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Post by Brandon S. Pilcher on Sept 30, 2024 15:34:03 GMT -5
This is my portrait of a Neolithic male inhabitant of the Middle Eastern Levant between 10,000 and 6500 BC. I based his facial features off a reconstruction of a skull from the site of Jericho which had been covered with a plaster “mask”. Research on ancient DNA has shown that the Neolithic people of the region, who were among the world’s first farmers, would have descended from a mixture of the earlier Natufians on the one hand and Neolithic peoples of Anatolia (modern Turkey) on the other (the latter population also being the ancestors of the Neolithic farmers in Europe). Come the Bronze Age, the people in the Levant would in turn absorb migrants from further north and east, including some originating as far afield as modern Iran.
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Post by Brandon S. Pilcher on Oct 1, 2024 14:13:27 GMT -5
This woman represents a population of humans known as the Red Deer Cave people who lived in southwestern China between 18,000 and 11,500 years ago. When paleoanthropologists found their skeletal remains, they originally assessed them to come from a late-surviving species of “archaic” hominins due to their robust cranial features and relatively small braincases. Later genetic analysis would reveal that the Red Deer Cave people were in fact modern humans related to East Asian and Native American people. However, this same analysis revealed that they had the ancestral allele for at least one gene affecting skin color, suggesting that these people had a darker skin tone than most modern East Asians.
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Post by Brandon S. Pilcher on Oct 2, 2024 15:41:59 GMT -5
An acrylic painting I did of a Central African woman and her pet leopard. Women and their cats is an enduring artistic trope for a good reason, especially if the cat is big and almost as fierce as its mistress!
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Post by Brandon S. Pilcher on Oct 6, 2024 15:57:44 GMT -5
Meet Nadjela and her pet leopard Ishaga, two characters from another short sword & sorcery story I have drafted (it is awaiting review and revision now). These are the same characters from my “Woman and Leopard” acrylic painting, but now they have names and a story to go with! Nadjela is the Crown Princess of Batela, a fictional kingdom in ancient Central Africa that I would say is somewhere within modern Gabon. Before she was born, her father King Mwambi fended off a Roman invasion with an enchanted staff the creator god Nyambe gifted to him, a staff capable of shooting lightning bolts. Thirty years later, the Romans have stolen the staff, and it’s up to Nadjela and Ishaga to infiltrate their coastal fort and retrieve it!
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Post by Brandon S. Pilcher on Oct 7, 2024 8:43:52 GMT -5
This is a sketchbook doodle of the antagonist in my newest short story, a Roman legate (legionary general) named Claudius Scipio. As the leader of a garrison positioned on the coast of what will someday be Gabon, Claudius takes great pride in being a descendant of the famous Scipio Africanus (the general known for beating Hannibal of Carthage in battle during the Second Punic War) and wishes to conquer the entire African continent on behalf of the Empire. The obstacle to realizing his ambition is an enchanted staff the local Batela people possess which can shoot lightning bolts, a staff their king once used to beat back the legion Claudius now commands. To get around this, the legate has the staff stolen and brought to him, and it's up to the Batelan warrior princess Nadjela and her leopard companion Ishaga to retrieve it from his clutches!
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Post by Brandon S. Pilcher on Oct 8, 2024 18:03:51 GMT -5
This is another artwork showing the villain from my recently drafted short story “The Thunderstaff of Batela”, a Roman legate named Servius Scipio (his name was originally going to be Claudius Scipio, but someone informed me that Romans of the Scipio family line would not have used “Claudius” due to their cultural naming conventions). That staff he’s holding is the Thunderstaff, which is capable of shooting bolts of lightning. He had it stolen from the (fictional) kingdom of Batela in Central Africa and plans it use it to conquer the entire continent for Rome. It’s up to Nadjela, princess of Batela, and her leopard companion Ishaga to stop him!
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Post by Brandon S. Pilcher on Oct 12, 2024 3:44:04 GMT -5
This is an okapi I sketched in my sketchbook using a photo reference. I think the legs came out too short, but I am proud of having captured its movement. Okapi may look horse- or zebra-like, but these Central African animals are actually rainforest-adapted cousins of the giraffe.
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Post by Brandon S. Pilcher on Oct 12, 2024 15:45:27 GMT -5
Acrylic painting I did of a generic Roman military officer. I'm not one of those guys who thinks about the Roman Empire all the time, but they do pop up in my brain every now and then.
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Post by Brandon S. Pilcher on Oct 13, 2024 14:20:25 GMT -5
Nadjela, Crown Princess of Batela, and her loyal leopard companion Ishaga are in attack mode this time! I think I may draw a more detailed environment for these two characters sometime in the near future.
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Post by Brandon S. Pilcher on Oct 14, 2024 16:58:16 GMT -5
Last night, I scribbled down another short story starring my character Nadjela of Batela. This would be a quick portrait sketch of that story's main antagonist, Kojo. He is a prince from the kingdom of Agisymba, which lies in the savanna adjoining Lake Chad to the north of Batela. Kojo's agenda is to marry Nadjela so he can seize control of her kingdom at the behest of his ambitious father King Oringo. When the princess of Batela rejects his proposal, Kojo is more than eager to resort to underhanded, even sorcerous methods to achieve his goals...
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Post by Brandon S. Pilcher on Oct 15, 2024 11:48:45 GMT -5
This is a portrait sketch of Pontius Pilate, a Roman politician who governed the province of Judaea (modern Israel and Palestine) for about ten years in the early first century AD. He is known to have governed with an iron fist, even being removed from office after ordering the massacre of Samaritan rebels. However, perhaps Pilate’s most infamous act is ordering the execution of the Jewish preacher Yeshua ben Yosef, better known as Jesus of Nazareth. I couldn’t find what I was certain was an accurate portrait of Pilate from his time (the closest were busts that looked way too much like Julius Caesar to be anyone else in my evaluation), so I based my portrait’s features on Robert De Niro. That guy should totally play an ancient Roman if he hasn’t already.
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Post by Brandon S. Pilcher on Oct 15, 2024 18:53:06 GMT -5
And here's some nature art for a change... Along the banks of the Amazon River in Pleistocene South America, this black caiman (Melanosuchus niger) has brought down a saber-toothed Smilodon populator for its next meal. S. populator may have been among the most massive felines known from the fossil record, with a body mass reaching as much as 880 pounds, but the largest black caimans on record have surpassed that at a whopping 1,650 pounds. To this day, the black caiman is the largest living member of the family Alligatoridae (even larger than the American alligator) and the largest predator in the Amazon basin.
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Post by Brandon S. Pilcher on Oct 17, 2024 2:54:13 GMT -5
This is a pencil sketch of an African forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis), which is native to the rainforest regions of West and Central Africa. They are the smallest living elephant species, with a shoulder height between seven to nine feet and a mass between two to seven tons. Some historians have proposed that these were the elephants that ancient North African civilizations such as Carthage, Kush, and Ptolemaic Egypt employed in battle, based on the Greek historian Polybius claiming Ptolemaic war elephants at the Battle of Raphia to have been smaller than the Indian elephants their enemies the Seleucids used. However, I find this unlikely, as African forest elephants are adapted to a humid jungle environment rather than the deserts or dry scrub of North Africa, and it’s likely that Polybius was influenced by a then widespread stereotype that everything grew bigger in India due to the climate (he would not have been a witness to the Battle of Raphia, having been born almost twenty years later). More likely, the Ptolemaic elephants were either some extinct species of endemic North African elephant or the larger African bush elephants (Loxodonta africana), which are indeed the ones that roam the region of northeastern Africa from whence the Ptolemies would have obtained them. In the modern day, unfortunately, African forest elephants are a critically endangered species due to ivory poaching and habitat destruction, with less than a hundred thousand remaining as of 2021.
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Post by Brandon S. Pilcher on Oct 19, 2024 0:52:51 GMT -5
Hey dudes, dudettes, and non-binary peeps, Today I am happy to announce that my newest novella Sinbad and the Lost Continent, a lost-world adventure inspired by the Arabian Nights, is now available on the Amazon Kindle Store!
Here's the book trailer: And the cover art I made for it:
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Post by Brandon S. Pilcher on Oct 23, 2024 16:48:49 GMT -5
While feeling bored one afternoon, I wanted to try making something using a different medium from my usual, so here’s an Egyptian pharaoh’s head I made with modeling clay and then painted with acrylics. The dude ended up looking kinda surprised or shocked, in my opinion. The simplified uraeus (snake head) fell off during the baking process, so I had to use super glue to put it back on.
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