THE PRINCE OF EGYPT The power, divinity and appearance of the Egyptian Pharaohs has been greatly fantasized throughout history. My initial fascination with the pharaohs began with me watching the animation movie: the Prince of Egypt as a child. The movie’s plot follows the biblical narrative of how the prophet Moses delivered the Hebrews from the land of Egypt where they were enslaved.
Screenshot taken of the movie the Prince of Egypt on Youtube =Despite the fact I found the narrative very interesting the movie tendered my fascination with the Ancient Egyptian Civilisation. The animated environment of alabaster stone and the seemingly-divine image of the pharaoh fascinated me. My initial intentions for an art project are realised in the concept sketch to the right which the Ancient Egyptian Pharaoh in full regalia in a posture of power Concept sketch of The Pharoah
Historical Investigation- Ancient Egyptian Canon of Proportions Doing further research on ancient Egyptian civilisation led to their Canon of proportions. I wanted to do a comparison between modern human body proportions and that of the ancient Egyptians. Today the basic unit of measurement in figure drawing is the head - with eight heads being used as a standard for average height- and is used by artists to represent the human figure proportionally.. An artist grid was used to preserve the Egyptian Canon of Proportions. Here different parts of the body corresponded to different squares on the grid. This grid system which consisted of 18 units for the whole human body gave artists the ease of representing the human body on any scale.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_proportions) My drawing below shows a comparison between artistic body proportions of the Ancient Egyptians and how they are today. I used an image I downloaded online which showed the grid system of the ancient Egyptians. On either side of the ancient Egyptian canon I also copied profile and frontal view drawings of the modern standard of body proportions—that is 8 heads tall. I aligned the Egyptian’s height to that of the modern human and worked out the subsequent width by ratio The image shows the [notice that it’s the same number of squares across and top Ancient Egyptian Canon of to bottom and that the grid proportions are the same]. proportions taken from the I noticed that in using that grid system in compliance with the ‘’8heads’’ theory, the height of the ancient Egyptian head was sitethe same as that of the modern human’s. But also as we see the proportions of the human body are also similar. Also by dividing 19 square vertical grids by the 2.5 grids occupied by a Egyptian head we get 7.6 heads. Almost close to 8. Other similarities included same shoulder level, hip level, full arm length, knee cap level, torso span. The differences however include:Different eye levels, chest levels, feet length.