Jabrosky's Crimes Against Fantasy Art

[Ireth]

Birds are dinosaurs, yet I've never heard that brightly colored birds are less edible than others.

Hence why I cited them among the exception to the "bright colors = toxic" rule. ^^; Sorry, I guess I should have only mentioned amphibians and the like.

 

[Jabrosky]

Cleo Has Her Makeup On
Cleopatra VII, the last of Egypt's Ptolemaic rulers, wears Egyptian-style kohl eyeliner and eyeshadow. Unlike her dynastic predecessors, Cleopatra actually took the trouble to learn the native Egyptian language in addition to Greek. Exactly why remains unknown, but I like to think it gives credence to the argument that Cleopatra VII had partial Egyptian ancestry as I've portrayed here. I wanted her to have a Zoe Saldana-type of look but don't know if it came out right.

The Matriarch's Melancholy
The Queen of Nubia (or Kush) wears a doleful expression as she gazes down from her balcony. Exactly what’s eating at her, I will leave to your imagination.

The bowl holding the palm tree in the background gets its color scheme from actual ancient Nubian pottery, which really did have reddish bases grading to black at the top.

Queen of the Prairie
I drew this female chief as a response to all the photos I've seen on DeviantArt of white female models wearing traditional Native American headdresses like the warbonnet. Sticky cultural appropriation issues aside, I always felt those portraits were self-defeating because they used Europeans models to promote Native American culture. If you want to portray the beauty of Native women in your art or photography, why not use actual (as in more than 1/16th) Native women?

This lady isn't supposed to represent a particular real tribe that exists today. I'll just say she's from some prehistoric group that only recently assimilated into one of the larger nations.

 

[druidofwinter]

Great artwork Jabrosky! I only just started looking through this thread yesterday, and thought all the pictures were wonderful. These ^ are no exception Keep them coming!

 

[Jabrosky]

Here's a quick one I doodled:

Lady Liberty
This is my interpretation (or redesign) of the American icon represented by the Statue of Liberty in New York. I wanted to give this version of the character a West African racial and cultural flavor in honor of the African-American population, whose longstanding struggle for liberation has helped make our country a freer and more equitable society. The shield she’s carrying draws on a Central African Azande design for inspiration.

 

[Gurkhal]

Very nice pictures. You deliver good stuff as always, Jabrosky.

 

[Jabrosky]

Styracosaurus the Color Shifter
What if there existed a dinosaur species that could change its color to blend into different habitats much like a chameleon? I picked the iconic centrosaurine Styracosaurus since it’s a dinosaur I have seldom if ever drawn before and because chameleons already resemble ceratopsians to my eyes.

Nubian Palace Guard
I got the idea for this from old “Orientalist” paintings depicting black soldiers chilling inside Middle Eastern palaces. However, while those characters were presumably meant to be slaves or mercenaries hailing from afar, I imagine this guy as a freeman serving the Queen of Nubia herself. Of course the architecture may look Egyptian, but then the Nubian and Egyptian cultures were always related despite their mutual enmity.

 

[Jabrosky]

African Aphrodite
After reading an article recording the presence of African people in ancient Greece and Rome (which was significantly more prominent than you think), I felt motivated to draw an African lady dressed in Greek attire. I'm naming her "Aphrodite" after the goddess of love, in large part because Aphro- sounds a lot like Afro to my ears.

Mind you, I don't think most ancient Greeks or Romans were black people. I believe most would have had a Mediterranean appearance rather like Antonio Banderas or Penelope Cruz. However, they did trade with a lot of different people around the world, so it makes sense for their civilizations to have polyglot populations with notable black minorities.

 

[Jabrosky]

Geoffrey the White Knight
Geoffrey the White Knight is a landless warrior whose original fiefdom has fallen on hard economic times, so he travels down to the wealthier kingdoms of the south in search of a new and better life. In the short story I have started writing for him, he will confront a dragon and meet this beautiful southern maiden. At least those are the must-keep plot points I have at the moment, but trust me, I’ll find a way to make the story less cliched than it sounds.

 

[Jabrosky]

Geoffrey the White Knight's World

This is the main landmass where my original hero Geoffrey the White Knight, protagonist of a short story I am writing, has all his adventures. At the moment I only have vague macro-regional labels down as I don’t want to over-define the world too early on and distract myself from the actual writing. Nonetheless I think the terrain textures here (made in Photoshop using texturizing filters on colors) look better here than on my earlier maps.

The major regions of the world are the chilly North, the temperate East, the tropical South, and the arid Heart. These are roughly equivalent to our world’s Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Mediterranean/Middle East area respectively. Generally speaking the Southern civilizations tend to be the wealthiest and the Eastern ones the most technologically advanced whereas the North is more impoverished and the Heart a treacherous backwater teeming with squabbling bandits.

Geoffrey the White Knight of course hails from the North, but he got dismissed by his feudal lord and so travels to the South seeking a new living. In the story I am writing for him, he confronts a dragon and carries out an errand for a Southern priest, but that’s all I will spoil for the moment.

 

[Jabrosky]

Omolara the Dragon Princess
This is the dragon my hero Geoffrey the White Knight bumps into at the story’s beginning. She used to be a beautiful African princess named Omolara, but the love goddess Oshun turned her into a dragon to punish her father for hubris. However Oshun had enough mercy to make the spell breakable on one condition: that a man kiss her without any selfish motivations. Can Geoffrey summon the courage to break this spell without even considering that he’ll end up with a hot princess afterward?

 

[Jabrosky]

Princess Omolara in Human Form
Omolara is the princess and heir apparent of Mobta, a small but wealthy kingdom with a West African cultural inspiration. She will become the love interest of my hero Geoffrey the White Knight.

When her father the King boasted of her beauty, the goddess of love Oshun took offense and turned her into a fearsome dragon to punish him for hubris. However, this spell can be broken as long as a man kisses her for unselfish reasons (that is, he can’t kiss her hoping to marry her afterward).

I should add that although Omolara is unarmed here and functions as the archetypical damsel-in-distress in the story I am writing for her, she is not totally defenseless. She’s actually pretty skilled at archery and ranged combat in general. What can I say, I like female characters who can take care of themselves!

 

[Jabrosky]

Caesar X Cleopatra
Julius Caesar, the great Roman statesman and general, helps himself to his paramour Cleopatra VII's fine half-Egyptian rear end.

Pharaoh's Blasphemous Booty
As you should know, it is extremely tactless if not outright blasphemous to watch your Pharaoh take a dip in her royal swimming pool. No excuses, it doesn’t matter if Her Majesty’s fine example of a Kemetic female backside mesmerized you. Though come to think of it, I can’t really blame you either. Yum…booty.

This is the first time I’ve ever drawn a wet human character, so I had to guess at the right highlighting method to render in her sheen. The black dots on her head are supposed to be tufts of peppercorn hair that have just started to grow back after a recent shaving job.

 

[Jabrosky]

Crude, messy, and incomplete compositional sketch for a planned drawing in which a Roman legion attacks a West African city and suffers heavy missile fire from archers on the walls. The Roman formation here is supposed to be in testudo mode, with shields covering all the soldiers in imitation of a tortoise shell. I’m actually drawing this at the request of some buddies on the official Total War: Rome II message board. So far I’m enjoying the challenge.

 

[Jabrosky]

Revamping of one of my earlier Pharaoh drawings:

Pity her kilt obscures the best part of her anatomy.

 

[Jabrosky]

One more Cleopatra drawing before I go to bed:

Caesar and Antony's Vixen
If Julius Caesar and Mark Antony were a hip-hop duo, it should be no mystery whom they would hire to grace their videos with her Greco-Egyptian beauty. Or would that be booty?

I admit that drawings like this are a guilty pleasure for me. Some might consider it disrespectful to Cleopatra VII's memory to portray her in such a sexualized manner, but then popular culture has always cast her as this object of romantic or sexual desire, and Greco-Roman writers did describe her as beautiful. Besides, booty drawings like this are fun to draw and manage to grab people's attention.

Now that I think about it, Cleopatra could probably shake it much better than a certain other female celebrity who has sunk to infamy in recent days...

 

[Jabrosky]

Alexander the Great Conqueror
This is my vision of the great warrior king Alexander III of Macedon, better remembered by history as Alexander the Great. Traditionally Alexander and his Macedonians have been portrayed as Greeks who unified all Hellenic-speakers into one cohesive nation after centuries of internecine squabbling. However, some scholars have argued that on the contrary the Macedonians were not proper Greeks but rather “barbarians” who spoke a different, heretofore undocumented language. Whichever side has stronger evidence to support its case, I thought a “barbarian” Alexander would look cool as a design, so I’ve given my depiction of him Celtic-like warpaint and a bear-skin cape.

Warrior Pharaoh
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 female 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.

 

[Jabrosky]

Alexander the Great's Steed
Alexander III of Macedon, or Alexander the Great, takes a ride on his trusty horse. The horse’s cow-skull headdress is my own invention, but the Greeks did name it “ox head”, so I wanted to pay tribute to that. It also fits in with the barbarian theme I’m going for here, since some scholars have argued that Alexander and his Macedonian people weren’t really Greek by ethnicity but rather “barbarians” (non-Greeks) who spoke a different language.

 

[Gurkhal]

Very nice pictures with black beauties although I'm not sure what I think about your version of the great Alexandros. To me the Macedonians would seem to have been mostly Hellenized by the time of Alexandros, although they were not ethnically Greeks.

 

[Jabrosky]

Very nice pictures with black beauties although I'm not sure what I think about your version of the great Alexandros. To me the Macedonians would seem to have been mostly Hellenized by the time of Alexandros, although they were not ethnically Greeks.

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

 

[Jabrosky]

Sekhotep's Sojourn
Pharaoh Sekhotep of Kemet, my original character, goes on vacation (or possibly a diplomatic errand) somewhere in West Africa. Obviously the head-tie she’s wearing is not native to her Egyptian culture, but when in Timbuktu, do as the Timbuktans do. In other words, she dresses according to whatever culture she’s visiting. Lucky for her that she’s not in the Middle East this time, what with their itchy burqas and hijabs.

Traditional West African architecture, especially the variation seen along the Niger River, is so fun to draw. It has a vague resemblance to the ancient Egyptian style insofar as both rely heavily on mud-brick as a building material, but the West African version has a pointy aesthetic that gives it an even more “exotic” quality.