Brandon's Book of Artistic Madness

[BrandonSP]

I have a lot of artwork I could share in this OP, but I'll start with a small sampling of my best work:


Warrior Pharaoh
A female Pharaoh from ancient Egypt decked out in battle gear.

Although women in Pharaonic Egypt and other African civilizations enjoyed more privileges than their counterparts elsewhere in the ancient world, only a handful of their many Pharaohs were female. Of course the most famous native Egyptian matriarch is Hatshepsut of the New Kingdom, but other examples included Sobekneferu of the Middle Kingdom and possibly even Merneith of the 1st dynasty.

The spear my Pharaoh is holding owes its design to the barbed tong achokwe used by the Dinka people of South Sudan. Her blue crown on the other hand draws from the khepresh worn by Pharaohs in battle time. Some scholars, most notably Cheikh Anta Diop, have hypothesized that this crown was actually a specially combed Afro based on similar coiffures seen among Rwandan Tutsi, but this is not widely accepted yet.


Rumble in the Jungle
My take on that most classic of Mesozoic scenes, the clash between Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops horridus. Both of these are my longstanding favorites of the whole Dinosauria, for they must have made worthy adversaries for each other.


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.


Cleopatra VII, the last matriarch of Egypt's Ptolemaic Dynasty and the most famous of them all, stands on a balcony within eyesight of the Pharos Lighthouse in Alexandria.

[BrandonSP]

Here's a recent drawing that took much longer than usual to produce (2-3 hours in the penciling alone if I recall correctly):

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, and the wheels could show more motion.

[Prabu]

Really cool drawings :)

Love the one with the spotted dinosaurs killing each other.

[BrandonSP]

Cleopatra the Charming
Cleopatra VII may not be my favorite monarch in Egyptian history, but somehow she's become one of my favorite historical characters to draw after Hatshepsut. It helps that since she went down in history as a powerful seductress, it seems more appropriate to sexualize her than other prominent historical women. Ancient Roman accounts conflict on just how beautiful she was, but as an artist I like to go with the upper-range estimates.

In case you're curious, that's supposed to be an Egyptian cobra slithering around her arm.


Some fan art for Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian stories, although the black lady he's chilling with is a character of my own creation.