MAN OF STEEL Concept Art: Kal-El's Starcraft, Superman's “S” Shield & Faora's Helmet

Film Sketchr: What kind of things did you design for the film?
Peter Rubin: I conceptualized a lot of the Kryptonian tech in 3D, often in collaboration with other artists working in 2D. Most importantly to me, the "S" glyph, and The Starcraft, were entirely, or mostly, mine.

Plus whole lot of smaller stuff, like the control panels that Jor-El and Lara use. The stasis pods in the Scout Ship. The device that cradles Kal-El in his father's laboratory and absorbs the Codex, before he's put into the Starcraft. Those ubiquitous standing control panels. All of that came primarily from me, with guidance from Alex.

...we went to Art Nouveau works of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, everything from architectural facades to bookplates to ladies' hairbrushes. Art Nouveau designers assumed that nothing could ever be as beautiful as what nature creates. We tried to be as true to that ideal as we could.

There came a point in the process when it became clear to me that Alex was counting on me not to simply dimensionalize the things we'd done in 2D, but to make the Art Nouveau thing my own, really understand it on a physical level, and bring that to the table. I spent a few days really working on it, taking it to the nth degree, trying to make it part of my hand-eye repertoire. Shout out to Chris Strother, our art department researcher, who is awesome, and who sort of took me by the hand and showed me the path. In the end the work was, funnily enough, unusable, because it was too slavish to the 19th century, but by the time I was done I had the style down. It worked out in my favor, because when Alex (McDowell) and Zack (Snyder) decided they needed a new approach to the glyph, the El family crest, Alex came to me, because I was able to reflect that style most effectively.

We started by throwing open the door to almost anything. I must have created more than thirty very different shields. The only rule was that it had to fit in with Alex's preferred aesthetic. No straight lines, only graceful curves. Even the exterior frame is curved, although we came close to breaking the rule for that for a bit. There are probably some who would have preferred a radical departure from the past, but I regarded it as my particular challenge to make this version both something new, and a loving homage to the image of Superman I've carried in my head my whole life. I was extremely lucky, in that Zack and Alex instinctively saw exactly what I saw in it.

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Man of Steel (2013) "H'Raka Jor-El's Warkite" by Christian Lorenz Scheurer
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Concept Art by Andrei Riabovitchev

In the pantheon of superheroes, Superman is the most recognized and revered character of all time. Clark Kent/Kal-El (Henry Cavill) is a young twenty-something journalist who feels alienated by powers beyond his imagination. Transported years ago to Earth from Krypton, a highly advanced, distant planet, Clark struggles with the ultimate question 'Why am I here?' Shaped by the values of his adoptive parents Martha (Diane Lane) and Jonathan Kent (Kevin Costner), Clark discovers having extraordinary abilities means making difficult decisions. When the world is in dire need of stability, an even greater threat emerges. Clark must become a Man of Steel, to protect the people he loves and shine as the world’s beacon of hope – Superman.