SIMO SOL: I HAVE THE POWER

Kickass artist SIMO SOL shared with me some backstory to one of his MOTU  paintings he did this summer.

He writes:

"He-Man: I Have The Power!" is a commission art for this year's Power Con, as it will be on the Con Guide cover. I am really proud of this, because now I am actually part of a great line-up of incredible MOTU artists, who did former Power Con cover artworks. 

It was really a challenge to paint this. The famous transformation. And you can easily f*** it up. Since this is a key moment of every MOTU story, I did not want to fail at all, but I really had respect to this scene. 

This sequence was always stunning for me as a child, when I watched the Filmation cartoon. These powers, the dynamics... incredible. A lot of artworks showing up Adam's transformation into He-Man include a lot of... well... light and shine and tinsel... but it's weird - they still they seem to appear with a kind of statics instead of magic. Anyway. I wanted it to be loud and powerful and just a big bad bang. As far as possible without any sound.

Visualizing the power itself was an important aspect for me. So I had to find out how to make the sword (as a key object) kind of a conductor for the power of Grayskull. Early sketches showed up "just" a bright glowing sword, but honestly it just looked like a bigger lightsaber from Star Wars EP. LXVII, that's not what I wanted it to appear. So I decided to surround it with a kind of magical aura and to let only the touched parts glow up - brightly! I choose blue (as complementary colour to orange) for the shine to show a kind of power that is different than anything else and it visually flows through He-Man's veins, which are glowing up in this moment, too. 

 Oil on canvas, 70 x 100 cm