Art

This piece, has a lot of influences, my first attempt at laying down everything that inspired/went into this piece was so long and incoherent I have to actually sit down and try to edit it into some kind of coherent sense. So I will separate the influences into paragraphs instead of in chronological order like I first attempted.

1. The little mermaid.
This piece was posted on Mermay which was not intentional but it worked out. When I first started to obsessively draw Sethos; because although Alhaitham is my favorite of all time (look at this website) I feel there is not enough art of Sethos out there and so I wanted to try and fill in that gap for myself. So as I was drawing Sethos, my friends Hale and MJ were having conversation about mythical creatures and the topic of mermaid came up. I could only think of a singular mermaid, The little mermaid, and with that the ideas of inserting different characters into the same roles in the movie, so mermaid Scara and prince Sethos was born.

2. Sinners.
If you have not watched sinner's do yourself a favor and go watch it. Is it a fantastic movie and felt to new and refreshing from everything that has come out recently. What I love most about it is that it spans so many genres, you can't calls this just a singular thing, it does not fit neatly into a box and it is great. The second thing is the many messages that can extrapolated from it, you can see it as a history of the blues, commentary on religion, race, colonialism, the exploitation of black artist and so on and so forth. A view on your generational roots. The songs are also just fanfreakingtastic. The songs that inspired me the most were "Pale Moon" and "Rocky Road to Dublin" I had those two songs on repeat for quite some time. I was singing and dancing at work and I finally needed to pour that energy into a character.

3. Dead Meat's Podcast episode on "His House"
There are technically two episodes dedicated to this movie so I recommend watching both. This video I have watched before but as I was watching their episode on Sinners they brought up the fact that actress Wunmi Mosaku was in this past movie they had already covered before. So I went back to rewatch this episode as I only had a vague idea of what it was about. Oh boy, so the first "His House" episode covered a bunch of history on the African continent that my north America ass did not even know about. I was just so angry that I knew more about European history than I did anywhere else really and I wanted to not be so ignorant so I wanted to implement more ideas from different cultures into things I make. (I have a whole notebook of ideas but not enough time XD)

4.Genshin- Sumeru
This point blends in with point 3 as this slight rage and embarrassment fueled my desire to try and find cultural inspiration. So Sethos is from Genshin impact, from the region of Sumer which has Middle Easter, Indian, Iranian, Persian, Northern African inspiration. Sethos being from the dessert falls in the Egypt/Norther African category. So that is where I turned my eye for outfit/instrument inspiration for this piece.

-oud. I love love love love the Sumeru Orchestra performance which includes traditional instruments in it's sound. So I went through the video and paused when I saw an instrument I wanted to try and use. I knew the character was standing so I needed something that could be theoretically lifted up from the ground. That is when I saw this lute looking thing. "Lutes are associated with Europe" I thought to myself so some quick googling led me to discover the Oud. The oud was a predecessor to the Lute and it has many differences such as not having a fretted neck, having a shorter neck and the overall shape of the thing. So after fixing my reference searches from Lutes to Ouds I moved on to the next thing which was outfits.

-all i know about princely outfits is of course normally of European or east Asian styles. I remember going on a fevered deep dive on a work day to try and find "royalty African outfits" which was did not turn out great results. I turned to youtube but I was not sure I was typing in the correct key words because I could not for the LIFE of me find anything, then by luck's end I found a something that gave me names of attires and discovered the kaftan, like I knew what it was but I did not have a name for it. My search was over, I found inspiration.

This was also the start of me unintentionally drawing characters with their eyes closed. I don't mean to do it just all the poses I think off that sway me happen to involve their eyes being closed, I am trying to break out of that habit.