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This Tyrannosaurus rex is jogging through the semitropical jungles along the coast of southern Laramidia (western North America) a little over 66 million years ago.
This is actually a combination of two separate artworks I created earlier, with the T. rex being plopped down on the background. Isn’t it amazing what layers in digital art software can let you do?
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Sobekneferu (or Nefrusobek) was another one of ancient Egypt’s small number of female Pharaohs, taking over from her brother and husband Amenemhat IV during the 18th century BC. Her reign, which lasted no more than four years, marked the end of Egypt’s twelfth dynasty and the period of their history called the Middle Kingdom, after which the northern part of the country came under the dominion of Semitic-speaking immigrants from Palestine that would be remembered as the Hyksos (“shepherd kings”).
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This bad grrl got her start as a pencil drawing I did on a plane trip home from New York. Then I added some color to her in Clip Studio Paint, and now here we are!
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Archelon ischyros is the largest sea turtle known to have ever lived, with a weight of two tons and a shell breadth of around 15 feet. It swam in the shallow sea covering central North America around 80 million years ago, during the Late Cretaceous Period. Equipped with a sharp beak, it would likely have been a carnivore feeding on other marine creatures.
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These Viking marauders, hungry for the gold and other riches of tropical Africa, have sailed all the way to the Gulf of Guinea and are scouting the coast for a place to disembark and begin their most daring raid yet!
As far as I know, there’s no actual evidence of the Vikings actually having sailed this far south, but considering they’re known to have raided the North African coast as well as establishing colonies as far afield as Canada, them venturing to the regions of Africa beyond the Sahara Desert doesn’t sound so ridiculous to me. It’s a fun scenario to imagine nonetheless.
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The ancient Egyptian Queen Nefertari (not to be confused with the earlier Nefertiti) is grimacing with disgust at something here. I originally set out to simply draw another portrait of her, but I wanted to inject a bit more emotion than the standard regal smile, hence this.
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This is my adaptation of a scene in Gustave Flaubert’s classic historical-fiction novel Salammbo, which is set in ancient Carthage during the time of the Mercenary War (241-237 BC). In this scene, the titular Carthaginian priestess Salammbo performs a special ritual in which she strips herself nude and dances with a sacred python. It’s been a popular scene for illustrators to adapt ever since the novel’s publication in 1862 (for what should be self-evident reasons), and I wanted to do my own take on it. Of course, I had to put a few skimpy garments on Salammbo rather than making her totally nude to make the piece “safe for work”.
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This male and female Tyrannosaurus rex are showing some romantic affection to one another. Right now, we don’t know how to tell male and female tyrannosaurs apart in the fossil record, but it’s plausible that the males may have sported brighter colors as we see in present-day birds and reptiles.
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I wanted this character to look like a “femme fatale” from the old film noir movies of the 1940s and 1950s, right down to the color palette. I like how the grayscale effect came out here.
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This is a "cover art" illustration I did to go with a short story I've recently drafted which is titled "The Black Cross". It's a detective story set in San Diego in 1940, with the protagonist (left) being a private eye who is called on to recover a black stone cross from Central Africa that is believed to be associated with a legendary figure called Prester John. But little does he know the true origin or significance of the cross...
As for the woman on the right of the composition, she comes in later in the story, but I won't spoil it for you here. Suffice to say she is connected to the titular cross in an important way.
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Tutankhamun (r. 1336-1327 BC), or “King Tut”, has become perhaps the most famous of ancient Egypt’s Pharaohs ever since the archaeologist Howard Carter discovered his tomb in the Valley of Kings near Luxor in 1922. Coming from a heavily inbred royal family, Tutankhamun was probably never the healthiest or most conventionally attractive individual, what with physical traits like a cleft palate, a slightly sidewards-curving spine, and a clubbed left foot, and he would have been eighteen or nineteen when he died, possibly from malaria (he would have ascended the throne around age nine). His biggest accomplishment during his short reign appears to have been reversing his predecessor Akhenaten’s controversial abolition of the traditional Egyptian faith in favor of a monotheistic veneration of a solar deity known as the Aten.
Ironically, Tutankhamun’s relative lack of enduring fame among his native people might have protected his tomb from robbery over the centuries, hence the wealth of artifacts Carter’s expedition was able to find in it. Makes you wonder what would have lain in the tombs of the more popular Pharaohs before they got emptied…
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150 million years ago during the Late Jurassic Period, Brontosaurus excelsus rears up on its hind legs to browse the foliage of the taller trees on the savanna. I don’t know if it is considered plausible anymore, but I remember that sauropod dinosaurs were commonly depicted as being able to stand up on their hind legs like this either to feed on higher vegetation or to intimidate predators.
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It's Throwback Thursday again, so let me share this 2019 artwork I did of Hatshepsut. Some aspects of her anatomy look a little wonky to me now, but I still like the energy (and sex appeal) she still exudes three years later.
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Two spearmen stand guard at the entrance of a temple complex situated in the kingdom of Kush, along the Nile River in northern Sudan. This scene was among the most exhausting to work on, in no small part due to all the perspective work I had to do for the architecture.
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I wanted to draw another woman with an Afro, but I was stuck on what sort of “theme” to give her to make the portrait more interesting. What I went with, in the end, was naming her “Afrodite” as a play on the name of the Greek love goddess Aphrodite. You could say this is how Aphrodite (or Venus as the Romans called her) would look if her cult were to spread into Africa.
Fun fact: some scholars think the cult of Aphrodite evolved from that of West Asian deities like the Sumerian Inanna, the Babylonian Ishtar, and the Canaanite or Phoenician Astarte.
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This is a commission I did for a gentleman who is working on a sort of “speculative evolution” project. He wanted me to draw a giant descendent of the theropod Neovenator hanging out with three of its youngsters on a savanna landscape.
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This bull Brachiosaurus altithorax is singing a mating song through an inflatable sac attached to its nostril. The inspiration for this artwork came from a trailer for the documentary Prehistoric Planet which featured sauropods with similar sacs running down the bottom of their necks. I felt that, if sauropods had such sacs at all, they would be attached to the nostrils (and therefore connected to the dinosaur’s vocalization and respiratory systems) rather than the skin of the neck. In either case, it would be a speculative possibility rather than confirmed by paleontological data thus far.
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This ancient Egyptian woman is carrying a pot of water on her head. For some reason, women carrying loads on their heads seems to be a ubiquitous and ancient tradition not only throughout Africa but in other parts of the so-called Global South, such as in South Asia and Latin America.
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This is a swordsman from the kingdom of Benin, which controlled the area of southwestern Nigeria in West Africa between 1440 and 1897 AD (it is not to be confused with the modern country of Benin, the territory of which corresponds more closely to another pre-colonial West African kingdom called Dahomey). As shown by their famous brass plaques, the warriors of Benin seemed to have been among the most heavily armored in the region. Honestly, I found that armor so elaborate that it proved rather challenging to draw using reference.
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A digitally colorized version of my earlier pencil drawing of an ancient Egyptian woman carrying a pot of water on her head. The trick I employed was to create a layer above the drawing in Photoshop that I set to the "Overlay" blending mode and painted the colors on that layer.
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This is my concept for a fantasy tyrannosaurid named Thanatotyrannus imperator (“death tyrant emperor”). Slightly larger and more heavily armored than the Tyrannosaurus rex of our world, this mighty beast is the apex predator of its jungle domain, using its bone-crushing jaws to dispatch the other large dinosaurs it preys upon. You can think of this design as being like an upgraded version of T. rex!
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This is my artistic reinterpretation of the iconic character Tarzan of the Apes as a man of indigenous African descent, instead of the White Englishman he was in the original Edgar Rice Burroughs novels and their various cinematic adaptations. Growing up, the Disney adaptation was my favorite of their whole animated catalog, and I've also read several of the Burroughs novels, but unfortunately, the character's "Mighty White Savior" connotations appear to have made him less fashionable in recent years.
I don't actually want Disney to give Tarzan the "live-action remake" treatment, since most of their other remakes have felt like soulless cash grabs to me, but if they or any other studio wants to bring the character to life again, I think it would be totally sweet if they made him African by origin as well as by residence.
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Giganotosaurus carolinii was a theropod dinosaur of the carcharodontosaurid lineage that prowled South America between 99 and 97 million years ago, during the Late Cretaceous Period. When it was first discovered in the 1990s, much was made about how it could have been even larger than the famous Tyrannosaurus rex, yet further research has suggested that the two dinosaur species were of roughly similar size, with T. rex possibly being more heavily built and therefore more massive. Nonetheless, Giganotosaurus would have been a formidable predator in its own right, likely preying on long-necked sauropods such as Andesaurus and Limaysaurus.
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Merneith was a queen from the very first dynasty of a unified Egyptian kingdom, with her husband Djet being that dynasty’s fourth Pharaoh. When Djet passed away sometime before 2950 BC, their son Den would have been too young to take the throne, so Merneith would have acted as a ruling regent in his place (the exact length of her reign remains undetermined). Merneith may have actually been the second woman in Egyptian history to assume the throne temporarily, with the first one (Neithhotep) being none other than the spouse of the dynasty’s founder Narmer himself.
In this picture, Merneith is wearing a combination of the red crown of Lower Egypt and the white crown of Upper Egypt, representing the union of these two regions into one kingdom under Narmer.
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This would be a rough sketch of an illustration I'm doing to celebrate the first anniversary of my debut novel "Priestess of the Lost Colony", which was published on April 27th last year. Normally I would do the rough sketch with a pencil on paper before scanning it into my machine and doing the inking and coloring in Clip Studio Paint, but this time I decided to do the whole process on the computer.
Now I need to decide what kind of background (if any) to give these characters...
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This is a portrait of a pre-Columbian Maya ruler, or ahau. Unlike the later Aztec who settled further north in Mesoamerica, the Maya never had a unified empire but rather an assortment of monarchic city-states which frequently fought with one another, often to obtain captives for ritual “offerings”. Although many of the Maya urban centers in the southern parts of their domain would be abandoned in the 8th to 9th centuries AD, possibly as a result of drought brought about by climate change, the Maya civilization as a whole continued to endure thereafter until the Spanish invasion in the 1500s. Today, there are about eight million Maya people still living, with most of them living in southern Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize.
I did this illustration to celebrate the first anniversary of my debut novel Priestess of the Lost Colony, which I got published on April 27th, 2021. The characters here would be the main cast of the novel assembled together in the Greek countryside, with the Egyptian goddess Mut gazing over the scene from the heavens.
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Itaweret: An Egyptian priestess serving the goddess Mut who grew up in the colonial settlement of Per-Pehu on the coast of Greece. When the warlike Scylax of Mycenae sacks the colony and enslaves its inhabitants, it is up to Itaweret to liberate what remains of her people. She is the story's main protagonist.
Bek: Itaweret's teenaged younger brother, who accompanies her on her quest after leading a failed defense against Scylax.
Philos: A Greek shepherd boy who develops a crush on Itaweret and joins her and Bek after a startling revelation about his true heritage. He has a tame lion named Xiphos.
Scylax of Mycenae: The tyrannical ruler of the Greek city-state of Mycenae and the story's main antagonist.
Kleno: Scylax's older sister and partner in crime, a priestess who spies on our heroes with the aid of the goddess Athena (represented here in owl form).
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This portrait of a pre-Columbian Maya queen as a follow-up to my earlier one of a male Maya king. Although the majority of Maya rulers would have been men, as with other ancient civilizations, there are a few instances of women attaining power as rulers. Among the most remarkable was Lady Six Sky (682-741 AD), who founded her own dynasty reigning over the city of Naranjo. Some monuments even show her trampling captives as a warrior queen, a rare representation for women in Maya art.
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The daughter of the Pharaoh of Egypt has rescued an infant of Hebrew descent from the Nile waters and would like to adopt her into the royal family. Little does she know the significance of her heroic compassion…
I did this scene in honor of the Jewish holiday of Passover. I’m not Jewish or religious in any sense, but hey, if other artists can depict scenes from ancient mythologies without believing in those myths, I think it’s well within my right to depict characters and scenes from the Abrahamic scriptures.
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In Greek mythology, Andromeda was a princess of Aethiopia (which at the time usually referred, not to the region of modern Ethiopia, but to what we now call Sudan, especially the kingdom of Kush), whom, according to her boastful mother Queen Cassiopeia, was more beautiful than the Nereid sea nymphs who accompanied Poseidon. To punish the queen for her hubris, the sea god sent the monster Cetus to terrorize the Aethiopian coast. Only by sacrificing Andromeda to Cetus's appetite could the Aethiopians enjoy a respite from its attacks.
Thankfully for Andromeda, the Greek demigod Perseus came over to slay the monster the moment she was about to be eaten. Afterward, Perseus and Andromeda married, had seven sons and two daughters, and founded the city-state of Mycenae.
For this portrayal, I based Cetus's appearance on the Livyatan melvelli, a cousin of the modern sperm whale which prowled the seas during the Miocene epoch between 10 and 9 million years ago. Since the name of Cetus is related to our modern word "cetacean", I figured a whale would make the most logical base for his design.
(By the way, this is a redraw of a piece I did back in 2018 since I thought Andromeda's anatomical proportions were rather wonky in the original.)
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Antalas (r. 530-548 AD) was a chieftain of a Christianized people in North Africa known as the Frexenses, who played a major role in the conflicts between the Byzantine Roman Empire and various indigenous peoples in the North African provinces.
At first, Antalas was an ally of the Byzantines after they captured the area from the Germanic Vandals, whom he had fought previously. However, the relationship between Constantinople and Antalas soured when the Byzantines had his brother Guarizilla executed after a revolt in 543. A series of bloody struggles between the North African locals and their Byzantine overlords ensued, but when the Byzantines won the Battle of the Fields of Cato in 548, Antalas and his fellow African chieftains found themselves forced back into submission. The Byzantine Empire would thereafter maintain control of the area until the invasion of Arab Muslim armies in the late seventh century AD.
I have not found any surviving portraits showing how Antalas may have looked, so I ended up basing his dreadlock-like hairstyle on those worn by “Moorish” or Numidian cavalry on the Roman Trajan’s column.
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I did this scene as a commission for a client who wanted a village street scene for a fictional culture he created called the Taluni. They’re supposed to be of Celtic origin, but with some African genetic admixture that would help them adapt to the hotter savanna environment they’ve moved into. Oh, and there are dinosaurs in this fantasy setting as well.
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These two are mounted skirmishers from early medieval North Africa such as those that assisted the Muslim conquest of Spain in the early eighth century AD. One of the North African ethnic groups recruited in the Islamic armies of the time, the Zenata, would lend their name to the terms “genitour” and “jinete”, the latter referring to horsemen in Spanish. More recently, the Genitours have become memorialized as one of the unique units the Berber civilization can train in the real-time strategy game Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition.
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Rajaraja I (947-1014 CE), also known as Rajaraja the Great, was one of the mightiest rulers of the Chola dynasty which dominated southern India during the Middle Ages. His campaigns of conquest extended Chola control as far afield as northern Sri Lanka and the Maldives island chain. He also commissioned the construction of the Brihadisvara Temple in Thanjavur, the Chola capital, to honor the Hindu deity Shiva. His dynastic successors would go on to extend Chola’s realm of influence all the way to Malaysia and Sumutra.
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Hannibal Barca, the mighty Carthaginian general, stands mounted on the back of his war elephant Surus as they cross the Italian countryside in 216 BC. Of the thirty-seven elephants that Hannibal took with him on his campaign against the Roman Republic, Surus was the one that survived the brutal crossing of the Alps. The meaning of the elephant’s name has two possible translations. One is “the Syrian” (suggesting that it was an Asian elephant instead of the African elephants the Carthaginians normally used), and the other is “stake” in reference to its tusks (one of which was described as broken). The latter interpretation is what I went with since I personally feel an African savanna elephant would make a more intimidating mount than the smaller Asian species.
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Andrewsarchus mongoliensis was a large carnivorous mammal that roamed East Asia during the middle Eocene epoch, between 43 and 41 million years ago. It possibly weighed up to one ton and reached six feet high at the shoulder, although so far only its skull has been recovered. Its closest living relatives are the cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises) and hippopotamuses, and I wanted to reflect that in my portrayal of this animal. The tubercules on its snout are inspired by those of the humpback whale.
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This would be a young princess from the Empire of Mali, one of the mightiest civilizations of medieval West Africa. Although Islam was the official religion of Mali, they nonetheless retained many customs and beliefs of their pre-Islamic forerunners in the region. One visitor from Morocco, the prolific traveler Ibn Battuta, complained that many of the women in the Malian royal household, including the Mansa’s own daughters, went around naked. Not that I would blame them, since it can get really hot over there in West Africa!
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In the ancient Egyptian pantheon, Hathor (or Het-Heru) was the goddess of love and sexuality, fertility, and joy, exemplifying the Egyptian ideal of femininity. You could say she was their equivalent to the Greek Aphrodite, the Norse Freyja, or the Yoruba Oshun. Although normally a benevolent and motherly deity, Hathor had a fierce side to her as well, for she could transform into the lioness-headed warrior goddess Sekhmet. Otherwise, the animal Hathor was associated with the most was the cow, whose form she could sometimes assume.
I have to say that goddesses of love like Hathor can be a joy to depict, as it gives me yet another pretext to draw a voluptuous woman. And I can never get enough of those!
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It’s a balmy summer day in the Late Cretaceous of Alaska, and this Nanuqsaurus hoglundi is taking a leisurely stroll through the woods. A lot of paleoartists nowadays like to depict this dinosaur and others in its environment in winter scenes since dinosaurs in the snow seems like such a novel concept, but I wanted to do something a bit different by showing the creature in its habitat during the warmer part of the year.
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These are my designs for culturally diverse skins for the villager units in the real-time strategy game Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition. The default skins already in the game (shown in the upper left corner) would go to all the game's European civilizations, while the designs I created myself are for the non-European civilizations. Here's to hoping the AoE2: DE dev team develops an official culturally diverse skin pack for the game, possibly as downloadable content if not a free update.
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This young woman from ancient Carthage has her eyes closed in deep contemplation, or possibly meditation. What could she be thinking?
As far as ancient civilizations go, not so much has survived from the Carthaginian civilization, in no small part because their Roman adversaries made a point of destroying every trace of it after conquering them in 146 BC and then building on top of its ruins. It’s a terrible shame from an archaeological standpoint that so much was lost, but on the bright side, at least I have a little more creative leeway in reconstructing how the Carthaginian people and culture may have looked.
When designing this character’s appearance, I mixed elements from ancient Greek, Egyptian, and North African Amazigh cultures. At the peak of its power, Carthage would have controlled much of the western Mediterranean basin, so they probably mixed influences from all over the region anyway.
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In 500 BC, during the region of the Shah Darius I (522-496 BC), the Achaemenid Persian Empire was perhaps the largest in the world. It stretched from Macedonia to the west, the Indus Valley to the east, and Egypt to the south.
With so many different cultures under their domain, the Persians seem to have embraced tolerance of native customs for the most part, but they were not always popular with their subjects. When Alexander “the Great” of Macedonia invaded Egypt in 322 BC as part of his long campaign against Persia, for example, the Egyptians welcomed him as a liberator. In the end, it was Alexander and his Greco-Macedonian army who brought an end to Achaemenid Persia, with the spoils being divided among his generals after his death.
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I was smitten enough with my earlier portrait of a Carthaginian woman that I drew her again, this time with a smile. I think she’s being flirty here.
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And now my Carthaginian lady has a husband! These two would be a well-to-do couple from the civilization of ancient Carthage, a empire based in North Africa which dominated much of the western Mediterranean basin between the ninth and second centuries BC. The man hails from areas under Carthaginian influence in the Iberian peninsula (modern Spain and Portugal) whereas the woman is of native North African descent. With this picture, I wanted to illustrate the probable diversity of the Carthaginian population in keeping with its transcontinental nature.
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Megaraptor namunhuaiquii was a fairly large predatory dinosaur that hunted in South America during the Late Cretaceous Period, between 91 and 88 million years ago. When paleontologists first discovered its fossilized talons in the 1990s, they interpreted them as coming from a giant dromaeosaurid related to the infamous Velociraptor and Deinonychus. However, subsequent discoveries would reveal that the enlarged talons were positioned on the dinosaur’s fingers instead of its toes as on the dromaeosaurids. Most likely, Megaraptor and its kin were most closely related either to the tyrannosaurs or to the allosaurs.
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I made this map to go with one of my literary side-projects, which is in the alternate-history genre again. It's set in 200 BC, during the aftermath of the Second Punic War between Carthage and the Roman Republic. Having taken a nasty beating at the hands of their Roman nemeses, the Carthaginians have sent an expedition westward across the Atlantic Ocean in search of a safe haven from Roman aggression (as well as new riches to exploit). They have finally discovered a new world on the other side of the sea and established a new colony on its shores, but can they survive there? And how will they get along with the local inhabitants?
These would be some of the dramatis personae for my latest side project, an alternate-history novella about ancient Carthaginians sailing across the Atlantic and reaching North America (which they name "Atlantis"). These first six characters would be the most important on the Carthaginian side (Part II will cover the major Native American characters).
These would be some of the dramatis personae for my latest side project, an alternate-history novella about ancient Carthaginians sailing across the Atlantic and reaching North America (which they name "Atlantis"). These first six characters would be the most important on the Carthaginian side (Part II will cover the major Native American characters).
And here would be their Native American counterparts:
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Isceradin and Arishat, my two characters from ancient Carthage, are enjoying an intimate moment with one another by the sea. Isceradin, the man of the couple, can trace his ancestry to Carthage’s holdings on the Iberian peninsula (modern Spain and Portugal), whereas Arishat would be of indigenous North African heritage.
These two have become the leading man and lady of a forthcoming alternate-history novella of mine which is about the Carthaginians discovering the Americas (or “Atlantis” as they call them) in 200 BC. Together, they have a little daughter named Nikkal, although she is not shown here.
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