Sunday, September 08, 2019

Drawing "He-Man - Masters of the Universe"

Greetings folks! Thanks for checking in. Way back at the start of my career I was fortunate enough to be working as a newbie at Filmation Studios. About a month into my first studio gig in animation one of the production managers comes into my room with a big box full of action figures and vehicles from Mattel Toys.

That moment was the beginning of the "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe" TV series. It revolutionized animation for broadcast television as it was the first series created exclusively for syndication. In other words it bypassed the traditional networks and was sold directly to local stations. The strategy was brilliant and the series was a smash hit.

The news came out at this year's PowerCon (He-Man Expo) in LA that Netflix will be reviving the He-Man franchise with a new animated series based upon the one from the 1980's. There's also a new motion picture in the works call "Masters of the Universe: Revelation". Both of these projects will be coming out sometime in 2021.

So... being the last artist alive from the original development team I thought it would be a good time to start drawing He-Man again. After many many years I thought it would be interesting to see where I'm at with my He-Man skills. Here's what I've done so far. 

I imagined I was back at Filmation picking up on where we left off with the character. I struggled with getting him on model especially his face but things started to come together okay for just starting out. I'm a little rusty but with practice I'll get back in my He-Man groove.

These are blue pencil drawings. I plan on completing them in black line.

  
Follow this YouTube link and you'll see what I mean... 


This is what you do when you're exploring action pose possibilities. Roughing out thumbnail sketches.

4 comments:

Araceli "Kahn" Pereira said...

Wow fantastic work!! It is a pleasure to seeing more about this character ♡

You work very well with anatomy and poses in different perspectives, I'm actually practicing a lot to manage some poses and perspectives in my drawings which are very difficult to do for me (specially for not human characters) and the practice is really helping me a lot 😊

It is so cool to seeing different types of characters in your artworks! humans, animals, etc. !

Charles Z said...

Thank you Araceli. Most people here are into Crash and the other characters I've done for video games. For a long time before that I was at a lot of different studios doing many things. That's what gave me a reputation and experience for working on video games when they were just starting to get sophisticated in design and production.

I'm getting a head start right now to be ready when the new He-Man movie and Netflix series are out in 2021. Looking to use this time to have fun with the characters and see where I can take it as a personal project.

Araceli "Kahn" Pereira said...

Oh really? wow how strange, He-Man is a well-known serie, even my parents have seen it.

Oh I see, I imagine you have learned a lot from those experiences over time!

Well that sounds great, so I'll wait to see your next works and projects here. Good to know that there will be a new serie of He-Man btw, it causes me curiosity... but I will have to wait until 2021 I guess.

Greetings!

Anonymous said...

Masters of the Universe/He-Man & Shera was part of international superheroes in popular culture in TV films comics animation and media throughout the world.