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This is my portrait of the “dark-skinned and comely” heroine of the Biblical erotic poem titled the Song of Songs, or alternately the Song of Solomon (since its authorship is commonly, but perhaps erroneously, attributed to King Solomon). Although never named, she is addressed as a “maid of Shulem” in one verse, which may refer to an origin either in the Israelite capital of Jerusalem or a village named Shunem or Shulem.
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I gave my earlier "chillin'" Cleopatra's shirt a darker shade of blue to make her stand out more from my depiction of Hypatia of Alexandria. Plus, I think darker blue is more Egyptian-esque than lighter blue.
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This is my depiction of an Aboriginal Australian huntress living sometime long before the European invasions of the 19th century. I admit that there’s a lot of romantic fantasy going into this design, but to make it come across less like an ignorant stereotype, I did do some quick homework on what Aboriginal Australian clothing would have looked like in pre-invasion times. One thing I learned is that some Aboriginal cultures liked to draw or inscribe designs like lozenges or cross-hatching into their loincloths, which inspired the patterns on the one my heroine is wearing here.
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Cleopatra and Amanirenas, two contemporaneous queens of the Nile, printed on matte brochure paper! I love how Cleo came out, but I worry that Amani may have come out a bit too dark (even though she is intended to be very dark-skinned, like South Sudanese people today). The weird thing about printing digital artworks is that they sometimes don't come out as bright as they appear on your computer screen.
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Proceratosaurus bradleyi was a small theropod dinosaur that hunted in Europe around 166 million years ago, during the Middle Jurassic Period. Once thought to have been an ancestor to the larger horned predator Ceratosaurus due to fragments of a crest being found on its head, Proceratosaurus is now thought to have been more closely related to theropods of the coelurosaur lineage like Yutyrannus and Guanlong.
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This is my portrait of the Ptolemaic Egyptian princess Arsinoe IV (b. 68-63 BC), who was the youngest daughter of Ptolemy XII and a sister to Cleopatra VII (the famous Cleopatra). After their father’s death, a secession dispute broke out between Arsinoe, Cleopatra, and their brother Ptolemy XIII, with the Roman statesman Julius Caesar entering the conflict as he became Cleopatra’s lover. After the conflict turned bloody and then ended with Cleopatra gaining the Ptolemaic throne, Arsinoe found sanctuary at the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus (located in what is now Turkey), only for her big sister and Mark Antony to have her executed. Ancient power politics could often be cutthroat like that!
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Did you know that there were Viking warriors who fought on behalf of the Roman Empire? Well…almost. The western half of what we think of as the Roman Empire had collapsed nearly three centuries before the Viking Age got going, but the eastern half, known to historians as the Byzantine Empire, lived on well into the Middle Ages, with the capital being the city of Constantinople (now Istanbul in Turkey). And these “Byzantine” Romans did indeed make use of Viking mercenaries whose forerunners had settled in the area of northeastern Europe.
It was these Vikings, along with some Anglo-Saxons from England, who made up what became the Varangian Guard, a corps of bodyguards for the Byzantine emperor. Their ferocity in battle also made them handy as elite soldiers in the Byzantine army, fighting with axes like the one pictured here.
If you’re wondering whether this Varangian guardsman’s facial paint is historically accurate, in all honesty, I don’t know for sure. I just think blue war paint looks cool on northern European warriors.
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This is my portrait of Sukamek, a supporting character from my alternate-history novella Carthage Atlantica. His horticultural people, the Inu’naabe, live in villages of bark wigwams scattered along the eastern coast of North America, and they are the first Native Americans (or “Atlanteans”) the Carthaginian colonists from North Africa stumble upon in the story, also becoming their allies and trading partners. Although the Inu’naabe are technically a fictional creation of mine, they are inspired by various Algonquian-speaking communities native to eastern North America such as the Lenape and the Wampanoag.
quote:Originally posted by BrandonP: 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).
Had to update the piece by giving the Norse woman a hangerok, or apron over her dress, in order to be more historically accurate.
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66 million years ago in Late Cretaceous North America, this mother Tyrannosaurus rex has slain a Triceratops for herself and her young to feed on as a sort of family picnic. Fresh Triceratops meat is probably a real treat for the kids here!
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This is the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II (1303-1213 BC), also known as “Ramses the Great”, decked out in his military getup. Like all Egyptian Pharaohs, Ramses set out to propagandize himself as the protector of the kingdom as well as the balance between order and chaos, and he was particularly fond of promoting himself as the victor of the Battle of Kadesh against the Hittite Empire in 1275 BC. In real life, however, the battle was most likely a draw between the Egyptians and Hittites which resulted in a pact of non-aggression between the two Bronze Age superpowers.
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This is a combination of the reference sheets for the three leading ladies from my next upcoming novel Women of the Plains, the first draft of which I have recently completed. The story takes place in eastern Africa around 100,000 years ago, with the characters all representing ancestral Homo sapiens prior to the "Out of Africa" migrations a few tens of millennia later. Oja, the woman on the far left, would be the story's protagonist while Uru and Namak are her besties. When Oja gets separated from their nomadic hunter-gatherer band after a hunting accident, she discovers a new land and another people with a very different way of life while her friends go out looking for her.
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The Egyptian Queen Nefertari (d. 1255 BC) catches the balmy rays of the African sun as it sets to the west of the delta city of Pi-Ramesses. In the ancient Egyptian language, Nefertari’s translates to “the most beautiful one”, with nefer– being the word for beauty.
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If you’re a dinosaur with stubby forelimbs like Carnotaurus, it may not make much of a difference if one of them gets bitten off in a fight. Come to think of it, that must have happened quite often with the shorter-armed theropods. I wonder if we’ll ever find fossil evidence for that behavior?
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This is an archer from the Neo-Babylonian Empire, a civilization which rose from the ashes of the Assyrian Empire in the late seventh century BC and dominated the Fertile Crescent until 539 BC. Although archers like this have commonly been used as the Babylonian civilization’s “unique unit” in strategy games like the Civilization series, finding accurate references for their look was not that easy since most of the images that came up were from the Assyrian or Persian civilizations rather than the Babylonians. In the end, I drew upon the Assyrian imagery for this depiction, since the Assyrians and Babylonians would have shared a common cultural and linguistic heritage as Semitic-speaking peoples of southwestern Asia (a group also including the Arab, Phoenician, and Biblical Hebrew peoples).
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Re-posting an old favorite I made around a year ago...
This composition shows the evolution of an enduring and ancient artistic motif which we may call the “Mother and Child”. The first mother is from Neolithic Africa and is inspired by various African sculptures known as “maternity figures”. The second is the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis with her son Horus, also based on sculptural representations. The third is the Biblical Miriam of Nazareth with baby Yeshua, and the fourth is based on medieval European depictions of the Virgin Mary and Jesus.
I got the idea for this artwork after visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, which had an exhibit comparing various ancient Egyptian artifacts with those from elsewhere in Africa. One of the comparisons they displayed was between Egyptian representations of Isis suckling baby Horus and one of those African maternity figures I mentioned above. I like to think that the Egyptian images in turn inspired Christian depictions of the Virgin Mary and Jesus.
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Between one million and 10,000 years ago, during the Pleistocene epoch, the Americas would have been the hunting grounds of two species of the saber-toothed cat genus Smilodon, Smilodon fatalis in North America and Smilodon populator in South America. Of the two species, S. populator would have been the larger, weighing between 500 and 900 lbs, making it one of the largest cats known to have prowled the earth. S. fatalis, on the other hand, would have been similar in dimensions to a modern lion, but more heavily built, with a mass between 350 and 620 lbs.
Although both species would have ranged far and wide and inhabited a variety of biomes in their respective continents, I wanted my depiction of the northern species to have a more “wintry” color scheme, with white spots on a gray base to blend into snowy environments. The southern species, on the other hand, would be more brown with dark spots to fit into the warmer environments of South America.
quote:Originally posted by BrandonP: This is a huntress representing the Sao civilization, a culture (or grouping of related cultures) that thrived in fortified towns along the Chari River in southern Chad between the sixth century BC to the sixteenth century AD. Among the artifacts this Central African culture left behind are sculptures of terracotta and bronze as well as funeral urns in which they buried their dead. A number of ethnic groups in the area of Chad and Cameroon, such as the Kanembu, Kotoko, and Sara, claim descent from the Sao, and some legends describe these bygone people as a race of giants.
A second version, for those of you who dislike artistic nudity.
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Dunkleosteus terrelli was a fish of the placoderm class that terrorized the Earth’s oceans during the Late Devonian Period, between 382 and 358 million years ago. Characterized by thick bony armor around its skull (which would probably have been covered by skin in life), this carnivorous fish could bite its prey with a force ranging between 1,349 and 1,664 lbs. Estimates of its body length used to run as long as 33 feet, but more recently have been scaled down to around 13 feet.
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This would be a view from behind of my archaeologist heroine Latonya Coleman, whose specialty is returning stolen artifacts to their ancient tombs and temples of origin. She’s become one of my favorite characters I ever created. Think of her as being like Lara Croft from the Tomb Raider games, but also like an antithesis to her.
I wanted to practice my anatomy some more, so here’s a female figure in a sitting posture. I am not entirely confident about how I foreshortened her right leg, but this was still a fun study to do.
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I did this simple “pin-up” of an unnamed African-American woman bending over with her hands on her thighs because, well, that sort of stuff is always fun to draw.
quote:Originally posted by BrandonP: Yusuf ibn Tashufin (1061-1106 AD) was a ruler of the Muslim Almoravid Empire, which he and his cousin Abu Bakr spread from the Senegal River in West Africa all the way up to what are now Morocco and Algeria. Under Yusuf's leadership, the Almoravids even crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and took control of Muslim Spain, and Yusuf even defeated the Christian king Alfonso VI of Castile at the battle of Sagrajas in 1086 AD. Pictured alongside him here is his wife and queen Zaynab an-Nafzawiyyah, with whom he would have shared power as if she were a co-ruler. They are known to have produced at least three sons together, one of whom was Yusuf's successor Ali ibn Yusuf.
Man, did this attract unwanted attention today on Facebook. One of the comments I had to delete:
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Itaweret, High Priestess of Mut from the Kemetian colony of Per-Pehu, takes a rest from her quest on some rocks in the Achaean countryside.
For those of you who have not met her yet, Itaweret is the heroine of my novel Priestess of the Lost Colony, which takes place in an alternate timeline wherein the people of Kemet (aka ancient Egypt) colonized the coast of Achaea (Greece) during the Bronze Age. When the Achaean warlord Scylax of Mycenae sacks the colony and enslaves its citizens, it is up to Itaweret and her younger brother Bek, guided by the goddess Mut, to liberate what remains of their people.
Itaweret’s story draws inspiration from a couple of ancient Greek legends about Egyptians settling on their shores. One comes from the writings of Herodotus, who claims that a pair of “black doves” (priestesses) from Egypt founded the Oracle of Dodona, whereas another tells of an Egyptian king’s fifty nieces fleeing to the Greek city of Argos. One scholar, Martin Bernal, has even suggested that these legends reflect an actual Egyptian colonization of Greece in his three-volume work Black Athena, although his hypothesis remains unsupported among archaeologists. Nonetheless, I thought the premise was fair game for an alternate-history story.
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This is my portrait of Zuko, the character who (spoiler alert) becomes Lord of the Fire Nation at the conclusion of the animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender. One can only hope he proves a better ruler for both his people and the world than his predecessors. He ended up becoming one of my favorite characters in the series due to his evolution from being an antagonist to one of the heroes.
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Over eight thousand years ago in northeastern Africa, this Neolithic Egyptian couple is gazing upon the fertile floodplains of the Nile River Valley from the high plains beyond. Back in those days, the Sahara of North Africa would have been a grassy savanna teeming with wildlife and nomadic peoples instead of the barren desert we know today. Once the land began to dry up between 4000 and 3000 BC, some of the people who had roamed it would have fled to the Nile and begun cultivating its banks, leading to the Egyptian and Kushite civilizations of historic times.
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This is my interpretation (with a few minor tweaks) of the Tyrannosaurus rex portrayed in the documentary series “Prehistoric Planet”, narrated by David Attenborough. I have to be honest, I found the series’s portrayal of the Tyrant Lizard King to be underwhelming all in all. It was good to see the animal’s gentler side represented, but I felt that those scenes would have had more meaning if contrasted against seeing the beast in predatory action. That we didn’t see the T. rex doing what T. rex did best was a missed opportunity for what was supposed to be the ultimate, “most accurate” documentary depiction of these animals. I did like the jungle backdrops (presumably representing the southern parts of western North America in the Late Cretaceous) though.
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This is another reconstruction I did of a Natufian woman from the prehistoric Levant circa 15-11,500 years ago. This time, I used as my reference a photo of an actual Natufian skull, which I obtained from the following publication:
Hershkovitz, I., & Arensburg, B. (2017). Human Fossils from the Upper Palaeolithic through the Early Holocene. In Y. Enzel & O. Bar-Yosef (Eds.), Quaternary of the Levant: Environments, Climate Change, and Humans (pp. 611-620). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781316106754.068
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This is a facial reconstruction I did of a skull from the site of Taza in eastern Algeria which dates back to around 16,100 years ago and is associated with tools of the Upper Paleolithic Iberomaurusian culture. In life, the specimen would have been a woman who had her upper incisors removed, a tradition common to her people which persists among Nilotic peoples of East Africa as a preventative measure against lockjaw.
I obtained the photo of the skull from the following publication:
Robert J. Meier, Mohamed Sahnouni, Mohamed Medig, Abdelkader Derradji Anthropologischer Anzeiger, Jahrg. 61, H. 2 (Juni 2003), pp. 129-140
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Had enough spare time today to do another skull-to-flesh reconstruction, so here goes...
The subject of this reconstruction is a woman from the Harappan civilization who lived between 2,200 and 2,600 years ago. Developing along the Indus River in what are now Pakistan and northern India, the Harappans represent the oldest known urban civilization in the South Asian region.
Source of skull image:
Lee, W. J., Shinde, V., Kim, Y. J., Woo, E. J., Jadhav, N., Waghmare, P., Yadav, Y., Munshi, A., Panyam, A., Chatterjee, M., Oh, C. S., Hong, J. H., Wilkinson, C. M., Rynn, C., & Shin, D. H. (2020). Craniofacial reconstruction of the Indus Valley Civilization individuals found at 4500-year-old Rakhigarhi cemetery. Anatomical science international, 95(2), 286–292. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12565-019-00504-3
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This is my reconstruction of a woman whose skeletal remains were found in a medieval cemetery in Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic in central Europe), dating back between the ninth and tenth centuries AD. Unlike most inhabitants of the region at that time, her skull’s morphology possesses what appear to be distinctive African traits, suggesting she might be of foreign origin. Perhaps she arrived on a diplomatic errand or married into local nobility?
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OK, last reconstruction before I take a break from the subject...
The subject of this reconstruction is an ancient Egyptian woman from the city of Thebes (now Luxor) who lived and died in the first century BC. Nicknamed as the “Mysterious Woman”, she appears to have died in her twenties while pregnant, as her mummified body still had her unborn child in the womb. That, unfortunately, was not an uncommon fate for pregnant women to experience during those harsh times.
I obtained the reference image of her skeleton from the following publication:
Ejsmond, Wojciech & Ożarek-Szilke, Marzena & Jaworski, Marcin & Szilke, Stanisław. (2021). A pregnant ancient egyptian mummy from the 1st century BC. Journal of Archaeological Science. 132. 10.1016/j.jas.2021.105371.
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Euoplocephalus tutus was a smaller, earlier cousin of the armored dinosaur Ankylosaurus that browsed the forests of western Canada during the Late Cretaceous Period. Like its bigger and more famous relative, Euoplocephalus sported a club on the tip of its tail that it might have used to fend off predators such as the tyrannosaurids Gorgosaurus and Daspletosaurus.
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I felt like drawing something cute for a change, so here’s a Triceratops helping himself to a cinnamon roll. It may be a herbivorous dinosaur, but hey, sugar and flour both come from plants!
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Meet Mukeba, who is the main antagonist for a new prehistoric-fantasy novel I am writing which stars my huntress character Nyanja. Mukeba used to be a shaman for his village, but got himself exiled after making repeated unwanted advances on the chieftain's daughter Kabedi. Sometime later while living in solitude in the jungle, Mukeba found a god called the Starborn crashing into the world from the heavens above, and he has agreed to let it possess his body in exchange for the power it offers him (including the ability to shoot red lightning from his fingers).
Now, Mukeba plans to exact revenge on the people who have wronged him, claim Kabedi for himself, and spread the worship of his malevolent god across the world through any means possible, no matter how brutal. And it's up to Nyanja and her allies to stop him!
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This would be a glamorous young lady from the 1920s, that era when movies had no sound or color, everybody was jazzing to jazz, and all the gangsters in the hood were killing each other over a totally different type of illegal mind-altering substance than they are today (here’s a hint: the stuff they were fighting over is neither smoked or injected, but rather consumed in liquid form. Oh, and it became legal again about three years after the decade ended).
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This is my sketch of a tempskya tree, one of a genus of bizarre tree ferns that thrived during the Cretaceous Period. Typified by conjoined stems that formed a “false trunk” with fronds sprouting up its whole height, these plants would most commonly grown in lowlands near water sources such as rivers and wetlands. I think they look really cool, personally!
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Somewhere in Central America, a large American crocodile (Crocodylus acutus) is ready to show a hapless jaguar who really stands at the top of the food chain!
Almost every article on jaguars lists crocodilians as among their prey, so I thought it only fair to depict a moment in which the tables got turned. Although American crocodiles don’t seem to have the fearsome reputation as their cousins the Nile and saltwater crocodiles, they do take large prey such as cattle from time to time, and males of the species can get quite big, with recorded maximums of twenty feet in length and two thousand pounds in weight. Since jaguars by comparison seldom weight more than three hundred and fifty pounds, it seems probable to me that they would fall within the prey range of American crocs.
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This is a humble soldier from the relatively obscure African country of Agisymba, which the Roman geographer Ptolemy mentions in his work the Geography in the second century AD. Drawing from an account by Marinus of Tyre, Agisymba lay around four months’ travel south of the Central Saharan kingdom of the Garamantes, which may locate it somewhere north of Lake Chad. It appears to have been fertile enough to support megafauna such as rhinoceros. Little other information exists about Agisymba and its people at that time, but it’s possible they were forerunners of later central Sahelian kingdoms such as medieval Kanem.
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I've updated my three commissioned artworks of Sekhmet, Ma'at, and Kali from 2021 so that they have golden auras of divinity as well as depigmented palms (the latter trait is common to all human populations, but more noticeable in the darker-skinned ones of Africa, South Asia, and Australasia).
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This is my portrayal of Saraswati, the Hindu goddess who presides over knowledge, music, arts, and speech. The musical instrument she is playing here (which was a real pain to draw, in all honesty) is an Indian version of the lute called the veena, which often appears in representations of her.
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150 million years ago in North America during the Late Jurassic Period, this Stegosaurus is wallowing in some mud. It may look filthy, but it lets the dinosaur cool off and protect their hide from those noxious Mesozoic mosquitoes!
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It is 54 BC in the Egyptian desert south of Alexandria, and two young princesses named Cleopatra and Amanirenas (left and right, respectively) who were out racing their chariots must flee a mob of hostile Libyan tribesmen!
This is actually an illustration for a short “historical adventure” story I recently drafted (it still needs some editing before I can share it) which stars Queen Cleopatra VII of Egypt (aka the infamous Cleopatra) and Amanirenas of Kush as teenage girls yet to ascend to their thrones. Since both of these queens seem to have been contemporaneous, I wanted to depict them as possibly being friends during their childhood years. Of course, they would be a lot safer racing in the hippodrome back in Alexandria, but Cleo felt doing it out in the wilderness would be more fun.
And, yes, there is some inspiration from the animated movie "The Prince of Egypt" behind this scene (as well as the story’s whole premise).
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“Long ago in a distant land, I, Aku, the shape-shifting master of darkness, unleashed an unspeakable evil. But a foolish samurai warrior wielding a magic sword stepped forth to oppose me. Before the final blow was struck, I tore open a portal in time and flung him into the future, where my evil is law. Now the fool seeks to return to the past and undo the evil that is Aku.”
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