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Once I had a big thread of my own here where I would post my artwork attached with descriptive commentary, but I deleted that thread about a year ago when I was in an infuriated mood. Now I want to get it started again, but this time with links to online venues where you can purchase your own printed copies.
This is a small educational poster (or mini-poster, if you prefer) describing an Upper Paleolithic culture uncovered in the Xianrendong Cave of southeastern China. This culture is remarkable for having produced some of the oldest pottery ever recovered by archaeologists, attesting to a hunter-gatherer culture that had begun to settle down in villages well over ten thousand years before the development of agriculture. On the right side of the poster is a speculative reconstruction of how the people of prehistoric Xianrendong may have looked.
A wary knight-like warrior keeps an eye on the border of her ancient savanna kingdom (as demarcated by the obelisk in the background) from the back of her elephant.
You might notice that the elephant’s tusks here have artistically embellished curvature to resemble those on extinct mammoths. It IS fantasy art after all.
Here’s a brawl between two different cultures’ interpretations of the mythical human-headed feline known as the sphinx. The one to the left is the Egyptian species we all know and love, whereas the other is a younger, winged variation depicted in the artwork of Mesopotamian, Persian, and other Middle Eastern cultures. I gave the latter sphinx a tiger’s body because I felt that would set it apart as distinctively “Asiatic” compared to the lion-based African version.
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And here's some stuff that sticks to the North African theme of ES:
These would be a couple of Kemetic (aka “ancient Egyptian”) citizens attired with more modern, hip-hop-influenced getup. It’s quite fun mixing ancient Egyptian and contemporary hip-hop culture for artwork like this.
This is a Moorish warrior woman I drew following the release of the recent "Aladdin" reboot. Originally, the Moors (or Mauri) were an African people occupying an area within the territories of modern Morocco and Algeria. Later in history, Europeans would use the term “Moorish” as synonymous with darker-skinned people in general (hence the word “blackamoor”), Muslims of any ethnicity, or the succession of Islamic dynasties which took over and dominated most of Spain during the Middle Ages.
Dihya al-Kahina, the warrior queen of the Zenata people, is defending her kingdom in the region of Numidia (now northern Algeria) against Islamic Arab invaders in the later 7th century AD. Her people, like the other tribes of Numidia, are every bit as proficient on horseback as the Arabs are on their dromedary camels.
And this would be a T-shirt design starring Hatshepsut, who was perhaps the mightiest of Egypt’s female pharaohs. You could say she was Queenin’ before it was cool!
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Apidima 1 is the first of two specimens of hominin skull material recovered in a cave in southeastern Greece in the 1970s, the other being labeled Apidima 2. A recent analysis determined that, while the fragments of Apidima 2’s skull could comfortably be identified as that of a Neanderthal who lived 170,000 years ago, those of Apidima 1 shows features more characteristic of modern humans (Homo sapiens)—despite actually having lived in the region at least forty thousand years before Apidima 2. Which is to say, Apidima 1 may show that a population of modern humans had already colonized southeastern Europe from Africa by 210,000 years ago. In fact, Apidima 1 may be the oldest Homo sapiens specimen found outside the African cradle.
This notwithstanding, the people represented by Apidima 1 appear to represent another “dead end” in the annals of human evolution. All humans living outside of Africa, modern Greeks included, owe the vast majority of their ancestry to a later migration from the continent between 70-50,000 years ago.
Since the fragments of bone belonging to Apidima 1 all came from the back of its skull, its sex has yet to be identified. But given my weakness for drawing pretty women, of course I had to reconstruct it as female!
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Some more recent favorites of mine... Titanis walleri, the last of the terror birds, has shown the saber-toothed cat Xenosmilus hodsonae who really reigns at the top of the food chain in Florida circa 1.8 million years ago.
The prehistoric terror birds, more properly known as the phorusrhacids, were a family of giant, flightless, and carnivorous cousins of the modern seriema that thrived between 62 and 1.8 million years ago. Most of them would have been endemic to South America, but Titanis is one example that has been found as far north as Texas and Florida. You could say that these big killer birds were among the last of the big predatory theropods.
68 million years ago in the jungles of late Cretaceous North America, a hungry Tyrannosaurus rex battles its arch-nemesis (and favorite prey) Triceratops horridus. From the cover of some nearby undergrowth, a small troodontid dinosaur watches with the expectation that whomever wins, the loser will become carrion to feast on.
The Kentake (Queen) of Kush goes on a ride across the Sudanese desert atop her royal elephant. Ever since I found out that the ancient Kushites may have trained and ridden war elephants (as suggested by the discovery of a possible elephant stable at the Kushite archaeological site of Musawwart es-Sufta), I’ve fancied the mental image of Kushite rulers going about on their own royal elephants. Considering that African bush elephants are larger than the Indian elephants used by the Asian and Middle Eastern civilizations, they must have ranked among the most fearsome mounted units ever fielded by an ancient army!
In Greek mythology, Andromeda was a princess of Aethiopia (which at the time usually referred, not to the region of modern Ethiopia, but to the kingdom of Kush in what is now northern Sudan) 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 respite.
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 not the first time I have drawn Andromeda. Her story has actually fascinated me as an artist for quite some time. However, since my art style has evolved so much since I last depicted her, I felt obliged to redraw her anyway.
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Travel back to a primeval era when dinosaurs ruled the earth and humanity was only getting started…not to mention getting funky. Welcome to the Soul Age!
I hatched the concept for this after realizing that the age of blaxploitation films overlaps with that of various prehistoric fantasy and sci-fi films (e.g. When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth and Planet of Dinosaurs). What if somebody back in the 1970s had combined the two genres and make a prehistoric blaxploitation movie with Ray Harryhausen-style dinosaurs and foxy cavegirls with Afros? I’d certainly watch that!
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I remember posting this in the now-deleted thread, but allow me to post it again. This is an educational poster I created to show the evolution of modern Western and Middle Eastern alphabets. It starts with the prehistoric African rock art traditions that would form the foundation of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs (with perhaps some additional inspiration from Sumerian cuneiform) and then shows derivative forms such as proto-Sinaitic, Phoenician, Greek, Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and Arabic (among others). It’s by no means a complete collection of all the scripts that evolved from these foundations, nor does it include alphabets from other literary traditions (e.g. Indian, East Asian, or Mesoamerican ones). Nonetheless, it should go to demonstrate the multicultural, transcontinental heritage of the modern English alphabet we use today.
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I did these three sketches while on vacation in Washington, D.C., since one of our distant cousins was getting married. It was a disappointing ceremony, to be honest, since the food they served afterward was really bad (despite it being served at a “fancy” venue) and only the bride and groom got to have even one bite of their cake. On the upside, I did get to visit both the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture as well as their Natural History Museum, both of which were real treasure troves of photogenic exhibits.
Going in a clockwise direction, the subjects of each sketch are:
1) A Tyrannosaurus rex, with a speculative “ridge” of jagged scales on its forelimbs inspired by those of some crocodiles today.
2) A “prehistoric fantasy” warrior heroine clad with strips of dinosaur hide.
3) A female Egyptian Pharaoh wearing the traditional blue crown of war (or khepresh).
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There are few outfits that would benefit a heroine of the prehistoric jungle more than the dinosaur-hide bikini. The tough and scaly hide grants the wearer protective armor where it matters the most, yet the bikini form provides the perfect comfort for hot and humid Cretaceous conditions. Not to mention, it allows her to show off her figure!
(Of course, this would be a shaded version of one of those sketches I did on my recent vacation.)
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Some more old favorites... A pack of dromaeosaurids rushes through the Cretaceous jungle on the hunt for their next meal. Dromaeosaurids, better known as “raptors”, are the family of meat-eating dinosaurs that includes the famous Velociraptor and Deinonychus. They are recognizable for the enlarged sickle-shaped talons on their hind feet, which the raptors may have used to puncture prey while pinning it down and savaging it with their teeth and foreclaws. And, as members of the theropod subgroup known as the maniraptorans, most if not all of them would have been feathered!
66 million years ago in South America, at the very end of the Cretaceous Period, a pair of titanosaurian sauropods look up from the jungle canopy to witness the biggest shooting star they have ever witnessed. Little can they fathom that the verdant paradise they call home is about to be lost in the upcoming catastrophe.
The dinosaurs here are based on the Dreadnoughtus schrani, a South American titanosaur from the Late Cretaceous that may have been the heaviest dinosaur yet discovered. Its maximum weight would have been around 42 tons.
The king of the savanna has met his match in this contest of leonine brawn and ferocity against human cunning and agility!
In other words, I wanted to channel my inner Edgar Rice Burroughs by drawing a chick wrestling a lion. It’s the sort of simple, yet timeless and high-concept theme that is just plain fun to illustrate.
The Kentake of Kush delivers an accolade to one of her finest soldiers, as represented by her tapping a sword onto his shoulder. Think of it as her way of knighting him.
You might recognize this as being based on the classic painting “The Accolade” by the British artist Edmund Leighton, which had a medieval European queen knighting one of her soldiers. What I wanted to do here was to take a classic piece of European artwork and put an African spin on its theme.
Back in the earliest days of the human species, the rainy season is about to descend upon the plains of Africa. Within a sacred circle of megaliths, this tribal priestess is performing a rite to placate the capricious deity of lightning and thunder.
Credit for this artwork’s inspiration goes to the music track “Thundertribe” by the pseudonymous artist "Paleowolf", whose specialty is making music based on prehistoric times.
Cleopatra VII, the last Queen of Ptolemaic Egypt, prepares for an upcoming war by striping and spotting her face with ritual paint. Maybe what she’s gearing up for is the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, where her fleet and that of Mark Antony will clash with Octavian’s.
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This illustration depicts the specimen of early Homo sapiens known as Apidima 1, a fragment of whose skull was found in a cave in southern Greece and dated to 210,000 years ago. This would make this individual the oldest discovered example of Homo sapiens found outside Africa, although they probably represented a dead-end lineage rather than an ancestor for any people living today.
Positioned to the right of Apidima 1 herself are two of the species with whom she might have coexisted in the scrubby chaparral of Pleistocene Greece. They are the extinct European straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus), and the still-thriving golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos).
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This is my depiction of a male specimen of the recently discovered, enigmatic hominin species from eastern Asia known as the Denisovans. Known only from fragmentary remains from which DNA has been extracted, they appear to have been most closely related to the contemporaneous Neanderthals, sharing their European cousins’ tendency towards a heavily built anatomy compared to modern Homo sapiens. However, the genetic data so far also indicates that Denisovans may have been darker-skinned than the Neanderthals as well as better adapted to the low-oxygen conditions of higher altitudes (like one might find in the Himalaya Mountains, for instance).
Although the Denisovans for the most part have joined their Neanderthal brethren in going extinct, they did leave a small imprint (between 1-6%) on the genetic ancestry of modern humans of East Asian, Melanesian, and Aboriginal Australian heritage.
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This to-be-colored sketch depicts a little-known personage from imperial Chinese history, namely a woman named Li who would give birth to the Jin Dynasty Emperor Xiao Wuwen (373-397 AD). According to the official chronicle "History of the Jin", she got her start as a concubine and and weaver whose colleagues had showered her with abuse for her being "tall and black" as well as a "kunlun" (the Chinese word for darker-skinned foreigners). Thankfully, this would ultimately play out as a classic Cinderella story for Li, since she found herself nominated as the Empress (consort?), with the imperial administration addressing her as "precious" to counteract the insults thrown at her.
I don't think anyone knows for sure what Li's ethnic heritage would have been, assuming she was a real person to begin with. The Chinese often used the word "kunlun" for African people, but in other cases it could apply to Negrito or even "Mongoloid" Southeast Asians (e.g. Cambodians, Vietnamese, or Malays). Since neither of those latter ethnic groups are known for their tall stature like Li herself, however, I chose to go with an African interpretation for my portrayal of her.
By the way, the phrase Li is saying is supposed to be Chinese for "Haters gonna hate!"
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Got her colored now... This is my depiction of a little-known personage from the annals of imperial Chinese history, namely a woman named Li who was the mother of the Emperor Xiao Wuwen (373-397 AD, during the Jin Dynasty). According to the official chronicle “History of the Jin”, Li got her start as a concubine and and weaver whose colleagues had showered her with abuse for her being “tall and black” as well as a “kunlun” (the Chinese word for darker-skinned foreigners). Thankfully, this would ultimately play out like a classic Cinderella story for Li, since she found herself nominated as Empress (as in imperial consort) out of all the concubines.
I don’t think anyone knows for sure what Li’s ethnic heritage would have been, assuming she was a real person to begin with. The Chinese often used the word “kunlun” for African people, but in other cases it could apply to Negrito, Indian, or even “Mongoloid” Southeast Asians (e.g. Cambodians, Vietnamese, or Malays). Since none of those other ethnic groups are known for having distinctly tall stature like Li, however, I chose to go with an African interpretation for my portrayal of her.
By the way, the phrase Li is saying is supposed to be Mandarin Chinese for “Haters gonna hate!” Go show those catty concubines, my Empress!
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It's a brisk and misty morning in the Late Cretaceous Period, and this Albertosaurus is ready to revive its energy supply with the flesh of an Arrhinoceratops it has brought down.
Albertosaurus sarcophagus, which hunted in North America between 71 and 68 million years ago, would have been a smaller and nimbler cousin of the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex, as both were members of the predatory dinosaur family Tyrannosauridae. Coincidentally enough, the Arrhinoceratops brachyops it is about to devour here also had a close affiliation with another, also much larger celebrity among the Late Cretaceous dinosaurs, namely the chasmosaurine ceratopsian Triceratops.
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It’s a duel of the demigods that puts Achilles, the famous Greek champion, against King Memnon of Aethiopia (which at the time referred to the territory of modern Sudan rather than what we call Ethiopia today). Both of these characters appear in Homer’s literary universe centered around the Trojan War, with Memnon and his Aethiopian army aiding the Trojan cause against the Greeks. They even go man-on-man together as depicted here. Although it is said that Achilles’s father Zeus (yes, that Zeus) respected both fighters to equal degrees and was biased towards neither one of them, the scales of fate told him to give the victory to his son by having him stab Memnon through the heart. Later accounts would claim that the temple of Asclepius in Nicomeda would keep Memnon’s sword contained within, while his body was either cremated or returned to his native Aethiopia for burial.
Although most historians imagine the Trojan War to have taken place between 1260 and 1180 BC during the Mycenaean Period (if it happened at all), I wasn’t aiming for perfect historical accuracy for either of these characters’ costume designs. They are mythical beings after all. That’s why, for example, Achilles is wearing armor more like those of Greek soldiers from the Classical period (510-323 BC) than what their Mycenaean ancestors would have used.
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This one is over a year old, but I am still rather proud of it as a premise...
About twenty-six centuries before Columbus will sail the ocean blue, these Egyptian emissaries are paying their respects to a Mesoamerican king after a long voyage across the Atlantic. While the native ruler offers his guests a cup of chocolate beverage, his mischievous daughter is eager to indulge her curiosity by touching one of the visitors’ hair…much to the Egyptian woman's consternation, of course.
This is, of course, a fictional “alternate history” scenario. There have been some “Afrocentric” scholars such as Ivan Van Sertima arguing that the Egyptians or other Africans may have sailed across the Atlantic and made contact with early Mesoamerican civilizations such as the Olmecs, but most scholars consider this to be an unsubstantiated fringe hypothesis. Nonetheless, it would make for some appealing fiction.
By the way, if the Mesoamericans in this scene appear strangely large compared to the Egyptians, that’s because the Maya art style I referenced for this seems to have a lot of chunky characters with big heads.
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This is an illustration I'm working in for a short (as in, having a 5k word count and three scenes) pseudo-historical fantasy story, which has the working title "Dribble Like Me". It's a tale of international diplomacy gone haywire through cultural misunderstanding and microaggressions, and the only resolution is a ball game---as in, an ancient Mesoamerican-style ball game where the loser gets put to death!
The female character to the left is my protagonist Neith-Ka, the princess of an Egyptian-style civilization traveling overseas, whereas the two dudes below here are locals whose culture is based on that of the pre-Columbian Maya city states. The latter are supposed to be wearing helmets made from the hair of a rainforest-dwelling bison which is native to the story's fictional world. Neith-Ka, on the other hand, has a headwrap on to protect her braids during the sport.
I really need to fill in all that negative space in the upper right corner with some more Maya-looking buildings, but Mesoamerican pyramid-temples are more difficult to draw than you'd think if you want to get the perspective right.
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Link Here's another work-in-progress illustration for another (also work-in-progress) short story of mine. This one would set in our modern-day Earth and would be more of a spy thriller than my usual fantasy or historical fiction tales...albeit with a heavy dose of lost-world adventure poured into its mix.
To sum it up in a few words, the two protagonists are a husband-and-wife team of FBI agents investigating intensified police brutality by the LAPD, following the fatal shooting of the female lead's younger brother. This leads them to an island in the equatorial Pacific where the LAPD Chief has established his winter getaway, but unfortunately for them, the island gets its name for its endemic population of predatory pelycosaurs and other survivors from the Permian period (298-253 mya). And then there's the crooked cop's own hired goons...
In case you're curious, the male lead (left) is an Hawaiian/Palestinian-American mix, the female lead (right) is African-American, and the main antagonist (not pictured) is an Arab immigrant from Casablanca, Morocco who likes to surround himself with the "Moorish" architecture of his homeland (hence his styling himself as a "Sultan of Finback Isle").
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This is an illustration I did for a short pseudo-historical fantasy story I completed in late August of 2019, which I have titled Dribble Like Me. It's a tale of international diplomacy gone haywire through cultural misunderstanding and microaggressions, and the only resolution is a ball game. As in, an ancient Mesoamerican-style ball game where the loser must be put to death!
The female character positioned to the left of this composition is Neith-Ka, the princess of Khamit (based on ancient Egypt), who is visiting the citystate of Mutul in the overseas country of Mayab (based on the pre-Columbian Maya, of course). The two Mayaban men to the right are her opponents in the game, and they're wearing helmets made from the hair of a rainforest-dwelling bison endemic to their land. Neith-Ka herself has a headwrap to protect her braids during the game.
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Neither the combined perils presented by a hungry Tyrannosaurus rex, an erupting skull-faced volcano, and a giant predatory pterosaur can discourage our heroine from rescuing her loyal gorilla ally!
This is an “alternative version” of a commission I did for my DeviantArt follower Chickfighter. In the original version I did for them, the character was a blonde-haired woman of European descent in a white bikini, and it was a saber-toothed cat that the pterosaur was carrying off. Regardless I liked the basic setup of the scene so much that (with my commissioner’s approval) I did this second version with a few design tweaks for my own personal usage.
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Meet Neith-Ka, who is the protagonist of my short story “Dribble Like Me” (as yet completed but not ready to be published for public readership). She’s the athletic, feisty, and somewhat pampered princess of Khamit, a civilization based on ancient Egypt in the story’s pseudo-historical world. She travels over to the citystate of Mutul in Mayab (based on the pre-Columbian Maya) to seal a trade deal, but a cultural misunderstanding between her and her hosts leads to a diplomatic altercation that will have to be resolved with a ball game. Namely, the Mesoamerican-style of ball game wherein you shoot a rubber ball through a vertical hoop without your palms or toes, and where the loser gets put to death.
Oh, and Neith-Ka does not like foreigners touching her braids without permission. It’s not that she’s uncommonly touchy, though. You’d feel very much the same way if you had to put up with unsolicited hair molestation all the time when visiting other cultures.
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These two queens (one a Spinosaurus aegyptiacus and the other Homo sapiens) come from deep in the past of the Egyptian Nile basin, albeit from very different time periods. Together, they're spending the twilight stargazing by the great African river that defines their shared kingdom.
I wonder if the Egyptian human queen believes her Spinosaurus companion has any ties to the crocodile god Sobek?
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Having broken off from the rest of the world two hundred and sixty million years ago, the landmass known as Finback Isle has protected a unique ecosystem in the equatorial Pacific since long before dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Only a near-extinct nation of Polynesian settlers, along with the crew of Ferdinand Magellan, have ever set foot on the island within the annals of human history.
And then Ibrahim Fawal, the controversial new Chief of Police in Los Angeles, decided to establish his secret winter getaway there.
Enter our heroes Abdullah and Monique Kalua, a daring husband-and-wife team of FBI agents sent to investigate the LAPD’s accelerated record of corruption and brutality, including the shooting of Monique’s own younger brother and brother-in-law. Their mission is to penetrate Fawal’s private Moroccan-style lair on the island and bring him to justice.
Not only must they brave treacherous ruin-studded jungle teeming with beasts older than the dinosaurs themselves, but they will have to contend with the armed officers of one of the vilest men ever to head the police of LA…the Sultan of Finback Isle!
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This is a book cover I designed for a novelette I recently finished writing, which I would describe as a hybrid between a spy thriller and a lost-world adventure. It’s a tale of heroic FBI agents, crooked cops, Moroccan warriors, and savage beasts from the Permian amidst Polynesian ruins. Once I have it all edited and polished, I’ll be selling it for Amazon Kindle!
(By the way, the two characters in the cover illustration, from left to right, are Abdullah and Monique Kalua, the story’s two FBI protagonists. Abdullah is a Hawaiian/Palestinian mix and his wife Monique is African-American. The titular main antagonist, Ibrahim Fawal, is of Moroccan Arab heritage, and he’s probably in that little LAPD copter towards the upper left.)
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On the snow-swept prairie of North America between fifteen and eleven thousand years ago, one of the earliest Americans sticks a spear shaft into that pool of mucky black liquid near his encampment. Whatever he’s thinking when he’s doing it, he ought to pay more attention to his immediate surroundings. There could be a Smilodon stalking him!
This scene was originally going to take place somewhere in what is now the Los Angeles area of California, with the guy being based on historic Native peoples of California like the Tongva and the asphalt pit representing one of those at La Brea. Later on, I decided I wanted a more quintessentially “ice age” backdrop with lots of snow and ice and maybe some woolly mammoths and bison in the background, so I switched the setting to somewhere in the northern Great Plains. Maybe they’re somewhere near the petroleum reserves of central Canada?
Additionally, I’ve always wanted to juxtapose Native Americans like those from the iconic Plains cultures (e.g. the Lakota, Cheyenne, Comanche, etc.) with Pleistocene megafauna like the mammoths and sabertooths. People forget that the human hunter-gatherers who would have settled among these animals wouldn’t have all looked like stereotypical cavemen in simple fur togas or loincloth. Some of them might have looked like the foraging groups known today or recorded in historical times.
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A rogue bull elephant, driven crazy by musth and the pain of a broken tusk, has terrorized the prehistoric savanna for long enough. Our heroine is ready to put the beast out of its rampaging misery with the obsidian point of her broken spear!
(If you don’t know what musth is, it’s a moment male elephants go through on a seasonal basis that causes them to secrete a black fluid from behind their eyes. It also makes their moods much more volatile and dangerous than usual.)
I drew this as a birthday gift for one of my artist friends (his gallery is here) who shares my fondness for sexy dark-skinned warrior babes. His character designs tend to have more trappings of science fiction, superhero comics, or anime-esque fantasy than mine do, but he has drawn a few tribal or barbarian fantasy heroines as well. It’s those latter that inspired this scene most of all.
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It's a cold winter night between eleven and fifteen thousand years ago on the plains of North America. One of the earliest ancestors of the Native Americans is so absorbed in gathering sticky liquid asphalt for use as glue that he doesn't notice the hungry Smilodon fatalis stalking him to his right.
At least our human protagonist might be able to escape this one if he's able to kick or shove the saber-toothed cat into the asphalt pit (or "tar pit" as they're commonly misnamed).
This is a scene that underwent a lot of revision from its initial conception. It started off being set in the Los Angeles area of California, with the asphalt pit representing its infamous La Brea pits, but then I decided I wanted a more iconic "ice age" environment with lots of snow along with woolly mammoths together with the bison and sabertooth. This is why I moved the scene to somewhere in the northern Great Plains, possibly near the rich petroleum reserves of central Canada. The third, digital draft of the work required me to change the Native man's costume and his encampment to look somewhat less like a stereotypical 19th century Plains Native sleeping in a tipi (as I was informed that tipis were only introduced in the Americas after Columbus).
Overall, I think the work has improved a lot over its transition from pencil draft to digital reworking.
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With this sketch, I set out to design a dinosaur-hunting heroine who was cast from a somewhat different mold than the usual tribal chick in a hide bikini. Don’t get me wrong, I like that old archetype too, but this time I wanted someone whose design evoked more of a specific African cultural heritage. In this case, most of the influence came from brass plaques from the West African kingdom of Benin (bizarrely enough, this was located in what’s now western Nigeria rather than the modern nation called Benin, which on the other hand is coextensive with a separate kingdom in the region called Dahomey). Old Benin’s capital, known for earthen ramparts containing more material than Khufu’s Great Pyramid in Egypt, was also the inspiration for the big walled settlement behind.
I am pretty sure I drew her pet Velociraptor’s legs way too short, but that can be fixed in the (probably inevitable) digital makeover.
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72 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous, a pair of Kamuysaurus japonicus enjoy the warm and sunny weather alongside the beach of what will someday be known as Japan. Kamuysaurus was a Japanese member of the hadrosaurid dinosaur family, the so-called “duckbills”, and its fossil remains were found in what were once marine sediments (that is, originally laid under the sea). The paper describing it suggested that it and its relatives would have preferred coastal environments in general, hence why I have chosen to depict this dinosaur alongside a beach.
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This little family represents a Neolithic culture of West Africa called the Kintampo Complex, which occupied most of the territory of what is now Ghana between 2500 and 1400 BC. Living in villages of wattle-and-daub houses (sometimes built on stone foundations), these ancient Ghanaians would have subsisted on crops such as pearl millet, yams, and oil palm, as well as keeping livestock such as cattle and goats. However, they had yet to adopt the metalworking technology that their contemporaries elsewhere in West Africa had begun to develop, so they would have still used stone for making tools and jewelry.
A lot of artistic guesswork went into this illustration since I had more written descriptions than photos of the Kintampo people's material culture to go on. I did read that they would have possessed cigar-shaped rasps for beating barkcloth, so that is why they're wearing barkcloth clothes here. As for the young son wielding miniature weapons to the left, he's supposed to be playing soldier like little boys around the world cultures like to do.
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An Egyptian traveler visiting a village in West Africa circa 3000 BC wants to know what’s up with that grayish metal called “iron” they’ve been smelting and forging into tools.
To be fair, the ancient Egyptians would sometimes make beads and even daggers out of iron mined from meteorites (they called it the “metal of heaven” for that reason), but it wasn’t until the 6th century BC when they started smelting the stuff for themselves. Another hotspot of ironworking in the Nile basin was in the Kushite city of Meroe, which had become the kingdom’s capital after 590 BC. I am honestly not yet sure why neither of these civilizations had picked up the technology earlier if it had been a thing further west in Africa for far longer.
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This is a little nostalgic fan art I did for the game Empire Earth, an old real-time strategy title which came out back in 2001. Designed by Rick Goodman, one of the guys behind the original Age of Empires, Empire Earth extended the concept of “advancing through the ages” to cover the entirety of human history, starting in prehistoric times (around 500,000 years ago, to be more exact) and ending sometime in the distant future. It also boasted an in-game “civilization editor” which allowed you to create your own civilizations, in addition to the map and campaign editor which were standard features for RTS games of that era. Although Empire Earth enjoyed enough success to spawn two sequels, it seems to have faded into historical obscurity relative to longer-standing series like Age of Empires or Warcraft.
Nonetheless, I had a lot of fun playing as a prehistoric tribe in the original Empire Earth, especially since the prehistoric stages had more gameplay depth to them than their equivalent in the first Age of Empires game. I also appreciated the cultural diversity added in the second despite it being over-laden with new bells and whistles (the third game, alas, was too broken and buggy to have much redeeming value). I’d love to see a remaster for Empire Earth with the epic chronological scope of the first game and the diversity of the second.
This clubman here would be based on the first game’s clubman available in the prehistoric age. However, he is Africanized in phenotype relative to his pasty-white game counterpart since the hominin lineage leading to modern humans (Homo sapiens) would still have been living in Africa 500,000 years ago.
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A professional huntress, accompanied by her loyal Velociraptor, scans the jungle outside the towering walls of her native city for signs of game.
This is a design for a different kind of dinosaur-hunting character, one based more on the rich history and diverse cultural heritages of tropical West Africa than on the stock tribal chick in a leopard-skin bikini (though, don't get me wrong, I like that second archetype as well). I drew most of the inspiration for this character's look from brass plaques from the medieval kingdom of Benin in what is now southwestern Nigeria (ironically enough, the modern nation called Benin is based not on this but rather a separate nation called Dahomey further to the West). Old Benin's capital, Edo, is also known for earthen ramparts containing more material than the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, hence the basis for the big walls in the background here.
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This Egyptian tomb guard doesn't seem too pleased to see you, and neither does her pet hyena.
I took an old sketch that had been sitting in my sketchbook for at least a couple of months and transformed it into this pair, also harkening back to a rudimentary concept for an Egyptian tomb guard character I hatched back in early 2017. The helmet she's wearing is of course based on the Egyptian jackal god of the dead called Anpu, or Anubis as he is known to Westerners.
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Amanirenas, the famous warrior queen of classical-era Kush, faces off against a Roman legionary in her war against the (newly rechristened) Empire between 27 and 22 BC. It would have been quite a bloody and devastating affair for both sides of the conflict. The Kushites started with a successful attack upon Syene and Philae in the south of Roman-controlled Egypt, but the Romans retaliated with enough force that they managed to sack Napata, the second of Kush’s three historic capitals (its first and third being Kerma and Meroe, respectively).
After this particular war ended, the Roman and Kushite civilizations would not clash that often anymore. The peace treaty between the two powers in 21 or 20 BC conceded most of the Roman territorial gains during the earlier war back to Kush, and the Kushites received an exemption from taxation to Rome. From that point on, the Roman Empire and the kingdom of Kush would enjoy a relatively peaceful coexistence next to one another until the latter declined as a power after 300 AD.
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These are warriors of the people known as ancient Libyans, who were not a unified nation but rather a collection of nomadic, pastoral tribes living west of Egypt during pharaonic times. Some of these groups would have clung to the Mediterranean scrubland along Libya’s northern coast whereas others may have eked their existence out in the Sahara Desert and beside its oases.
You may have noticed that I’ve given these two Libyan warriors different skin colors, even though they are supposed to be tribal compatriots. That’s because Egyptian depictions of their Libyan neighbors give them different skin colors too. Sometimes Libyans in Egyptian art are colored light yellow-brown like the peoples of western Asia (aka the “Middle East”), whereas other times they are painted much darker brown, more like the native Egyptians themselves.
I interpret this as showing physical variability among the disparate peoples of Libya during this period, with some of them having received more gene flow from Europe or West Asia (which would have lightened their skin on average) whereas others kept the darker skin of their indigenous African ancestors. I suspect the former would have been more common along the Mediterranean coast, since it would have been more accessible to migrants from outside of Africa, whereas the latter were more common deeper within the desert. At least that is what makes the most sense to me.
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This would be my artistic interpretation of the myth of Saint George rescuing a princess from sacrifice to a dragon. Although St. George has become the patron saint of England, he didn’t start out as the medieval knight of popular imagination. Instead he was a Roman soldier named Georgius from the province of Cappadocia, in what is now Turkey. Furthermore, his episode with the dragon and the princess took place in “Libya”, which referred to the entire continent of Africa back in antiquity. In some versions of the myth, the princess helps by offering the girdle around her clothes as a leash to capture the beast around the neck.
Also, dragons in older traditions were portrayed as resembling giant snakes rather than the more lizard- or dinosaur-like creatures we imagine nowadays. That’s why this dragon looks rather like an oversized python.
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It is North America during the Late Cretaceous, circa 67 million years ago. Bolts of lightning shoot from the ash plume of an erupting volcano, and a Tyrannosaurus rex deep within the jungle answers the crack of their thunder with a deafening roar of its own.
What could be more awesome than a scene of a roaring tyrannosaur? Why, a scene of a roaring tyrannosaur with lightning in the sky and a volcano erupting in the distance, that's what!
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This would be a simple landscape drawing showing an environmental boundary (aka ecotone) between open, seasonally dry savanna and the wetter, more humid depths of the rainforest. I suspect the transition between these two biomes would be more gradual in real life (i.e. you would start with more clumps of trees in the savanna until they started merging together into woodland and then jungle), but I rather like the contrast in environments presented here.
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It's true, coffee does come from Africa (the highlands of Ethiopia, to be specific). Some sources claim an indigenous Ethiopian cultivation and awareness of the coffee bean's properties as far back as the ninth century AD, but it was in the fifteenth century that coffee as a beverage took off in popularity outside the continent, spreading first into the Arabian and Islamic regions before reaching Europe and beyond. However far back its use in our favorite morning drinks goes, we all have Africa to thank for being the birthplace of the coffee plant.
By the way, I created this artwork as a design for coffee mugs to sell on Redbubble. You can buy your own mug with this design here.
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This is a reference sheet I made for Takhaet, an Egyptian warrior character I created for one of my short stories back in 2016. Three years later, I felt enough inspiration to revisit the character that I wrote a second story for her, which is supposed to be a sequel to the first.
To sum up her character, Takhaet is a veteran Egyptian warrior from the 14th century BC who finds herself an unwilling subject of the “Heretic” Pharaoh Akhenaten. When Akhenaten sets out to persecute the traditional Egyptian religion in favor of his own cult of Aten, Takhaet refuses to surrender her faith in the old gods—all while having to protect her niece little Nebet.
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This would be a conceptual design for a heroic princess whose scepter grants her magical powers, among them the ability to communicate with her loyal Tyrannosaurus steed.
I meant this to be a more kid-friendly design that what I normally do, since my original plan was to submit it to a children’s publication called The Brownies’ Book, which has African-American and other minority children between the ages of six and thirteen as its target audience. Basically, I wanted it to look like something you’d see on a Saturday morning cartoon for young girls (although boys would probably enjoy it as well, since lots of kids of both sexes love dinosaurs). Later examination of the publication’s submission terms suggested that they were more interested in written literature than visual art like this, but I am proud of the end result nonetheless.
Maybe, sometime in the distant future, I’d get an animated show with this kind of protagonist off the ground. Who knows?
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A bull Deinotherium bozasi, a distant relative of the elephant, roams the rainforests of Africa, equipped with two downward-curving tusks on its lower jaw. This African species of the Deinotherium genus is known to have lived between 7.3 million and 781,000 years ago, which would have made it a contemporary of the early hominin apes that would evolve into human beings. The two tusks on its lower jaw might have helped it strip down bark or branches for feeding.
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Did you know that almost everything you eat from the grocery store comes from “genetically modified organisms” (or GMOs?). If it was bred into a certain form through centuries of domestication, it counts as genetically modified. If you really want to eat organic (or embark on the so-called “paleo diet”, for that matter), you ought to get all your food from wild plants and animals in the nearest plot of woods or bush.
For that matter, you pet dog or cat would be a GMO too, even if you don’t eat them.
Seriously, I’m hardly anti-environment (things like poaching, pollution, and of course anthropogenic climate change are very genuine problems facing us), but I could never get into the whole “organic” or anti-GMO movement for the reasons stated above. We’ve been genetically modifying our crops and livestock for thousands of years now, so it’s not like they’re automatically less safe if we do it we modern technology nowadays.
I drew this prehistoric warrior chick with cartoony proportions as another one of my occasional style experiments. One thing I learned while doing this is that the big doe-eyed look like that of many cartoon or anime heroines looks better if you exaggerate the size of the head as well.
I'd watch my back around this Egyptian queen if I were you. She may be beautiful, but that doesn't mean she can't be deadly as a cobra!
There is in fact a recorded instance of an Egyptian Pharaoh's wife having her husband murdered. This would be Tiye, a secondary wife of Ramses III, who hoped to put her son Pentawere on the throne instead of the Pharaoh's preferred heir Ramses IV. She and her co-conspirators appear to have succeeded in killing the Pharaoh with a cut to the throat, but they failed to usurp Ramses IV's position as the royal heir. Instead, most of the lead conspirators got caught and executed by the Egyptian authorities, although we do not know what happened to Tiye herself.
This Smilodon fatalis came out looking rather regal, if I do say so myself.
Unlike many of the other prehistoric creatures I've drawn, Smilodon is an animal which I've been more or less consistent in coloring over the years (although this would be grayscale like all pencil drawings, of course). I always imagine it as having a gray coat with white spots, which I consider to be logical camouflage for a predator prowling the snowy wilds of North America during the Ice Age.
I drew this black rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis) two days after World Rhino Day as a belated celebration. Its name notwithstanding, the black rhinoceros stands out from the white species in Africa not by its color but by having a prehensile hooked lip for grasping branches and leaves, as well as being smaller and reputedly more aggressive.
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This would be quick concept art for an African-American archaeologist character from the 1930s, whom I shall call Isis Lincoln. She would have earned her archaeological credentials at Tuskegee University in Alabama, and she would have an appetite for adventure comparable to Indiana Jones. In fact, a large part of the inspiration behind her character comes from the recent suggestion that Indiana himself would be succeeded by a woman, although I personally see Isis more as Indy’s contemporary and maybe even a colleague (or even more than that, at least at one point) if they were to inhabit the same universe.
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This is a digitally colorized, marker-ink portrait of Juba al-Mauri, who is one of the characters from my novelette The Sultan of Finback Isle. Hailing from the mountainous highlands of Morocco, he belongs to an ancient ethnic group in the area known as the Mauri, whose name would evolve into our term “Moorish”. Although he wants more than anything else to help his own decimated people survive in the modern age, his search for profit has brought him into the employment of the story’s antagonist Ibrahim Fawal, a Moroccan-American Chief of Police in Los Angeles who is of Arabic ethnicity and treats Juba with more than a slight dabble of racial prejudice. Also, Juba’s very good with his shotgun, the stock (handle) of which you can see sticking out from behind his back here.
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