#ancientlife

Sappho's Reply

"my voice rings down through thousands of years

to coil around your body and give you strength,

you who have wept in direct sunlight,

who have hungered in invisible chains,

tremble to the cadence of my legacy:

When I had set out to draw ancient animals after doing creepy crawlies for most of a year, I realised I'd taken for granted how great it is for the animal you're drawing to be... finished?

A lot of PaleoArt is using your imagination to draw the completed animal as it would have appeared in life. As such, many of the animals I drew in this collection were closer to my typical cartoony art style than when I drew insects and arachnids.

Colour scheme was a huge part of the challenge as well. As you may see by looking at the earlier paleolife compared the later ones, I did a bit of experimentation with made up colours. And later on, I took a lot of inspiration from living animals for some colour schemes.

I will be at Kids Con New England this Saturday, Nov. 16th from 10am - 5pm. If you are in the Portland, ME area and looking for something fun to do with your kids, stop by. I will have lots of paleoart prints and stickers for sale!

You can find me at table B10 in Artist Alley.

The ancient city of Myra, located in and around the town of Demre in Antalya in Turkey, was connected to the sea by a canal to the west of the Myros River (Demre Stream). On the other side of the canal, the ancient port of Andriake was used for sea transportation and trade.

Myra is especially famous for its Lycian rock tombs, Roman theater, and Byzantine Saint Nicholas Church (Santa Claus). Rock tombs, Lycian inscriptions, and coins show that Myra has been in existence at least since the 5th century BC.

According to Strabo, Myra, one of the six largest cities of the Lycian Union, was called Myrrh in the Lycian inscriptions. The 2nd century AD was the time of Myra's great development.