and did I mention that I did the character designs for the main cast? I'M MENTIONING IT NOW.

Please ask your local comic shop to order a bunch! Previews is out next week, and the first issue of Necessary Evil ships in October. It's a great comic, and I hope you'll all give it a try.

Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be posting some more of my Necessary Evil art and telling you all some more about the comic itself. But for now, here is a pin-up/mock cover that I created for Josh when he first asked me to design the characters:

click above for larger view

So, next week, is the big San Diego Comic Book Convention, which I have alluded to. Technically, it's known as Comic-Con International, but I rarely hear people call it that. In fact, people usually just call it Comic-Con, with no qualifiers. The epic proportions of the convention are such that no qualifier in the human language would be appropriate. But I digress.

I will be gone at the convention for most of next week, which means I'll be away from my precious computer and internet connection, which means no post on Friday. HOWEVER! I would never abandon you, dear reader--which is why on Monday, I will be putting up a huge mega-post, containing two pieces of brand new art to cover the entire week's posts. And it is no coincidence that these two new pieces will both be terribly relevant to the wares that I am peddling at Comic-Con.

BUT THAT'S NOT ALL--in addition to plugging my own projects, I will also be plugging the projects of my chums and cronies, who will be peddling their own wares at Comic-Con. Please stay tuned!

Post Script: The aforementioned Harry Potter post will go up sometime soon after the convention, probably with a review of the book.

I caught up on comments this weekend!

Just a quick heads up for anyone interested--I caught up with responding to comments going all the way back to the beginning of April. Sorry for being so delinquent--I'll try to do better job keeping up in the future. A special thanks to everyone who took the time to leave a comment. The feedback is appreciated!

**EDIT** For whatever stupid reason, I had comments on the post below turned off. I am an idiot. Comment away, if you so desire. Thanks, and sorry for the inconvenience!

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

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.

AMAZING TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCES!

Brought to you from the far-flung future of 2007:

1. Images now open in a new window when you click on them for a full view. If anyone has excessive conflicts with their pop-up blockers, please let me know. I had no problems with it in Explorer or Firefox (haven't tested Safari yet).
2. Site feed is now enabled, for anyone who wants to subscribe. I really don't know how RSS or any of that stuff works, but let me know if there are any problems and I'll do what I can.

Regarding Comments: BLOGGER IS A MORON

It has been brought to my attention by a few people that comments are not posting properly. NOT MY FAULT THIS TIME--BLOGGER IS BEING A PAIN! At any rate, I'm going to try and get this comment nonsense sorted out, and until then, please feel free to email me at:

noisymonkey@yahoo.com

I will post and respond to your hilarious and witty comments!

Post Script: If you don't know me in "real life" please include the word "sketchblog" in the subject of your email. Thanks!


**UPDATE: 1/10/07 11:21pm**
I don't think it was anything that I did, but comments appear to be working again. If anyone has trouble posting comments, please email me. Or if you just don't like the unreliable Blogger comment system, feel free to email your comments instead. As for you Blogger, I'm sorry I called you a moron. It's just... you know I hate it when you don't post comments and you do it anyways. I love you Blogger, and I want to be with you, but sometimes you just drive me crazy. Please, can't we get past this?

Regarding Comments: I AM A MORON

To the couple of people who left me comments in the past few days--I had stupidly left on "comment moderation" in my settings which means that i need to approve each comment before it will display. So basically for the past few days I've been checking on my blog obsessively and wondering why nobody has been leaving me any comments. Yes, I am a sad and needy mess. BUT COMMENTS WILL NOW SHOW UP AS SOON AS YOU POST THEM! So everyone, please feel free to leave me a note--I require your validation!

Anyways, in summary, as the title of this post says, I am a moron.

Also: who left me the long annonymous tirade in the comments about Skeletor??? It was hilarious, and I must know who you are!

Every Story Has A Bloginning...

HI, KIDS!

It looks like I am going to give the sketchblog thing a shot. According to a somewhat well-known comics-blogger friend of mine, the pressure to post regularly will cause me to be more productive in all aspects of my life. That probably wouldn't hurt.

The plan, for now, is to post two new color sketches a week, roughly on Tuesdays and Fridays. "Bonus" posts of older art will occur from time to time. This blog will be an exercise in quick and regular productivity more than anything else. The subject matter will primarily be fan-art because I find that drawing pre-existing characters is a good way for me to focus on just FINISHING a sketch rather than agonizing over character design or somesuch (but you will see some original stuff from time to time). Oh, and on top of my geeky fan-art, you'll also be graced with an accompanying smart-ass geek-commentary about whatever character I'm drawing. For example, if I were to draw Orko's girlfriend from the old He-Man cartoon, I'd probably have a thing or two to say about it.

Okay. Read on, tune in regularly if you are so inclined, and let me know what you think.

Current Mood: Bloggy.
Listening To: The ultimately pointless pitter patter of my own lonely typing, amidst the stark and bitter silence of a world dying beneath a cold, uncaring sun. Also, the soundtrack to Transformers the Movie is playing in the background.