Jabrosky's Crimes Against Fantasy Art

[Gurkhal]

So are you saying the Macedonians started out non-Greek but later adopted a Greek identity by Alexander's time?

That is my understanding of it, yes.

 

[Jabrosky]

Your painting is good, some how.... but i really can't understand...what u want to say...

What do you mean by this?

Two of the most famous warrior kings in ancient Aegean history, Alexander the Great and Leonidas of Sparta (the hero of 300), clash in an anachronistic battle between Macedon and Greece. The Macedonians actually did conquer the Greeks under Alexander’s father Philip, but Leonidas had died at Thermopylae a long time before then.

I hope the yellow highlights, which are supposed to reflect the sunset, don’t come across too weird here. However, I am happy that I could get these two characters into action poses on the same piece of paper.

A prehistoric African huntress stands proud in the jungle while a Brachiosaurus moseys in the background. As you should know by now, nothing is more fun for me than drawing black jungle girls coexisting with dinosaurs. Well, except drawing said black jungle girls fighting those dinosaurs, but that's more challenging.

That spear she's holding has a point carved out of bone in case you're curious about the off-white color. The facial scars are ritually inflicted and owe their inspiration to Sudanese African cultures like the Nuba and Dinka.

 

[Jabrosky]

Elven Gentleman
This well-to-do male elven proprietor is one of few citizens of the Aelvanian Republic who has the privilege of voting for his country’s leadership. As such, he and his fellow land-owning compatriots exert a hugely disproportionate share of political influence on the Republic’s governance despite all its rhetoric on representing “Freedom for the People”. Then again, said propaganda is accurate as long as you interpret “the People” to mean well-to-do male elven proprietors.

Originally I conceived of my elves as having the standard pseudo-medieval flavor typical for fantasy races, but now I feel they would stand out a lot more if I based their culture more on the late 18th- through early 19th-century United States of America. After all I want my elves to function as the bad guys of my setting, and you can’t get much more deliciously despicable than greedy slave-holding capitalists who would wipe out or displace anyone who got in the way of their “Manifest Destiny” ambitions all while waxing poetic about liberty and equality. Frankly we Americans paint ourselves far too often as the good guys in our retelling of history and current events, so I say it’s high time we got to be the villains for once.

Map of this character's world here

 

[Jabrosky]

Experiment with photo-manipulation using King Tut's famous sarcophagus and the beautiful Kenyan actress Lupita Nyong'o (12 Years a Slave):

 

[Jabrosky]

Torosaurus latus, a close relative of the Triceratops, enjoys a relaxing sunbath on the Cretaceous savanna. His hide has more shades of brown and gray, the so-called drab colors, than I usually put on my dinosaurs. As much as I prefer brighter colors on dinosaurs, I think drabber ones can also work if they’re arranged in inventive patterns.

Conceptual portraits for two fantasy races of my own creation, the avian Kukaws and the reptilian Caaneks. Both of these races share the same jungle-covered continent and human-like intelligence, but they have very different diets and developed fundamentally different cultures. The Kukaws are vegetarian agriculturalists with warlike tendencies whereas the Caaneks are peaceful, nomadic hunter-gatherers with a primarily carnivorous diet.

 

[Jabrosky]

Long time no post!

I'm going through an ancient Carthaginian phase right now, and today I want to share some recent drawings with that theme:

Sketch of a Carthaginian shrine to the goddess Tanit

"I shall use fire and steel to arrest the destiny of Rome!" Hannibal Barca announces as he brandishes his battle-ax atop the Italian Alps.

Another drawing of Hannibal Barca, this time standing on the ramparts of his palace or bastion in Carthage.

 

[Jabrosky]

Leonidas I of Sparta

Cleopatra VII of the Ptolemaic Kingdom

 

[Jabrosky]

Hatshepsut of Egypt

 

[Jabrosky]

Memnon the Ally of Troy

In Greek mythology, Memnon was a king of “Aethiopia†(ancient Kush or Nubia in what is now Sudan) who allied with the Trojans in their Homeric conflict against the Greeks. Although a skilled warrior whom the Trojans hoped would be their savior, Memnon was characterized by a nobility which won him the favor of the Greek gods. In one episode an elderly Greek king named Nestor challenged Memnon to a fight to avenge his son, but Memnon turned him down out of respect for his age. Ironically this strength of character would lead to Memnon’s undoing, for the demigod Achilles ultimately slew him on Nestor’s behalf.

I based Memnon’s look here on a real king of Nubia named Nedjeh, who ruled between 1650 and 1550 BC. Artistic sources depict him as an archer with a bowling pin-shaped hedjet crown related to those worn by early Egyptian Pharaohs.

 

[Jabrosky]

Hatshepsut on the Warpath
Although the female Pharaoh Hatshepsut is best known for her peacetime accomplishments, like most New Kingdom Pharaohs she was not a pacifist. Early in her career she did lead a number of successful military campaigns in Nubia and the Middle East, and she would have rode and loosed her arrows from a chariot like this. The Egyptians did not invent chariots, but once they acquired them from Middle Eastern invaders in the Second Intermediate Period, they improved on the design to better fit their desert habitat. For one, the Egyptian chariot was smaller than lighter than others, for example the bulky chariots used by the Hittites in Anatolia.

It should be needless to say that the zebras are my creative license. I chose them over horses in part to enhance the African flavor and in part because I thought the idea of a zebra chariot sounded novel.

Unfortunately I think I messed up Hatshepsut's nose.

 

[Jabrosky]

Achilles vs Memnon
The Greek demigod Achilles charges and prepares to clash with King Memnon of Kush (or "Aethiopia" as the Greeks called it). Most artwork that I've seen featuring Achilles in a one-on-one duel pit him against the Trojan Hector, so I felt his earlier confrontation with Memnon deserved some artistic attention for once. A common theme uniting the two fights is that Achilles slew both of his opponents out of vindictive rage for his fallen comrades (Antilochus in the case of Memnon and Patroclus in the case of Hector). Apparently revenge was a big thing for the warrior cultures of the ancient Near East.

I was actually stumped with a choice of weapon for Achilles given his pose. I was originally going to choose a sword, but his helmet would have obscured most of the blade, so ultimately I went for a spear. Unfortunately it looks shorter than it should since most of the shaft is hidden by his head and shield.

 

[Jabrosky]

Tshomba the Bakongo Healer
Time for a new original character!

It is the late 17th century. Tshomba is a healer and mage from the kingdom of Kongo on the Central African coast, but she has joined the dashing English pirate privateer James Swann for a life of overseas adventure. Their various escapades have attracted the unwelcome attention of the ruthless bounty hunter Don Gallego, so Swann and Tshomba escape to a remote island deep in the equatorial Atlantic. Not only must they brave the island's indigenous dinosaur population, but Gallego has under his command an ancient Egyptian sorcerer whose most potent powers are not magical.

Tshomba's story actually came to mind after a recent dream that juxtaposed the characters from Pirates of the Caribbean with dinosaurs. At first I wanted to use Captain Jack Sparrow himself for the male lead, but I switched to a wholly original story since I have more creative freedom that way (and honestly Captain Jack, while funny, is too morally confusing for my taste).

This isn't a finalized design for Tshomba. I actually want her gown and head-wrap to look a lot more polychromatic as that's how I describe them in her story, but somehow I didn't feel ready to apply intricate Central African patterns to larger sheets of fabric.

 

[Jabrosky]

James Swann the Privateer
His enemies may call him a pirate, but the Englishman James Swann prefers to think of himself as a privateer in service of the British Crown. Practically speaking all that means is that he has legal permission to plunder on the high seas as long as he only targets his home country's wartime opponents, for example the Spanish. Swann's harassment of Spain's colonial empire in the Caribbean has inevitably provoked them to put a heavy bounty on his head, so he has retreated to a remote and uncharted island in the Atlantic's equatorial heart. Which would be a great means of evading the bounty hunters if the island didn't have a native dinosaur population...

 

[Gurkhal]

Top-notch as always.

 

[Jabrosky]

Today I'm going on a fan art kick!

Hyborian Age Dragon
Through the thicket was thrust a head of nightmare and lunacy. Grinning jaws bared rows of dripping yellow tusks; above the yawning mouth wrinkled a saurian-like snout. Huge eyes, like those of a python a thousand times magnified, stared unwinkingly at the petrified humans clinging to the rock above it. Blood smeared the scaly, flabby lips and dripped from the huge mouth. The head, bigger than that of a crocodile, was further extended on a long scaled neck on which stood up rows of serrated spikes, and after it, crushing down the briars and saplings, waddled the body of a titan, a gigantic, barrel-bellied torso on absurdly short legs. The whitish belly almost raked the ground, while the serrated backbone rose higher than Conan could have reached on tiptoe. A long spiked tail, like that of a gargantuan scorpion, trailed out behind
---Robert E. Howard, Red Nails

In the Hyborian Age mythos, dragons like this terrorized the southern jungles of the Black Kingdoms. In the story Red Nails, Conan the Cimmerian and his companion Valeria encounter one of them eating their horses near the ancient city of Xuchotl. Many illustators have interpreted the passage quoted above as describing some kind of carnivorous stegosaur, but that's not quite what I envisioned when reading it. However, since Howard does say that necromancers brought the dragons back to life using old bones in the jungle, I can see dinosaur fossils having inspired his portrayal of these monsters.

In retrospect I should have made the legs much shorter in keeping with Howard's description, but it was fun paying my respects to one of my literary heroes.

Amra's New Queen
With Belit of the Tigress fallen, a new pirate queen has arisen to haunt the Black Coast. She is not irredeemably pitiless however, for here she supplies sympathy to a still-mournful Amra the Lion (known elsewhere as Conan the Cimmerian).

Conan the Cimmerian (c) Robert E. Howard, but the black lady on the left is my own character.

 

[Jabrosky]

Nyarlathotep
And it was then that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt. Who he was, none could tell, but he was of the old native blood and looked like a Pharaoh. The fellahin knelt when they saw him, yet could not say why. He said he had risen up out of the blackness of twenty-seven centuries, and that he had heard messages from places not on this planet. Into the lands of civilisation came Nyarlathotep, swarthy, slender, and sinister, always buying strange instruments of glass and metal and combining them into instruments yet stranger. He spoke much of the sciences of electricity and psychology and gave exhibitions of power which sent his spectators away speechless, yet which swelled his fame to exceeding magnitude. Men advised one another to see Nyarlathotep, and shuddered. And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished, for the small hours were rent with the screams of nightmare.
---H.P. Lovecraft, Nyarlathotep

I have to thank fellow DeviantArt artist vonmeer for the inspiration behind this piece of fan art. I'm very much a newcomer to the whole Lovecraft mythos despite its Internet popularity, but Lovecraft was a close buddy of Robert E. Howard whom I do like very much as a fantasy writer. In fact many of Howard's stories that I've read incorporate Lovecraft-like creatures, character names, and ideas of cosmic abominations. When designing Nyarlathotep's costume here, I decided to incorporate some Howardian influences by giving him a Stygian-style serpent motif. The snake-like object he's holding is not supposed to be a living creature but rather a scepter of green metal.

 

[Jabrosky]

Tshomba Therapies a Triceratops
My original heroine Tshomba, an African lady mage, uses her healing magic to soothe an ornery Triceratops.

When I initially created Tshomba, I didn't really have a clear idea of her personality or back-story. All I knew is that she came from the Central African country of Kongo (now Congo) and joined a dashing 17th-century English privateer named James Swann in his adventures. However, the more I mulled over the scene I had written for her and Swann, the less satisfied I felt about how the whole story would turn out. In large part this was because I didn't develop their characters well to begin with, leaving large and critical hols in the plot I had developed.

Over the course of drawing and coloring this illustration, it occurred to me that Tshomba might work better as a nature mage who could communicate with dinosaurs and other animals a la Dr. Dolittle or Eliza Thornberry. It would certainly provide a refreshing contrast to the dinosaur-slaying huntresses I have created previously since her relationship with the animals would be less antagonistic. I am not sure if I want to keep the 17th-century setting or James Swann though.

 

[Jabrosky]

Pharaoh's Bodyguard
Although I drew this character with the intention that she would serve as a Pharaoh's royal bodyguard, the idea behind her actually comes from the Dahomey "Amazons" in West Africa who also served as bodyguards for their king. As of now no evidence uncovered has shown that a similar contingent of female warriors protected the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt, but absence of evidence may not be evidence of absence. Even if it were, mixing together ancient Egyptian and so-called "sub-Saharan" African influences is one of my favorite artistic tricks.

 

[Jabrosky]

Nefrusobek on the Hunt
Armed with her bow and arrow, Queen Nefrusobek of Kametu goes hunting out in the savannas that stretch beyond her riparian kingdom. Sometimes she will attack from her zebra chariot or war elephant, but today she's in a more courageous mood and traveling on foot.

Although Kametu is of course based off ancient Egypt, it enjoys a rainier climate and thus has a grassy savanna rather than desert environment. Nonetheless most of the Kametian population congregates along the Iteru River since it has more fertile silt and a steady water supply. Fish and livestock provide the majority of their dietary protein, but hunting wild game is nonetheless a popular past-time with the nobility and royalty.

Pharaoh Dislikes Chocolate
As much as the Queen of Egypt didn't want to offend her Olmec hosts, she just couldn't get into their most prized beverage. You couldn't really blame her. The original Mesoamerican form of chocolate did have a bitter taste before the Europeans came along to sweeten it.

I'm actually skeptical of the belief that Egyptians or any other Africans made it to the Americas during Olmec times, but I have to concede that I actually do like the concept of pre-modern globalization.

 

[JRFLynn]

but I have to concede that I actually do like the concept of pre-modern globalization

So do I Thank you sharing, I love the mix of magic, egyptian culture, and dinos.