Joe Amaro

Monday, March 5, 2012

In my life I have been very blessed to work with some very talented people, many of them my heroes.These past few years I have been extremely lucky!!! I got to work on some Star Wars toys and even met George Lucas at Skywalker Ranch...I finally got to work with the Four Horsemen on various projects...and now the great Rudy Obrero!

For those who don't know, Rudy was one of the original painters of the Master of the Universe packaging art form the vintage line! More recently he did the artwork on the 2011 Wind Raider for the Master of the Universe Classics line.

It was really the packaging art that pulled me into the He-Man universe. I used to stare at the art work and pretend with my toys in hand to live in that world...let's be honest...I still do...I based my Castle Grayskull sculpt off his original painting!

So you can only imagine how excited I was when Rudy and I started talking about working on a fun project together! He is also a big He-Man fan so we bonded instantly, Especially because, like me, he also makes He-Man art for himself for fun. He sent me one of his personal paintings. It was a He-Man type character on what he called a Manta Raider. I fell in love and quickly responded to him: "I can make that for you" (I have another story like this with Gerard Butler from the motion picture 300, but that is for another time.)

Back to the story...so off we went...for the next months, on our spare time, we went back and fourth. First working out the design since he only had the one view. I made turn around drawings for him to approve and he tweaked them and sent them back to me. Rudy's comments are in red...