Mammoth and the Druids

Inspired by my fascination of Astronomy, paleontology and the occult, this image was created with hand-drawings which were vectorized with illustrator and placed together in photoshop, with a black, red and sepia range of colors. I didn’t have an initial idea of who the three hooded figures where supposed to be, but people looking at this image generally regarded them as druids, which Implies something ritualistic about the story behind the image. Perhaps they have gathered to worship this ancient creature as a god incarnate, in contrast to how early homo-sapiens treated them. The Mammoth population began declining in approximately 14000 BC and were reduced to small populations on Wrangel Island, an Artic Ocean island in north-west Russia and St. Paul Island, in Alaska, before finally becoming extinct in 4000 BC, when the Pyramids of Giza were only 500 years old. While global warming bringing the end of the Ice Age was the biggest cause of their extinction, it cannot be ignored how much they were hunted by early humans. They were primarily hunted for their meat to be cooked an eaten but other parts of the mammoth were used for many other things; their teeth and bones were made into tools such as arrowheads, axes and hammers, their skin and fur was used for making tents, furniture and clothing and their tusks were ivoried into jewelry and ornaments. Referring back to the image, the planet in the background resembling Jupiter was added as a science-fictional element to deepen the story behind the image.

Cooking in Space

The physics in this situation are obviously not realistic. You’d actually have to be about 25 million kilometers away from the sun in order to cook eggs on a frying pan with a similar temperature as a stove, which is about half the distance between the sun and Mercury. Drawn by hand with black pencil on white paper, I used Photoshop to reverse the black and white and then I added some colour over some of the white using the paint brush tool and certain blending techniques. Originally, I was going to keep the image black and white but I added the colour after deciding that the object in the top left corner didn’t resemble much like the sun. I colored the egg yolk and left the rest since it was the only other object in the image that was similar in colour to the sun, and all my favorite works of art only have two or three colors.