Egyptian Thursday!

Welcome back to my artblog. I've slowly but surely gotten this thing back up and running. Drop me a line, leave a comment, all caps and really angry if you want... I love it all!

Anyways, today is Egyptian Thursday and that's when I show you a piece of a bit of a piece that I'm working on that deals with Egypt in some way. Ancient Egypt anyways, no Tahrir Square pieces on Thursday, sadly. I've started work on a graphic novel set in Egypt's pharaonic past and focusing on Hatchepsut, Egypt's first female pharaoh. It's been a blast so far, script to thumbnails and now the pencils.

The section of the story that this page comes from deals not with Hatchepsut directly, but with the Myth of Osiris, Egypt's god of the underworld, which is a fascinating read all by itself. This particular page is the big climax, when Osiris descends to the underworld to rule forever and his wife Osiris gives birth to their son Horus, who will become the new king of Egypt.

First off, here's the thumbnail. It's pretty tiny; the sketch book it's in is no bigger than a moleskin. The size doesn't really matter for me when it comes to thumbnails; more, it needs to effectively tell the story and convey the emotion intended. I had my "Aha!" moment with this page when I drew upon (no pun intended) my Catholic heritage for that central image. The rest just fell into place afterwards.



The penciled page as it stands looks a lot like my thumbnail. Sometimes a page is just right, and this was one of them. So far at least, I'll find something I hate about it tomorrow I'm sure! The next step will be tightening a couple areas and lettering it, and then eventually inking it. I'll keep you posted.



Let me know what you think, or just drop a line to say hi. See you tomorrow!

Egyptian Thursday!

Welcom back! It's Thursday and that means it's time to get in some Egyptian Art! A little while back I did a pretty well done drawing of Heket; I thought it was about time I went back and did another anthropomorphic female deity.

Cuz you know, there's just so many of them.

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Taweret is the Ancient Egyptian goddess of birth and fertility. She's a pretty fearsome looking god, with the head and body of a hippopotamus, the back of a crocodile and the paws of a lion. Taweret basically combines fierce, protective animals into one being. She also sometimes is shown with seven stars running the length of her back, in connection with her identification with the constellation the Big Dipper.

There's a lot there for an artist to play with. Let's see what we can come up with.

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Not a lot to go on...yet. Gonna work on this a bit more on the weekend. See what I can get it to. Pretty fun, this hippo-woman-lion thing...

Egyptian Thursday! (Hetek)

Here's a piece that I've finally finished inking! (It wasn't that long ago that I penciled it, but it slipped down the list of priorities a bit when it came time to finish the damn thing!)

The lady's name is Heket (Ms. She Who Hastens The Birth if you're nasty) and she was the head midwife of Ancient Egypt. Interestingly, one of her titles was 'I Am The Resurrection' and this led to her being at least respected by early Christians; they often used amulets depicting that phrase and her image.

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This piece started off pretty clear in my mind. I did a little, and very rough, thumbnail in my sketchbook but I more or less knew exactly how it was going to look. I don't know if any of it's clear but heres it is.

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At this point there's kind of two options I give myself in dealing with photo reference for something like this. I can either find something close and adjust the picture and composition accordingly, or I can allow for a greater amount of time looking for a photo that looks 'just right'. I decided to go with the second option here. I'll lean towards the former in cases where I feel like my idea isn't all the way there; the improvisation of a change in my layout can be exciting. This time though the image was so solid in my mind that I decided to stick with it.

First I found a couple images and cobbled them together to get the body. The lighting in the photo on the left particularly appealed to me.



Next I needed a frog model. Haha. It did feel a bit like casting. Normal when you're using people, but a little...weird... when you're dealing with a frog.



And then of course, frogs. Lots. Of. Frogs.

Then some more.

(I'll leave those off, there's too damn many of 'em)

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I penciled, and then inked the piece. Here's what she looks like.

I'm officially over frogs! lol No, I'll end up using them (and her) again.

I'll need to to justify all the reference I dug up!

Egyptian Thursday!

So, the post on this one's going to be brief. This is Heket, Egyptian Frog Goddess. Early goings here, with the drawing and posting to be continued tomorrow...

FROGS!

Egyptian Thursday!

Well, the week is a little bit over half done and there's work to be done yet! It's Egyptian Thursday, let's draw some mummys!

...or something...

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San Diego, contrary to popular belief, has actually been around as a big city for something close to a century now. It has its own share of buildings which in particular come from the Art Deco period, or to be more specific, a subset of the Art Deco period.

Art Deco, roughly the 1930's, was a design aesthetic which incorporated elements as disparate as clean geometry, human anatomy, the 'machine age' and a renewed interest (at least in the aesthetic sense) in pagan iconography, or rather non Greco-Roman pagan iconography. The last bit there combined with the discovery of the tomb of King Tutankhamen during that decade to form a variant of Art Deco, known as Egyptian Revival.

Egytpian Revival is more or less Egyptian-inspired buildings (sometimes architecturally or just ornamentally) combined with an Art Deco simplicity and geometric organization. It's a fun style, and one that (for obvious reasons) has been on my mind lately. San Diego has a good number of Egyptian Revival buldings and, it being San Diego, I took the opportunity to get out and do some quick sketching on location.

Fun stuff. Now I just gotta figure how to work them in to some pages...

(Oh, and ignore the marker bleeding through from the other side!)
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Egyptian Thursday

You had to know it was coming right? It's time for round three of Egyptian crowns! I kinda stretched this one a bit, but just a bit, to get in a couple things. One is the crown made famous by Nefertiti (she's also who's bust I used for the figure here); this crown, as far as the current range of research shows, was only ever worn by Nefertiti. I have some ideas on how to reconcile that though, and wanted to get some practice on it. The second is the hairstyle traditionally worn by Egyptian youth; it's called the sidelock. (Otherwise, as adults, many Egyptians chose to go completely bald, due to the extreme heat. That's what I'm doing for our female pharaoh as an adult) I also tossed in Hatchepsut wearing a head band, often worn beneath crowns, for cushioning I'd assume. It's an easy look without going all "Bamn! Crown!" and one that I think I'll be using. I can always incorporate different clips onto the knot.

Hope everyone's week is going well!

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Egyptian Thursday

Welcome back! It's Thursday and (as of last week, at least) that means it's Egyptian Thursday! I'll be doing a piece of art relating to that ancient world power. Maybe photo-realism, maybe comics, maybe something else... whatever strikes my fancy.

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First a little background. Egypt is generally divided into vast periods called Kingdoms (Old, Middle and New). These were divided into Dynasty; usually grouped by families (like say the Tudors or the Hapsburgs), these were listed numerically one through thirty.

The period I'm working in is the New Kingdom, and within that the Eighteenth Dynasty. The Eighteenth Dynasty is in fact the first dynasty in the New Kingdom. It's a time of big conquest, big trading, big monuments... Frankly, it'd be hard to not find a great story to tell in all of this!

Hatchepsut, Egypt's first female pharaoh, comes from this period and lies right in the middle of the Eighteenth Dynasty. I did a drawing of her a month or so back but I'm pretty unsatistifed with it. Let's try this again!

(Oh, and just an aside: This is an example of the vast spans of time we're dealing with in Egypt. The United States has existed 234 years. The Eighteenth Dynasty (one of thirty remember) lasted for 243 years. Yep, long time.)

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Hatchepsut here is wearing the Blue Crown (also known as the Serpent Crown) and it's generally associated with the Pharaoh as military ruler. This is a pretty good first pass on this drawing. I'll post the next step sometime next week!

Egyptian Thursday!

Welcome back to my artblog. Today is Thursday, and this week I'm adjusting the format a bit. I've recently been getting more and more into Egyptian art and history (again) and I've realized that a decent number of the pieces I've posted here have been on the subject. I figured that I might as well make it official. So out with Inspiration Thursday, in with Egyptian Thursday.

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During my Junior Year Thesis at SVA I got heavily into the history and story of Hatchepsut, Egypt's first female pharaoh. I've decided recently that I'm going to re-pursue that project and see where it takes me.

Right now I'm doing a lot of research and preliminary sketches and ideas. One thing I remember from this the first go-around is that organization is key. I'll open books and there's something that I can remember wanting to include or thinking about on the R train home, but never wrote down and forgot about it.

The cataloging starts now!

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This is a model sheet I've made myself for the various crowns that Hatchepsut wore. (Or some of them at least, there's a ton) Fun stuff. See you tomorrow!