He-Man Masters of the Universe

Fan art I decided to complete. I created the original ones over 10 years ago where the draft illustration took about 4 hours to complete. I decided to overpaint it and fix my mistakes and improve the painting. In total it took around 40 hours to finish over a period of a month or so where I get spare time. I drew this entirely in Photoshop using my Cintiq 20WSX and 2010 Mac pro.

I was a massive fan of the original 1983 He-Man having lots of the toys when I was young. I also loved the 2002 re-boot, so I decided to combine the best bits together. The paintings show a few stages of progress where I paid more attention to where the detail matters - the faces.

**Update**
I painted the first primitive version of this Masters of the Universe artwork back in 2011, which only took around 4 hours in Photoshop in my spare time while I worked in the games industry. It was a Head nod to the 4-year-old me that loved He-Man toys back in the early 1980s

I re-painted a slightly better version a few years later with more details, which took a total of 40 hours, but I was unhappy with the composite.

Over the past few months in the evenings, I have spent over 100 hours evolving it by repainting, adding details, improving lighting, softening the tone on the artwork, and modernising my vision for how He-Man and Scorpia should look.

I loved the White Dwarf artwork style and board games like Hero Quest and Space Crusade from the 1990s, and wanted to give a similar vibe.

I used a 32” Wacom Cintique and Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Dimensions and Blender. I wanted to prove that something very specific can be produced and enjoyed without using AI to generate it.

Love it, hate it, let me know what you think!