It’s not everyday we get approached by legendary comic book artist Jim Lee that he wants our help. But that’s just what happened leading up to the 2012 SEMA Show. DC Entertainment along with Kia Motors America asked us to build a Kia Soul in superhero fashion. The campaign was called “We Can Be Heroes” and it was designed to raise awareness and funds for the hunger crisis in the Horn of Africa. A total of five cars were built for SEMA - of course, our Kia Soul was the best!
Our ride features artwork by Mr. Lee with a Green Lantern-inspired design. And who else better to help with the car’s overall two-tone widebody design than our good friend Jon Sibal, who’s the artist behind countless epic car builds including our recent FR-S project car – he’s also a former comic book artist himself. We asked Jon a couple questions about the Soul after the show and he couldn’t be more proud of the final result:
How did you come up with the rendering? My goal in designing the Green Lantern car was to highlight the character's signature trademarks like his black and green suit, his logo, his strength and visual presence. And once I had that basic design foundation to work from, it was then a matter of creatively integrating those features into the car.
From the rendering to the finished car, how did the process go? The process of going from a digital rendering to a fully completed car was an adventure on its own. Because of the limited time we have to build it, it required a lot of careful planning and late nights for the builder and everyone involved. There were also some custom parts that I integrated into the design that you cannot just buy off the shelf so that also forced us to be creative in how we can execute it within the time frame we had. The widebody fender flares were all hand shaped from scratch along with a host of other parts specifically made for this project. It was a challenging build but our team pulled through. I'm certainly honored to have been part of it.