People here might know me as an occasional visitor to the Race Relations forum, but more often I'm an amateur artist. I've been doing that kind of stuff since the tender age of five. Usually what I draw are dinosaurs, characters from ancient history, and sexy ladies. I'll start this off with a sample of my best and most representative work.
In the jungles of what will someday become Singapore, an Egyptian colonial patrol is about to intercept a native war party of Malays. Of course this is a fantastical "alternative history" scenario, as there's no evidence the Egyptians ever traveled to Southeast Asia, let alone colonized it. But the island of Singapore has long been known as a strategic location for the Indian Ocean trade between west and east; the modern nation is descended from a port set up by the British in the 19th century. Plus I lived there for six years as an expat kid.
This is my reconstruction of Egyptian village life in the so-called "Neolithic" (or early predynastic) phase. It would take place circa 4000 BC, when the Egyptians had already established an agricultural economy but had yet to unify into one kingdom. They would have lived in small villages of "roundhouse" huts along the Nile during the dry season, but would then move upland into the savanna with their cattle when the floods came to water their crops. As with their Nubian brethren and many other African peoples, the Egyptians would always regard cattle as their most important livestock (though only the upper classes would have eaten beef regularly). The cattle they would have come from a long-horned breed still common throughout the African continent.
This is my "reimagining" of the Egyptian goddess Aset/Isis as she was portrayed in concept art for the game Age of Mythology. This mythologically-themed spin-off from Age of Empires has to be over a decade old as of this typing, but it's been modified and re-released on Steam and even has a fan-made expansion pack (Tale of the Dragon) out now. With expansion packs included, the civilizations you can play in Age of Mythology​ are the Greeks, Norse, Egyptians, Atlanteans (made up, I know, and a lame addition in my humble opinion) and now Chinese. I'm tempted to go over this and make a digitally inked and colored version that could be modded into the game itself (I've already made a big reskin mod for its Egyptian units that can be found in the Steam workshop).
Jungle babes in bikinis fighting raptors is a classic artistic theme, so of course I had to take my shot at it sooner or later. Seriously, this setup (and my love for the whole concept of dinosaur-hunting jungle girls in general) owes much inspiration to comic book artist Frank Cho, who draws this sort of stuff all the time and has even published it in several books (he's particularly famous for his work on Shanna the She-Devil). It was time I had to pay homage to what must be his favorite theme
This Ku(*)(*)(*)(*)e soldier is offering much-needed help to a little girl who has lost her mother (probably in some kind of crowded public setting, like a town square). In my opinion, there are few sights more tear-jerking than a child in distress because they can't find the people they depend on most. It certainly happened to me a few times when I was a kid, so I can relate to that experience even years later. And yes, I still need more practice with drawing cute little kids. This one I drew for a fantasy author and fellow dinosaur fan whom I follow on DeviantArt, Brandon Bowling. The dinosaur is a Jurassic genus known as Ceratosaurus.
This is my portrait of Nephthys, protective goddess of the dead in Egyptian mythology. She was sister to Isis and Osiris and sister-wife to Set (who was also Osiris's brother...what can I say, gods had different family values in that culture), and she was often paired up with her sister as protector of Osiris's mummified body in funeral rites. So when designing my version of her, I gave her the motifs of death and mummification. While others have given her mummy bandages for clothing, the fossil-headed staff and ammonite earrings are my own contribution to emphasize her stewardship of the dead (and because I love me some prehistoric stuff of course). The super-dark skin color I've given her is meant to channel the black bitumen substance used in Egyptian embalming. Although Nephthys appears to have been a mostly benevolent goddess, her macabre domain still called for a rather sinister backdrop. I'll just say that as protector of the dead, she has to keep away would-be disturbers by scaring the lights out of them. This warrior character comes from a group of people known as the Sherden, one of several warlike "Sea Peoples" of European descent which swarmed throughout the Mediterranean Basin in the third millennium BC. The Egyptians would employ Sherden as mercenaries, even personal guards for the Pharaohs themselves, when not fighting them. These fierce, fair-skinned European warriors must have seemed exotically intimidating and barbaric to their darker African employers! In battle the Sherden would have donned horned helmets like our cartoon depictions of Vikings, but I wanted to show more of this guy's hair off. I also wanted him to resemble Chris Pratt, who has become one of my favorite modern-day action stars since Jurassic World. He'd look awesome as a Sherden character in a historical/action movie, if they ever get around to making that.
Heru (or Horus), one of the best-known heroic gods of Egyptian mythology, is wrestling the crocodile Sobek in the marshes of the ancient Nile. I intended this this be an Egyptianized homage to old comic book covers which featured Tarzan fighting all kinds of African wildlife in the Congolese jungles. In fact I originally wanted to give Heru a prehistoric tribal getup and place him in a jungle setting, but then I decided he would be confused for a generic African tribesman and so settled on a more classically Egyptian outfit for him (though the croc is blocking most of it). When I was a second-greader getting to know about ancient Egypt, the thing that fascinated me most about it was how the Egyptians were able to build their civilization in the so-called "Dark Continent" with all those fierce safari animals running around. Of course I know the concept of a "Dark Continent" is a potentially racist or at least problematic one, but I still enjoy drawing Egyptians alongside the wilder denizens of their African habitat.
Narmer, also known as Menes, has been traditionally regarded as the founding Pharaoh of ancient Egyptian civilization. He was a ruler of Upper Egypt (southern Egypt, further up the Nile) who according to legend conquered the north (Lower Egypt) and established a capital at their junction which the Greeks would call Memphis. At this early stage, the Egyptians buried their dead royal not in pyramids but in short, flat-roofed structures called mastabas like the one in the background. I got the idea for this from an ancient stone bust of Narmer himself which has him wearing this flat-topped headgear that spreads out near the top. I would have thought it was the red crown of Lower Egypt, but since it doesn't have the big protuberance from the back that the red crown usually does, I couldn't help but be reminded more of a kufi cap like African-American men wear. So here's my interpretation of Narmer wearing a red kufi cap! Well it IS African History Month as of this typing... I recently received a creative writing assignment to write a mock pilot episode for a TV show. I've decided I wanted to make it a cartoon aimed at girls under age 12 and have it star a courageous warrior queen from the jungle, and this is my concept art for the protagonist in question. It's my feeling that too much merchandise aimed at girls centers on princesses and their more "mundane" activities rather than women with actual power and strength. Plus little girls deserve to have action-packed adventure stories targeted at them too. I'm undecided on the heroine's name yet, but I'm considering calling her Ikaba after scavenging it from my mountainous pile of scrapped projects. It's been ages since I last drew a portrait of Pharaoh Tutankhamun, by far the most well-known Egyptian Pharaoh to the general public. He died at 19, and some speculate it might have been murder or a violent accident, so I couldn't help but be reminded of a certain other teenager who was violently killed a few years ago. I even see a bit of a physical resemblance between them. Of course the big difference between them is, in that other teenager's case we at least know it was murder or at least manslaughter (so RIP to him and condolences to his family and loved ones). Try guessing who that kid was, but here's a hint: I based the grayscale coloring of my King Tut portrait off a well-known photo of his that has him in a hoodie.
Beautiful!!!! Do you take the idea of reincarnation seriously? Do you think that I am naive to think that it has the potential to significantly improve race relations, especially in America where Facebook and forums like this can educate so many people so fast? http://www.politicalforum.com/race-...head-past-life-regression-under-hypnosis.html What is that white guy doin in my head? (Past life regression under hypnosis). I read both of Helen Wambach Ph. D.'s books back in the '90's and I am convinced that they have the potential to transform race relations. Well over sixty percent of Dr. Wambach's volunteers were women.... but almost exactly fifty percent of past lives viewed/ perceived.....were of men! White people see themselves as Black and Japanese and Chinese and Aboriginal in past lives. Roughly ninety percent of past lives viewed would be described as "poor" which is almost certainly not what would happen if people were simply remembering scenes from movies that they viewed as a child or teenager.
If..... you were to get 5 to 10 of your fans together to form a film production cooperative.... your art could be used on the webpage......... and even in many of the potential scenes. Horus .... according to some sources is identifiable with Nimrod......... who ... according to the Book of Jasher inherited the leather garments of Adam.... and when he wore them he became extremely strong...... and was able to defeat and kill many extremely dangerous animals. There are some fossils that seem to indicate that raptors or some types of dinosaurs may actually have lived at the same time as some humanoids.... that is interesting because Edgar Cayce stated there had been five.... Adam and Eve pairs.... created over the past several million years............ http://www.ccel.org/a/anonymous/jasher/12.htm
This is a quickly doodled portrait of a tribesman from the Mediterranean coast of Libya who would have been contemporaneous with the ancient Egyptian and Ku(*)(*)(*)(*)e civilizations. These people, who presumably spoke Berber languages like those of the North African Maghreb further west, would have started out as nomadic herders, but later in Egyptian history they grew in number and started settling the Nile Delta in large numbers until they even took over the whole country under Shosenq I in 945 BC. Conventionally Egyptians would portray the Libyans as having fair or light brown skin as they would Middle Easterners as seen in their "table of nations" murals. The grayish-blue eyes I gave this Libyan tribesman do appear occasionally among Maghrebi Berber-speakers, and it's my belief that they and other "Caucasian" characteristics in these people reflect distant European ancestry from the Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal, which would have been practically a stone's drop away from the northwestern African coast). Skeletal remains of people living in that area near the end of the last Ice Age (20-10,500 years ago) have yielded Eurasian mtDNA haplogroups, and the tools associated with them additionally resemble those of the Iberian peninsula (hence why the culture is known as Iberomaurusian). On the other hand, it should be added that after that period, the Sahara would turn to grassy savanna which would have brought these Iberian migrants into contact and intercourse with darker-skinned native Africans who would influence their culture and language. The Berber languages for instance are actually part of a larger linguistic phylum called Afrasan or Afroasiatic which would have originated along the Sudanese/Horn of African coast (most Ethiopian languages as well as ancient Egyptian itself are also classified under Afrasan). Further, according to the skeletal analyses of bio-anthropologist SOY Keita, the people of Northwest Africa during historical antiquity (e.g. ancient Carthaginians) would show a mix of "Caucasian", African (i.e. Egyptian, Ku(*)(*)(*)(*)e, and West African), and intermediate traits which implies a mixed-race population. Ergo, even though my Libyan tribesman has blue eyes and tawny skin, I wanted his facial features to look intermediate between Africans and Mediterranean Europeans to reflect his people's "biracial" heritage. This prehistoric chick and her tame raptor have chosen to stand their ground (or rather tree bough) in the face of a territorial Tyrannosaurus rex. This is the product not only of half a day's hard work at the desktop and tablet, but also playing three hours of Far Cry: Primal. The European lion (Panthera leo spelaea) was a subspecies of lion that prowled the subcontinent of Europe during the Pleistocene "Ice Age" epoch all the way to the 10th century AD in Transcaucasia. They would have been 8-10% bigger than the surviving African subspecies, but not quite as big as the American lions (Panthera leo atrox). Not only would they have terrorized Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon humans during the ice age, but they would earn prominent places in ancient Greek and Roman mythology; Herakles/Hercules for example slew one tough specimen of these known as the Nemean lion. Many modern reconstructions draw the European lion, as well as its American cousin, as almost maneless based on certain Paleolithic cave paintings, but then classical Greek artwork shows them as having full manes like the African subspecies, so I prefer to think they did have manes and those cave paintings (possibly produced by female artists themselves) were simply showing lionesses on the hunt rather than the males of the species. Besides, a thick mane would make sense in the cooler European climate. I was experimenting again with a more painter-like, line-free version of digital art with this piece. I'm still inexperienced with that method, but I like to think I'm getting better at it with practice.
This piece is meant to express my anger and sadness over how people of African descent continue to be treated, not only in the US but across the world. What's being removed from her head is an Egyptian-style crown like the one Nefertiti wore.
