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This is a warrior representing a grouping of Germanic peoples known as the Anglo-Saxons, who invaded Great Britain from the area of northern Germany and Denmark beginning in the 400s AD, after the Western Roman Empire had pulled out of the province. Together, the disparate kingdoms they formed in the area would become the country known as England today, with their language evolving into modern English. Originally, the Anglo-Saxons would have practiced a religion related to that of the Norse and other Germanic cultures, but they would convert to Christianity beginning in the late sixth century.
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This Allosaurus is in the process of turning around while running. Allosaurus is estimated to have been able to run between 19 and 34 miles per hour, which is not bad for a three-ton dinosaur.
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While on a mission to return a stolen Maya artifact to its original location, the archaeologist Latonya Coleman has to hide from a Tyrannosaurus rex on the prowl. Not even her dual pistols and martial arts skills would be enough to bring down the ten-ton beast…or so she thinks.
There’s actually another story behind this illustration, although I haven’t written it all down yet. The ruined city you see is situated in the Late Cretaceous Period, with its architects being Maya colonists who went through a natural “time portal” hidden in the Guatemala highlands and ultimately got wiped out by a virulent Mesozoic disease. Centuries later, an artifact from the city fell into the hands of a creationist ministry in America who wanted to use its depictions of dinosaurs to discredit the scientific understanding that humans evolved millions of years after non-avian dinosaurs died out.
Not only will Latonya have to brave the dinosaurs and other wildlife of the Late Cretaceous in order to return the artifact to its rightful place, but the ministry has sent goons after her to retake it for them…
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Meet Scott Jones, who is a character I created to be a boyfriend for my archaeologist heroine Latonya Coleman. He shares her passion for archaeology, but he's more comfortable studying artifacts back at university than venturing into the field like her. Nonetheless, he has a knack for linguistics and deciphering ancient texts.
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This is a quick doodle of a Native American woman from the Great Plains wearing a "war bonnet" representing the respect she has earned in her community. In most of the historically documented cultures which had war bonnets, it was usually the men who wore them, but hey, Native American cultures must have undergone a lot of change since their ancestors entered the Americas around 15,000 years ago. Besides, given how many female models of European descent have posed wearing war bonnets in the past, I thought it only fair that Native women be depicted wearing them too.
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Sketchbook doodle of the Late Cretaceous dromaeosaurid Dineobellator sitting on an ancient carved pillar. The artwork on the pillar was inspired by that of the pre-Columbian Maya. Imagine if the Maya found a hidden portal to the Late Cretaceous and established a settlement somewhere on the other side...
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The archaeologist Latonya Coleman is giving her colleague and boyfriend Scott Jones an affectionate kiss. Scott may not have the same appetite for dangerous adventure as his girlfriend, but they do share a passion for studying the ancient past.
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I wanted to try out a set of colored pencils I recently got for under $5 on an earlier pencil sketch of my archaeologist character Latonya Coleman. Unfortunately, the brown pencils I used for her skin tone didn't make her look dark enough, so I had to go over her skin again with a different brand of pencil (Prismacolor).
quote:Originally posted by BrandonP: The archaeologist Latonya Coleman is giving her colleague and boyfriend Scott Jones an affectionate kiss. Scott may not have the same appetite for dangerous adventure as his girlfriend, but they do share a passion for studying the ancient past.
is she holding him hostage?
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quote:Originally posted by BrandonP: The archaeologist Latonya Coleman is giving her colleague and boyfriend Scott Jones an affectionate kiss. Scott may not have the same appetite for dangerous adventure as his girlfriend, but they do share a passion for studying the ancient past.
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Meet Karen Cunningham, an antagonist I created for a short story that stars my archaeologist heroine Latonya Coleman. A wealthy English socialite and heiress to the fortune of her family’s corporate empire, Karen has a fondness for “collecting” ancient artifacts, which has put her at odds with Latonya’s mission to return those artifacts to the tombs and temples where they belong. Furthermore, Karen also resents Latonya for winning the heart of Scott Jones, whom Karen hoped to woo in order to exploit his archaeological knowledge for her own ends. Think of Karen as an old nemesis for Latonya.
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After years of going after weak and vulnerable human beings with his machete, Jason Voorhees decided to visit South Africa in search of bigger, tougher game, such as this rogue lion. Who will emerge victorious from this confrontation between human and leonine serial killers?
I got the idea for this after seeing the movie Beast, which pits Idris Elba against a rogue lion who has taken to murdering human beings after poachers wiped out its pride. I thought to myself, “That lion sure is a lot like a human serial killer, so how would it fare against any of the various serial-killer characters from the horror movie genre”?
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This unfortunate Kritosaurus navajovius is about to have a hungry Tyrannosaurus rex crunching down on its neck!
Most of the time, when you see a T. rex going after hadrosaurs in paleoart, the prey is Edmontosaurus. I wanted to shake things up a bit by having the unlucky hadrosaur be Kritosaurus, from the southern half of T. rex’s range, instead.
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Someone I know from Facebook had me speak to a high school class on Afrofuturism he teaches via Zoom today. It gave me an opportunity to share my artwork and talk about my written works to an interested audience. I don't think he has posted the whole conversation online even though he recorded it, but here's a TikTok where he summarizes what I said in his own words:
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This machete-armed warrior represents a culture of ancient West Africa known as the Nok, which thrived in the area of central Nigeria between 1500 BC and 500 AD. A culture characterized by agriculture, iron-working, and settlements of wattle-and-daub houses, they are best known for the abundance of terracotta sculptures they have left behind, giving us an idea of their attire and weaponry. I have to say, they do seem to have had the funkiest hairstyles!
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Meet Aspidonotus clavocaudus, a fictional species of stegosaurid from my fantasy setting of Panjuru. Commonly addressed as “shield-backs” in reference to the alternating rows of plates on their backs, these massive gregarious herbivores are more commonly seen in Panjuru’s savanna regions, grazing on grass, ferns, and other low-level plant life. Both their thagomizers (tail spikes) and shoulder-spikes protect them from the numerous predators, saurian and human alike, on the hot and open plains.
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This Natufian woman from around 15,000 to 11,500 years ago appears to be deep in thought as she gazes upon the landscape that will become the area encompassing modern Israel and Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. A culture of hunter-gatherers who settled in permanent villages, the Natufians are believed to be the immediate precursors to some of the earliest Neolithic farmers in the Fertile Crescent.
If you're wondering why my Natufian woman here looks "African", physical anthropologists examining the Natufians' skeletal remains have reported a vague resemblance to those of various African peoples. Furthermore, archaeologists such as Ofer Bar-Yosef have suggested their lithic technology was influenced by that of earlier Egyptian peoples known as the Mushabians.
More recently, Natufian genomes from the site of El Wad in Israel appear to show that they did have some ancestry (around 27%) from northern Africa, which the researchers called "Ancestral North African" (or ANA for short). Another, earlier study found that an even larger proportion of their ancestry (amounting to around 44%) came from a population called "Basal Eurasian", which could also be Northeast African due to lacking almost any of the admixture from Neanderthals seen in truly Eurasian peoples.
It's a hot summer day, so this princess is going skinny-dipping in her royal swimming pool to cool off. Thankfully for us spectators, she's from a time and place where swimming suits have yet to become fashionable.
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In ancient Egypt, it was customary to line the eyes with black kohl to reduce glare from the bright African sun, similar to how modern football players paint black stripes under their eyes. It was also believed to have medicinal properties protecting the eyes from disease, as well as malignant spirits.
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Qianzhousaurus sinesis was a tyrannosaurid dinosaur of the alioramin tribe that hunted in the humid, semitropical forests of China during the Late Cretaceous Period, between 67 and 66 million years ago. Nicknamed “Pinoccho Rex” on account of its narrow snout, it would have been a medium-sized predator around twenty feet in length with a mass nearing 1,700 lbs.
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This is a simple profile view of Itaweret, an ancient Egyptian (or Kemetian) priestess of the goddess Mut who is the protagonist of my novel "Priestess of the Lost Colony". It feels like it's been a while since I last drew her.
This couple represents the culture known as the Iberomaurusian, an Upper Paleolithic culture that occupied the northwest coast of Africa between 25,000 and 11,000 years ago. The name “Iberomaurusian” came about because it was once believed the culture extended all the way into Europe’s Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal), but this has since been discounted. After their heyday, the Iberomaurusians would be superseded in the northwest African region by the later Capsian culture.
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If the mythological concept of the centaur had made its way across the Mediterranean from Greece into Egypt, what might the Egyptian variation look like? Maybe something like this, or so I’d like to imagine.
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Living around 40,000 years ago, this woman’s ancestry would be a mix between two hominin species, the European Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) on the one hand and the Aurignacian modern humans (Homo sapiens) coming in from Africa on the other. To this day, between one to four percent of modern human ancestry outside of Africa appears to come from admixture with Neanderthals.
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This would be my interpretation of the protagonist from Hans Christian Andersen’s famous fairy tale “The Little Mermaid”. Her story is a rather tragic one, in which she surrenders her mermaid identity in pursuit of a human prince, only for things to not turn out so well for her.
I got the inspiration to draw this after a teaser trailer for Disney’s “live-action” remake of their animated adaptation came out, which caused quite a commotion on the Internet since they cast an African-American actress to play the mermaid Ariel (there are in fact West African traditions of mermaid-like creatures called Mami Wata). In all honesty, I never cared for the first Disney adaptation of Andersen’s story, nor do I have a high opinion of their recent live-action remakes in general, so I don’t have a high expectation of how the new movie will come out. I do find the Andersen original to be tragic in a bittersweet way though.
By the way, the oysters attached to the mermaid’s tail here are a detail lifted from the original fairy tale.
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This would be a Haradrim warrior riding a giant elephant known as a Mumak in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth mythos, the setting of his famous Lord of the Rings novel series. The people called Haradrim are basically the stand-ins for African people in Tolkien’s world, occupying the region to Middle Earth’s south. Unfortunately, as might be expected for a story authored by a White Englishman back in the 1950s, the Haradrim (as well as the Asian-based people of Rhun to the east) were mostly fighting on behalf of the bad guys against the heroic European stand-ins. The racist implications of that setup should be obvious to any modern observer.
By the way, my portrayal of the Mumak was inspired in part by the prehistoric Palaeoloxodon namadicus, a cousin of the modern African forest elephant which may have been the biggest elephant species known to exist.
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This would be an agojie, or female soldier, from the West African kingdom of Dahomey, which occupied the area of modern Benin between 1600 and 1904 AD. Recognized in their time for their discipline and ferocity in battle, the so-called “Dahomey Amazons” have become famous as real-life manifestations of the “warrior woman” trope, thus making them a sort of feminist symbol.
Alas, their legacy had many negative aspects as well, for a major proportion of their activities consisted of raiding other kingdoms in the region to procure captives and sell them to European slavers. It goes to show you how cruel and complicated history can be, even if it can also be inspirational.
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A band of Viking raiders, hungry for plunder as always, has ventured all the way to southern Africa to cause trouble. It’s up to these valiant Zulu defenders to keep the northern marauders at bay!
(In real history, of course, what we know as the Zulu kingdom emerged in the 19th century AD, well after the end of the Viking age. However, Nguni-speaking peoples ancestral to the Zulu would have settled in what is now South Africa around the first century AD, so they would have been present in the region by the time the Vikings came around. And, you have to admit, “Vikings versus Zulu” makes for a cool title.)
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In the forests of Late Cretaceous Australia, circa 95 million years ago, the predatory Australovenator wintonensis is on the hunt. A member of the megaraptorid family of theropod dinosaurs, Australovenator would have grown up to twenty feet long and weighed over a thousand pounds when fully grown.
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This is a sketchbook doodle of a Zulu warrior about to bring the killing blow down to his Viking adversary. The foreshortening on the fallen Viking here was ridiculously difficult to get right. Might color this in later...
"I lay paralyzed in homicidal rage, the anger's driving me insane..."
This was inspired by the Machine Head song "Slaughter the Martyr", from their recent album "Of Kingdom and Crown". The song's chorus, quoted above, somehow made me think of a Tyrannosaurus rex with the blood of its prey on its jaws. Music has a way of putting pictures in my mind like that sometimes.
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This attractive young lady would be a sangoma, a professional healer and priestess among the Zulu and related ethnic groups of South Africa. A major responsibility of the sangoma is to communicate with and appease the souls of ancestors in the spirit world, since Zulu belief holds that these ancestors can cause illness to people who displease them. Traditionally, sangomas were more often than not women, but in theory anyone could become a sangoma if they received a “calling” from the spirit world.
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After a bitter and bloody conflict, the Vikings and the Zulu are finally willing to put their grievances aside and make peace. And what better way to make peace with your enemy than introducing him to your sister?
(Yes, I know the handshake shown here is a bit awkward since the Viking is using his left hand to shake the Zulu’s right, but then again, you’d do the same if your right arm was busy holding onto your newly acquired Zulu girlfriend).
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66 million years ago in the semitropical forests of North America, Tyrannosaurus rex is stalking some Edmontosaurus annectens while under the cover of the trees. It won’t be long before the mighty apex predator bursts out into the clearing and delivers a bone-crushing bite to its prey.
By the way, the small mammal climbing on the vine to the upper right of the composition would be one of the immediate ancestors of Purgatorius mckeeveri, an early cousin of modern primates.
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This is a Norse berserker, one of a legendary class of warriors said to wear bear or wolf skins while going into a trance-like homicidal rage on the battlefield. Devout followers of the warrior god Odin, these elite fighters would have served as chieftains’ guards as well as shock troops in battle, although they could be difficult to control once they went, well, berserk. Some scholars suggest they might have consumed mind-altering substances to enhance their fanatical fury.
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Cleopatra VII, Queen of Ptolemaic Egypt, is chillin’ while gazing out to the Mediterranean Sea to the north of her capital. This time, I wanted to try out drawing a woman’s face at a somewhat different angle from usual.
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This sketchbook doodle of an ancient Carthaginian war elephant is little more than 5x5 inches in dimension. It was a quick little exercise in drawing subjects within a smaller area. The end result might not have as much detail as my usual, but I still think it came out rather well.
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This is my colorization of a sarcophagus from ancient Carthage that belonged to a woman who appears to have served as some sort of priestess, possibly to the (originally Egyptian) goddess Isis. The original is from the Carthage National Museum in Tunisia.
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This priestess from ancient Carthage in North Africa is officiating a ritual to honor the goddess Tanit, represented by the crescent moon hovering overhead in the night sky. In Carthaginian mythology, Tanit was one of the most important deities, overseeing fertility. To this day, modern Tunisians may invoke a similar entity called “Omek Tannou” to summon rain during droughts.
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Isis (or Auset), the ancient Egyptian goddess who was the spouse of Osiris and mother of Horus, spreads her divine wings out as a protective gesture. Isis is one of several goddesses in Egyptian mythology sometimes portrayed with avian wings, with others including her sister Nephthys and the goddess of justice and truth known as Ma’at.
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