About the Creator
Born in Chicago, Illinois, and raised most of his life in the south suburbs, Shamar has always had a passion for art. When he was 4 years old, he drew all over his bedroom apartment wall. Instead of his mother scolding him for using it as a canvas for his rendition of The Ghostbuster, she continued to allow the young prodigy to express himself. In his pre-teens, he was so creatively driven that he used to make his own action figures out of paper and cushion material because he didn’t like that most toy companies did not create all or have a complete supply of characters from his favorite TV shows and movies.
In his first year of high school, he won a county art award for the illustration of an old mason. When he was 17 years old, he created his first independent comic book series called “Jafari” which was inspired by many Japanese mainstream animations and graphic novel serializations like Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon, and Tenchi Muyo. Fellow schoolmates at Bloom Trail Highschool enjoyed his series and artwork greatly, they voted him as the classmate to succeed as a professional artist.
He attended Columbia College to study illustration and animation but lost most of his passion for it due to life circumstances. Even though a huge flare was lost for the arts for several years, there remained a small light inside telling him this was his true purpose. To get back into what he loved, he decided to turn it into a business in his mid-20s by becoming a freelance graphic and motion designer. After gaining his passion back, he realized he still had an exuberance for making a series and decided to create a graphic novel called "ANU and IMANI: The Greatest Love Never Told" (Anu&ImaniGLNT) to inspire young children and teens about love, relationships, and the spirituality that intertwines with it.
With Anu&ImaniGLNT still in the works because of its complexity, Shamar wanted to come up with something inspirational in the meantime that could spread even beyond the pages of paper, which bore the idea of a clothing brand called Shamash Shamar that symbolizes giving spiritual insight into the beauty and courageousness of one’s background and conscious capabilities. Shamar has made the core of all his work to inspire and uplift the youth and even adults for generations to come.
