400 Years: African America, 1619-2019

African America was founded in 1619 when the first enslaved Africans were brought to the Jamestown colony. Our founding fathers included mothers as well, united in the bondage of chains and mutual support. Together they established a unity, a politic, and a culture which is what defines a nation. Although many methods were used to control and minimize our people, our memory and resolve remain unbroken. Read More …

Figure creation with Blender 3D and Manuel Bastioni Lab

Speaking of summer vacation, I thought I’d update you with a few of the things I worked on over the past few months. If you’ve been browsing my site for a while you should know that I do my illustrations primarily using a 3D program called Poser and polish them off with Photoshop. Recently I’ve been using another program called Blender to create various props and textures Read More …

African 3D Art: Fertility Doll Rigged for Blender

Well I guess she’s getting down! This is the fun part. Experimenting and learning new stuff. My character Nia needs a prop. Like Ujima has his tool belt and Kuji has her books. What better for a young child than a doll. Not just any doll but this Ashanti Akua’maa. It’s purpose is to help teach young girls how care for a newborn and to ensure healthy children Read More …

Weapons of Mass Distraction

Because I work with digital art it’s easy for me to get distracted. There’s always some new software, some new capabilities added, or some aspect of a program as yet unexplored. Worse yet is my interest in so many artistic styles and concepts. I do a lot of experimentation and preliminary work for images I’m working on or some bright idea I’d like to do in the future. Rather than let these images (I call them sketches) sit, I’ll be adding them to the site from now on so you all can see some of the process. The distractions have now been weaponized! Read More …

African Masks-3D Modeling

  So this is something new I’ve been working on for the last month or so. I’m slowly teaching myself 3D modeling using Blender in order to create and modify simple objects for use in my Poser art. Here are two masks modeled after authentic sources, textured, and set up for display. I expect these to turn up in some of my other artwork in Read More …