What inspires your work?

I’ve been drawing and making up little stories since the tender age of five years old. Like many other creative individuals, I believe that impulse has its roots in a desire to express my inner thoughts. As someone on the autism spectrum, I’ve always been a solitary introvert prone to daydreaming about his own little world. Art and writing for me are my favorite ways to get this inner world out of my head and display it for the whole world.

Sources of inspiration for individual works can come from potentially anywhere. It might be something as simple as something I see or read about on the Internet, or something I’ve spotted at the corner of my eye in real life. In other cases, I may draw upon history, archaeology, anthropology, paleontology, and occasionally myth and legend. Sometimes I want to do my own personal take on a popular theme or character from these sources, whereas other times I might be inspired by a more obscure person or animal, historical event, or time and location that most people don’t know much about.

Still other influences may come from books I’ve read, movies I’ve seen, or computer games I’ve played. My favorite fiction tends to be fantasy and sci-fi adventures by authors such as Robert E. Howard, Charles R. Saunders, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. My taste in movies is similar, with favorites including Jurassic Park, Jurassic World, Disney’s Tarzan, James Cameron’s Avatar, the 2005 King Kong remake, and Black Panther. As for games, I’m particularly fond of action-packed RPGs (e.g. Skyrim and Far Cry: Primal), strategy (e.g. Age of Empires, Sid Meier’s Civilization, and the Total War series), first-person shooters (e.g. the Doom series), and building/management simulators (e.g. Zoo Tycoon, Planet Coaster, Planet Zoo, Jurassic World: Evolution, Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis, and Pharaoh). Oh, and almost anything with dinosaurs.

Finally, a major reason why so many of my pictures and stories (most of all those with dinosaurs) have jungle settings is that I spent around six years of my childhood as an American expat in Singapore (my dad was in the oil industry). I always felt the verdant tropical vegetation of that country was gorgeous and evocative of adventure and the primeval world. Of all the many places I’ve ever lived, it was probably Singapore that influenced my creative work the most.

What is your writing process like?

More often than not, writing short stories involves what I call “mental outlining”. I’ll grow the story in my head before or during the writing process, so that I know what is going to happen ahead of time. Occasionally, I will scribble down brief notes in my notebook summarizing critical scenes in the story or the major characters, but most everything else is planned in my imagination.

When writing novels, on the other hand, I require at least a basic written outline before embarking on the story itself. For Priestess of the Lost Colony, for example, I wrote down a list of the major events in bullet points, as well as assorted notes on the main characters and their backstories. Even then, I did not have everything figured out before writing the story itself. There were many places towards the end of the novel where I had to “wing it” and make things up as I went along.

Why do you draw Tyrannosaurus rex and other dinosaurs as scaly? Didn’t they all have feathers?

Certain dinosaurs, namely the maniraptoran coelurosaurs (e.g. dromaeosaurids such as Velociraptor, oviraptorosaurs such as Oviraptor and Caudipteryx, and of course modern birds) almost certainly had feathers, and I do typically portray them as feathered. However, I feel the prevalence of feathers (or fuzzy filaments called protofeathers) within the Dinosauria tends to be exaggerated by the clickbait press in this day and age.

For example, a lot of artists these days will draw protofeathers on tyrannosaurids like T. rex, yet all the skin impressions we have from the Tyrannosauridae show scaly skin (with the face possibly having a “cracked” texture similar to crocodiles and alligators). The same is true for almost all dinosaurs outside the coelurosaurian subgroup of theropods (meat-eating dinosaurs). Therefore, I see feathers and protofeathers as a development unique to a few lineages of coelurosaurs, with almost all the other dinosaurs having scales only.

Why don’t you draw your theropod dinosaurs with lips covering their teeth?

In recent years, it has become popular within the paleontology enthusiast community to claim that theropod dinosaurs would have had lips covering their teeth when they had their mouths closed, similar to modern squamates (lizards and snakes). The reasoning goes that lips covering their teeth would hydrate the enamel, and that the reason crocodiles and alligators lack such lips because they are semi-aquatic (never mind that, during dry or colder periods, some species “hibernate” for months by digging out burrows to hide in away from water).

The problem with this hypothesis is that almost all theropods have a prominent overbite with the upper teeth sliding over the lower jaw when they had their mouths closed (see the below photo of a T. rex skull, for example). If theropods had the lip covering that has become trendy in contemporary paleoart, the upper teeth would probably stab through the bottom of the lower lip from inside! By contrast, modern squamates (see the second photo of a crocodile monitor lizard’s skull below for example) do not have this overbite, so their upper teeth do not slide above the lower jaw as in theropods and crocodilians.

 

It therefore seems more reasonable to me that theropods lacked lips, making them more similar to crocodilians than squamates in this regard. Since all dinosaurs would have shed their teeth with regularity, they would probably not need lips for keeping the enamel of their teeth hydrated anyway.

Why do you draw ancient Egyptians and other North Africans as Black? Aren’t they supposed to look “Middle Eastern” or “Mediterranean” (i.e. light tan-skinned)?

A major reason we see the people and cultures of North Africa as essentially “Middle Eastern” or “Mediterranean” (i.e. resembling, or related to, Southwest Asians and Southern Europeans) rather than truly African is due to historical conquests and colonization of the region by Eurasian outsiders such as the Greeks, Romans, Phoenicians, and most famously the Muslim Arabs (among others) in the last three millennia. These would have introduced genes, languages, and cultures not indigenous to the region. It’s more or less similar to what happened to Central and South America when the Spanish and Portuguese invaded them after 1492, admixing with the Native American people while imposing their own culture and language onto them.

This isn’t to say that there was no gene flow or cultural intercourse between North Africa and Eurasia even before these major conquests. However, it is my belief that the aboriginal people of North Africa, including the southern (or Upper) Egyptian founders of pharaonic civilization, were fundamentally native Africans, no less so than people living in other regions of the continent. They would have been among the people who stayed behind in Africa while the ancestors of all non-African humans left around 70,000 years ago. Therefore, they would have retained the darker skin and other warm-climate adaptations of the first African humans and so would have appeared Black to modern eyes. The lighter skin we associate with North Africa today seems to be of recent Eurasian origin since the genetic alleles they carry for this skin color are related to European ones which did not become widespread even in Europe until after 8,000 years ago.

If you look at ancient Egyptian depictions of themselves compared with foreign peoples, you will find that the Egyptians generally depicted their own as a reddish- or mahogany-brown color significantly darker than the tan-skinned peoples of the Mediterranean basin and the Middle East, although it is true that they also painted people from the kingdom of Kush (in what is now Sudan, further up the Nile) as even darker than themselves (often literally black). Of course, since the Egyptian civilization lay at a geographic crossroads between the Mediterranean and Sudan, there would have always been gene flow from both of these areas and therefore more diversity in the Egyptian population’s skin color than the ancient paintings may suggest. Nonetheless, my interpretation of this convention is that the median ancient Egyptian skin tone would have been similar to mahogany or milk chocolate, not unlike many people of African descent who are considered Black today. Indeed, there are people in Egypt today, particularly in the southern part of the country, who have that exact same skin tone.

By the way, it is popularly claimed that Cleopatra VII, the last ruler of Egypt’s Ptolemaic dynasty, was of pure Greek or Macedonian ancestry in contrast to the native Egyptian population she ruled over. And it’s true that the Ptolemaic dynasty was founded by a Macedonian general named Ptolemy who served under Alexander the Great. However, although we know that Cleopatra VII would have had this Macedonian ancestry on her father’s side, the identities of her mother and her paternal grandmother remain unknown. Skeletal analysis of remains possibly belonging to her (half?) sister Arsinoe IV have shown a mixture of African and European physical features, which opens the possibility that Cleopatra herself may have been of partial Egyptian (or other African) ancestry. Therefore, I prefer to depict Cleopatra as a woman of mixed African and Mediterranean descent, which many would consider Black under the American one-drop rule.

UPDATE 7/13/24: A friend of mine ran some ancient Egyptian samples, including one from the predynastic period, through some genetics software to break down their ancestry and predict their phenotypes. Most turned out to have had “dark to black” skin, and the predynastic sample’s ancestry vaguely resembled an almost even sub-Saharan African/West Eurasian cross (although this could simply be indigenous Northeast African ancestry, which we would expect to be intermediate between sub-Saharan and Eurasian peoples or closer to the latter since Eurasians ultimately originated from Northeast African migrants).

Why do you draw so many sexy Black women if you’re a White dude?

In large part, it’s my personal preference. Some gentlemen prefer blondes or redheads, and others go for Asian or Latina women. For me, it’s Black women. The best way I can describe it is that it’s an “opposites attract” thing, or the allure of the exotic (“exotic” being a relative and subjective descriptor, of course). In my opinion, such preferences are no more problematic than any other oriented around physical features (e.g. hair color, eye color, body type, etc.). The problem comes in when you start attaching inaccurate stereotypes to certain races (e.g. the submissive Asian woman, the well-endowed hyper-masculine Black man, or the hyper-sexual Black woman), but of course I know that there are as many different types of Black women as there are any other.

Furthermore, for a long time Western society has denied and disrespected the natural beauty of African women. There is still a pervasive mentality that they can only be beautiful if they have relatively light skin and more European-like physical features due to admixture. Even African and Afro-Diasporan communities don’t seem to be immune to this racist conditioning, hence the phenomenon called colorism. That’s a prejudice I want to see countered by giving more exposure to African beauty.