The child is crying and the grandfather offers comfort. Where? I don’t know. I have never been there. In my imagination it is somewhere in the Sahara. Kakan means Grandfather in Hausa. Hausa is spoken in parts of West-Africa. So maybe Niger? Or is this family traveling on a trade route through the desert and ended up in Egypt. Is it today? Or many hundred years ago?

I’m always fascinated by paintings of the old masters; Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps, Vasily Polenov, Vasiliy Vereshchagin, John Singer Sargent, etc. But also more recently the movie Zarafa is really inspirational. I did not try to copy any of them but if got only a little bit close I’m happy. Unfortunately I can’t paint. I have to build. Today (3d) computer generated art is maybe frowned upon, but there are so many 3d artist making really beautiful stuff. This unknown and unappreciated group is also a big influence. I hope they get some credits one day. Another source of inspiration is the map of Northern-Africa. If you look at all the places, you will find the most beautiful names; Tataouine, Ghardaia, Al-Jawf and many many more.

This image started in Marvelous Designer. Playing with fabric and wanting to do something more than a short skirt, I started building a tent. Not many images I did in the past contain people in them and I think this is very limiting; people are the most beautiful subjects in art. They are also the best way of telling a story in an image. So I set myself the challenge. I used Poser to pose the grandfather and son. I re-sculpted and re-textured them in Blender, put some basic clothes on in Marvelous Designer and finally imported all the assets into Vue.

No animals were harmed in the making of this image 😉