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This is a map I made in the program Wonderdraft that shows my personal take on the archetypal “Skull Island” as seen in various pirate- and adventure-themed media.
Unlike some other variations of the trope, my version is located deep within the equatorial Atlantic Ocean and owes its flora and fauna to migrations over the course of at least 150 million years. The island’s most iconic megafauna are the dinosaurs and other descendants of Mesozoic migrants. However, later arrivals have managed to eke out their own niches beneath the giant saurians, including monkeys related to New World platyrrhines, gorillas and chimpanzees, elephants of African forest affinity, pantherine cats of mixed leopard and jaguar heritage, and even phorusrhacid “terror birds”.
The island’s human inhabitants would have arrived from the West African coast sometime before 2000 BC, bringing with them established traditions of agriculture and ferrous metallurgy that allowed them to colonize the treacherous landscape and carve it into numerous chiefdoms and states over the course of centuries. The most famous of these societies, the so-called “Kingdom of the Skull”, developed in the rainforest on the windward side of the volcanic “Mountains of Hell”, but fell into ruin at an uncertain date, although local traditions attribute its collapse to provoking the wrath of a deity known as the “Flaming Skull”. Nonetheless, the islanders remain numerous across the island’s breadth, maintaining a rich variety of distinctive cultures and dozens of different languages, albeit all sharing what may be a distant kinship with the Gbe languages of coastal West Africa.
It was in the late 1400s when Portuguese mariners first chanced upon the Island of the Skull and shared their knowledge with other Europeans. Nonetheless, both the mosasaur-haunted waters encircling the island and its own hostile terrain have discouraged large-scale European colonial expeditions, although some daring buccaneers and corsairs have nonetheless succeeded in establishing commerce with indigenous communities on the coast. Many of these swashbucklers covet the fabled riches of the ancient Kingdom of the Skull, but few who have penetrated its interior have come back to tell the tale…
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It’s the dawn of the 19th century, and the recently liberated Republic of Haiti is under attack by its former French overlords, who seek to reconquer the Caribbean nation and force its people back into slavery. In a desperate search for aid, a Haitian voodoo priestess has descended into the island’s bowels, uncovering the fossilized remains of a long-deceased apex predator whom she hopes to resurrect so it can help her people defend their newly won freedom.
It’s a fanciful scenario, I admit, but given that many of the Caribbean islands are thought to have emerged during the Cretaceous Period (including Hispaniola, the island on which stand the countries of Haiti and the Dominican Republic), it seems conceivable to me that some dinosaurs from the North American mainland could have found their way to those islands, depending on well they could swim. As of this writing, it remains to be seen whether we will ever uncover any of their fossils.
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I wanted to try my hand out at drawing a reclining woman, and this sunbathing African fisherwoman is what came out of that. I didn’t have a particular culture in mind for her, but I think she could come from almost anywhere along the continent’s shores within the last few thousand years. One thing I do like about drawing characters from the lesser-studied areas of antiquity is that you have a lot more creative license with designing them than you would with, say, the Romans or the Persians.
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These are my interpretations of three goddesses that are each associated with hunting and archery. From left to right, they are the Greek Artemis, the Egyptian Neith, and the Norse Skadi. I doubt these goddesses are actually related to one another, but I thought it was a neat coincidence that the three ancient mythologies best known to the modern public happen to all have goddesses that share the bow-hunting theme.
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And these are modern-day versions of the same goddesses. If you’re wondering what sort of material Neith’s jacket is supposed to be made of, it’s supposed to be gold-colored crocodile hide.
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This is my design for an amphibious kaiju (or giant monster) that I created to be the antagonist of an upcoming short story of mine. Originating in the depths of the underworld, it’s actually a supernatural demon that is summoned to terrorize modern Japan and the adjacent coastline, and it’s up to the hunting goddesses Neith, Artemis, and Skadi to slay it. However, they will have more to contend with than just the kaiju itself…
I admit it may not be the most inventive kaiju design out there, as it kinda looks like a piscine version of the Dimetrodon, but it is what came up in my head while I started writing the story. I don’t have an official statistic for its size at hand, but in the story’s opening scene, it does take a mouthful out of a Hayabusa-class patrol boat (the typical length of which is around 164 feet), so you can imagine it’s a fairly large kaiju.
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Lucifer, or the Morning Star, once enjoyed prestige as among the most luminous of the immortals, a position he took great pride in. However, he never felt the nurturing affection the other gods showed toward those disgusting, imperfect abominations known as mortals. When he tried to cleanse the Earth of the plague of mortal life by throwing an asteroid into it sixty-six million years ago, the rest of the gods had him apprehended and thrown into the underworld for eternity, all while what remained of life rebounded to reclaim the planet’s surface.
Now Lucifer, as the Lord of Chaos, does what he can to torment the mortals from his subterranean prison, releasing demons to terrorize and smite as many of them as he can. But the three Goddesses of the Hunt, Neith, Artemis, and Skadi have been a thorn in his plans by slaying everything he has released. If Lucifer is to realize his agenda, he must find a way to eliminate those troublesome goddesses once and for all…
Lucifer, although named after one of the Abrahamic devil’s many monikers, is a character I created for a short story I drafted. The story is about the Goddesses of the Hunt going up against a kaiju (giant monster) that Lucifer has unleashed upon modern Japan, all while he is plotting a way to remove them from the picture altogether.
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The Goddesses of the Hunt Neith, Artemis, and Skadi must defend modern Tokyo from a rampaging kaiju (giant monster) that has been unleashed from the underworld. But they must be careful of the green fire building up in the monster’s gullet!
This is an illustration I did for a short story which I recently drafted. If you need to know who’s who, Neith (from Egyptian mythology) is the dark-skinned woman in gold, Artemis (Greek) is the olive-skinned woman in red, and Skadi (Norse) is the blonde in blue.
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150 million years ago in Jurassic North America, an Allosaurus fragilis has wandered too far from the open plains into the shadowy forest, and it has therefore fallen prey to the local apex predator, Torvosaurus tanneri. Goes to show you that just because you’re on the top of the food chain in one habitat doesn’t grant you the same status in another.
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The Knights Templar have ventured deep into the bushy wilds of the land down under, ever rapacious in their search for plunder. However, the local Aboriginal community will not tolerate those thieving intruders ransacking their homeland. And so an Aboriginal war party has ambushed the marauders, ready to beat their chain mail-clad bodies into bloody pulps with nulla-nulla clubs and boomerangs!
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On a remote island somewhere in the Indian Ocean west of Sumatra, the mighty Kong is ready to receive his golden-haired bride!
As a matter of fact, there are some natural blondes among the indigenous dark-skinned peoples of Melanesia and Australia. It appears to have evolved separately from the blond hair in Europeans. As for Kong himself, I based him off an orangutan instead of the traditional gorilla, since it’s orangutans rather than gorillas which are native to the Southeast Asian region.
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A valiant defender of the Congo jungles gazes with horror upon one of the vast cobalt mines that thousands upon thousands of her people have been forced to excavate from their homeland for a pittance each, with many having been evicted from their homes or abducted to toil in the mines. And it’s all to supply the Global North’s consumer electronics industry with the cobalt it craves.
I wanted to do a modern take on the archetypal “jungle girl” from pulp literature and comics with this character design, and I also wanted to represent one of the major human rights violations that is taking place in Central Africa on behalf of neo-colonial greed. I think it would be awesome to see a character like this take on the greedy devils exploiting her people!
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He may be a Homo neanderthalensis, and she may be a Homo sapiens from the Aurignacian culture of Europe and western Asia around 40,000 years ago. But they are nonetheless a happy couple, and that’s what matters in the end.
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Lt. Nyota Uhura of the USS Enterprise is testing out the latest in Federation martial technology, which they call a “lightsaber”. Little does she anticipated how longlasting its legacy will be, and how far, far afield its popularity will spread.
I don’t care if they’re different franchises with different corporate owners, I kinda like the idea that Star Trek and Star Wars take place in the same universe (albeit at different time periods). So this is my way of combining these franchises. Who knows, maybe Paramount and Lucasfilm will get together to do a crossover one of these days…
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Having just acquired his sacrificial bride, the mighty Kong must now defend her from the predators of his island domain, not least of which is the terrible giant land crocodile!
This is of course my adaptation of the scene from the classic movie in which King Kong wrestles a tyrannosaur. As much as I love the dinosaurs in both the original movie and the 2005 remake, I always did feel that Kong appeared less impressive compared to them, being simply a giant version of a modern animal. Therefore, I decided to make Kong’s nemesis a giant relative of the extinct terrestrial crocodilian Quinkana, which prowled Australia until around 10,000 years ago.
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12,000 years ago in what will someday become the neighborhood of Encino in Los Angeles, California, a distant ancestor of the local Tongva people must defend himself from hungry dire wolves (Aenocyon dirus)!
This was inspired by a revisiting of the 1992 teen comedy Encino Man, which is about a couple of high school seniors accidentally uncovering a frozen prehistoric man (played by a young Brendan Fraser), thawing him back to life, and teaching him to adapt to modern life. As much as Fraser’s performance is one of the film’s highlights (along with the other characters’ colorful if not always decipherable early 90’s vocabulary), it must be admitted that anyone living in Encino during the Pleistocene would not have looked like him. More likely, they’d be related to local indigenous groups like the Tongva and Chumash.
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Sherlock Holmes’s latest mystery has somehow brought him and Watson all the way to a remote region of South America. While Holmes has his magnifying glass out to investigate some footprints the local wildlife left behind, Watson realizes that the architect of said tracks is following them in turn…
This is of course my way of uniting Holmes with his creator’s other famous literary legacy. I know his deerstalker hat and cloak may not be the most practical getup for a tropical climate, but given how definitive it has become of Sherlock’s look, I felt he would be all but unrecognizable without it.
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This is my fan’s interpretation of Velvette from the indie animated series Hazbin Hotel. Her little rap number “Respectless” in the first season’s third episode is among my favorite songs in the series so far!
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It is the year 1851, and the rogue albino sperm whale Moby Dick has been terrorizing the archipelago of Vanuatu in the Melanesian South Pacific. It is up to a local warrior princess and her loyal saltwater crocodile to liberate their waters from that demon of the deep!
If you’re wondering what those little circular marks on Moby Dick’s head are, they are scars left behind by the suckers on the arms of giant squid, which are among sperm whales’ favorite prey.
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Aztec jaguar warriors fend off an invading force of Malian cavalry from West Africa deep in the rainforests of Mesoamerica!
This of course never happened as far as we know, but the Malian Mansa (Emperor) Musa did claim that his predecessor, Muhammad ibn Qu, abdicated his throne to lead a fleet of 2,000 ships into the Atlantic Ocean, never to return. This anecdote has invited speculation that Mansa Muhammad and his expedition may have reached the New World, although evidence for such conjecture remains undiscovered as of yet. But if they had, a confrontation like this could totally have taken place afterward!
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This is a female dancer from the Harappan civilization that spread over the Indus Valley in South Asia between 3300 and 1300 BC, being the first urban culture known to develop in the subcontinent. Her jewelry is referenced from a bronze statuette uncovered at the Harappan site of Mohenjo-daro in what is now northern Pakistan, but whereas the original sculpture showed a nude figure, I gave my version a top and loincloth to make it safer for work.
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This is a little Photoshop experiment attempting to recreate the face of Septimius Severus, a Roman emperor of mixed Italian and North African descent who seized control of the Empire circa 193 AD and reigned until his death in 211 AD. I sampled a photograph of former US President Barack Obama for the skin, but then darkened it to better match one of Severus’s painted portraits (credit goes to fellow mod Punos Rey for helping me refine my photomanipulation with his feedback).
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: ^ That's an interesting take.
Thanks. I actually had a little trouble settling on a complexion for the guy. The Roman painting of him does show him with a somewhat dark complexion, but on the other hand his mother would have been a typical Italian Roman, and then there's that anecdote of him finding an "Aethiopian" soldier handing him a wreath to be an ominous omen because of that soldier's skin color (which would suggest that Severus wasn't super-dark himself). In the end I went with what you might call a darker biracial color for him.
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^ The Romans like their Etruscan forebears and the Greeks before them like Minoans and Egyptians would paint men with darker complexions. But Septimius' complexion is even darker than the tanned complexion of Roman males which makes me suspect this was done to emphasize his African ancestry. He may have actually been lighter.
Recall Alessandro de' Medici, the first Duke of Florence that I brought up here. Although part of the Medichi family, his mother was a Moor from North Africa.
Note that while some portraits show him fairer, others show him darker.
Of course it's common for black-white biracial types to become lighter in winter but darker in the summer.
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quote:The Romans like their Etruscan forebears and the Greeks before them like Minoans and Egyptians would paint men with darker complexions. But Septimius' complexion is even darker than the tanned complexion of Roman males which makes me suspect this was done to emphasize his African ancestry. He may have actually been lighter.
That did occur to me as well. However, I was worried that some people might not like it if I made Severus too light as well, given the Roman painting of him.
BTW, I have another, hand-drawn portrait of Severus in the works:
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On a rocky ledge in the Pacific Northwest, the saber-toothed cat Smilodon fatalis attacks a male sasquatch in a contest of feline ferocity against simian strength!
Possibly originating in the legends of indigenous cultures in northwestern North America, the sasquatch has since become immortalized in the region’s folklore as “Bigfoot”. Those who believe the myth might have a grain of truth argue the sasquatch to be a relict descendant of the giant orangutan relative Gigantopithecus. However, seeing as the creature’s most iconic image is that of a bipedal ape, I opted to make my version a hominin related to the African Paranthropus.
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This is my interpretation of Enkidu, a character from the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh who is a form of the archetypal “wild man”. He befriends the titular King Gilgamesh of Uruk, with whom he goes on an adventure in a cedar forest. When the two slay the Bull of Heaven sent down by the goddess Inanna/Ishtar, the gods sentence Enkidu to death as punishment. The grief-stricken Gilgamesh searches for the secret of eternal life in the epic’s second half, only to learn that it was never intended for mere mortals like him and his fallen friend. It is infamously a rather tragic story.
Being fond of prehistoric life as I am, I made my Enkidu a late-surviving Neanderthal, but he has picked up a few artifacts of human civilization such as gold bracelets and a copper spearhead. One does wonder if finding the fossil remains of Neanderthals and other pre-sapient hominins might have inspired various myths of humanoid creatures such as “wild men” around the world.
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Inspired by the accounts of Sinbad the Sailor’s seven escapades, another Baghdadi by the same name has ventured out into the Indian Ocean in search of the treasures of ancient Lemuria. Before having even landed on the lost continent’s shores, this Sinbad’s already run into trouble with its indigenous wildlife!
The Sinbad you see here is actually the second of two characters named Sinbad in the 1001 Arabian Nights. He is a poor landsman to whom the famous sailor narrates his seven adventures back in Baghdad (then under the rule of the Abbasid Caliph Harun al-Rashid). One wonders if he might have been inspired by the other Sinbad to strike it rich out on the high seas!
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Meet Nemong, a tribal huntress and warrior from the legendary lost continent of Lemuria in the Indian Ocean. She is a character who appears in a short book I recently drafted titled "Sinbad and the Lost Continent", in which a sailor from medieval Baghdad named Sinbad (not the famous one, but another Sinbad inspired by the former's seven voyages) travels to Lemuria in search of ancient riches. It is Nemong who will guide our Sinbad and his crew to the ruins of her people's ancestors (since she understands they need the wealth to alleviate the poverty they experience back home), and she'll also become Sinbad's love interest later on.
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This is a bit different from what I usually do, but the idea came to me in a dream. I wanted to do a simple compass illustration with a cartoon-style animal representing each of the four cardinal directions (north, south, east, and west) as well as the four ordinal directions (northeast, southeast, northwest, and southwest). Can you identify all the animals representing each direction?
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This illustration shows the climax for my recently drafted short book Sinbad and the Lost Continent. In it, Sinbad (not the famous Sailor, but another Sinbad inspired by the former’s legends) and his expedition, including the fierce and beautiful local warrior Nemong (pictured right), discover the ruins of the ancient Lemurian capital Mu-Lemur, but they must get past the giant idol that guards its fabled treasures. What better way to defeat the idol than to lure one of the Lemurian continent’s fearsome tyrannosaurs into battling it? Who will win…well, I can’t spoil that here!
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The young Prince Taharqa of Kush, fated to become king of an empire that spreads from his homeland in Sudanese Nubia all the way down to the Nile Delta, leads an invasion of southern Spain circa 700 BC. This is of course another alternate history scenario, but the inspiration came from a handful of apocryphal accounts from historians such as Strabo and Ahmed ibn Mohammed al-Makhari that report that he ventured to the “pillars of Heracles” (the Gibraltar Strait between Spain and Morocco) and led an expedition into Spain. Archaeological evidence of such Kushite forays remains undiscovered, but considering that the Phoenicians from Lebanon had already established trading posts on the Spanish coast as far afield as modern Cadiz by that time, an army from the Nile Valley making it there is not totally impossible. Who knows, maybe Taharqa and his soldiers here are defending one of the Phoenician settlements from hostile local tribes?
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This ancient Egyptian princess is very fond of her pet vervet monkey, but the poor thing doesn’t seem to be reciprocating her feelings. Not that I blame the little dude. You would probably be unhappy too if you were brought down from your native savanna for some hairless bipedal apes to treat you like a fancy toy.
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Miragaia longicollum is a stegosaurid dinosaur that lived in Europe around 150 million years ago, during the Late Jurassic Period. Although smaller than its iconic relative Stegosaurus, weighing little more than 2.2 tons and stretching out to only 21 feet from head to tail, Miragaia stands out within its family for its proportionately long neck. Its genus name refers to the Portuguese parish in which its fossils were found.
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This is my portrait of Dea Africa, a Roman goddess-like entity who personified the imperial province of Africa (which to them meant the area of Tunisia and the northwestern coast of modern Libya). Roman artists traditionally depicted her wearing a helmet modeled after an African elephant’s head and with braided or dreadlocked hair, but otherwise made her look more Italian than African in accordance with their prevailing beauty ideals. Nonetheless, I wanted my version to look, well, African even without the elephant helmet, with some ritual scarifications and Amazigh-style tattoos to boot.
Dea Africa is unlikely to have been a major deity in the Roman pantheon, but sometimes she was associated with a cornucopia (horn of plenty) to represent fertility, which may refer to Rome’s North African provinces serving as a breadbasket for the Empire.
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And now for a different form of creative expression...
Over the past couple of days, I've been working on a mod for the free and open-source real-time strategy game 0 AD: Empires Ascendant that makes the Noba culture (who are based on the Nuba peoples of western Sudan) a fully playable civilization. It is actually a "mod within a mod" as I made it for use alongside the Delenda Est mod (from whence a lot of the assets came). Among the Noba civilization's characteristic units are tribal warriors wielding clubs, spears, and javelins, tame lions, war elephants, and a fierce and beautiful warrior queen who is their civilization's hero unit.
The mod still needs a bit more playtesting and polishing before I can upload it to the interwebs for others' use (and you will need the Delenda Est mod to use it), but it's almost done and I am proud of what I have accomplished so far.
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Somewhere among the Nuba Hills in the west of what will someday become Sudan, a local warrior queen mounted atop her trusty elephant steed rallies her troops in preparation for defending their homeland!
This is meant to be a fictional scenario set sometime deep in the ancient past, but it is nonetheless inspired by the various peoples who inhabit the Nuba Hills. Although they are an ethnically diverse bunch, speaking up to forty-two different languages, they are collectively known for their body-painting and wrestling traditions.
By the way, the yellowish tint this picture has is inspired by that of the movie 300.
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What began as simple practice drawing a woman with raised arms became this random dudette from ancient Carthage. Her hairstyle, which I believe is called “twists”, is based on that of a Carthaginian bust on display at the British Museum in London, UK.
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In the hot and humid forests of Eocene North America around 56 million years ago, Uintatherium anceps is having breakfast. Despite its resemblance to modern rhinoceroses, Uintatherium was not related to them but rather belonged to an extinct order of mammals known as the Dinocerata, which lived between the Paleocene and Eocene epochs of the early Cenozoic Era. One 2015 study has suggested a closer relationship between Dinocerata on the one hand and an order of South American hoofed mammals, also extinct, called the Xenungulata.
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While crossing the Alps in 218 BC, the great Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca has stumbled upon the skull of a woolly mammoth half-buried in the snow. Given the difficulty his own animals have experienced in enduring the montane cold, he wonders how elephants could ever be native to these frigid heights deep in Europe.
This is of course a speculative scenario, but woolly mammoth remains have actually been found in the Alps on several occasions, so I think it’s theoretically possible for Hannibal or people in his army to have found some on their trek.
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This is a bit of a digression, but it would be a lot better if I could post artwork I make of ancient North Africans anywhere without all the people going, "Why are they Black?" In some cases those comments are inquiries in good faith rather than racist trolling, but still, it gets tiresome after a while, as does defending my work. I don't know how Black artists with similar subject matter are able to put up with such crap.
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Back to art-posting... A Roman legion has found its way through a naturally occuring time portal to the Cretaceous Period, and the local denizens are more than happy (and hungry) to see them!
If you’re wondering why the legionary in the middle of the composition has darker skin than the others, he’s supposed to be Egyptian on his mother’s side, whereas the others are more or less typical Italians.
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Our Queens of the Nile Cleopatra and Amanirenas are posing for a selfie! Of course, this isn’t meant to be historically accurate (unless you really believe they had smartphones back in the first century BC).
BTW, I used a website called Zeeob.com to generate the fake Instagram post.
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This is my adaptation of the “Rosie the Riveter” poster which represented women’s increased participation in factories, shipyards, and other industrial workplaces during the World War II era. It has since become an icon of the feminist movement, and its message remains timeless.
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