Ungit's Monolith
This sketch was inspired by a part in C.S. Lewis' Til’ We Have Faces. The main character looked at a monolith in the Temple of Ungit. She saw hundreds of faces in the smooth rock. For a reference, I used cover art from the album Until We have Faces by Red. "We are the nameless, until we have faces!" - Faceless by Red
Trapped
Trapped was inspired by the beginning of one of my favorite video games, called “Hyper Light Drifter.” In the game, the character suffered from a strange illness and at the beginning was shown being covered in a black goo that caused the disease. The goo restrained him while reaching for a powerful object. I liked the visual of the character reaching for hope while being pulled against by evil.
Boarding Action
Boarding Action was inspired by the T.V. show The Expanse, which was cancelled right before I drew the picture. It made me think about how unrealistic many science fiction shows and movies are compared to The Expanse. I decided to draw what a realistic space battle might look like if troops were to board a ship. My favorite part of this picture is the design of the spacesuits each of the soldiers wears.
Abstract Art
The idea behind this picture came from Tron - Uprising and various other pieces of fiction. A common visual style for many scenes set in a computer or mind include lots of floating objects that shouldn't be able to float. I thought something that looked like an energy orb floating between 6 planes would look interesting, but I decided to have one plane blown apart by the energy source so the orb could be seen.
Excavation
I started this as a perspective drawing with only the building and path, but I realized that the perspective lines I had drawn looked like the lines archeologists use to demarcate parts of an excavation, and I drew other parts of it in a way to look like Mesa Verde.
Forest Fighter
I was listening to "The Eighth of November" by Big and Rich when I decided to draw this. I was having trouble deciding what to draw when I listened to it and decided a scene inspired by the Vietnam War would be what I drew.
Gears 2 Cover
I wanted to get better at drawing and decided that one way was to try and redraw the cover art of video games. My brother let me borrow some of his copies of games, and I chose to draw the “Gears Of War 2” cover because it looked interesting.
Halo 4 Cover
Similar to the “Gears of War 2” cover, I drew this one to try and get better at sketching. Surprisingly, this one was more difficult than the “Gears of War 2” cover. I had expected the harder lines in the armor to make it easier, but it didn't. The abundance of shadows also made getting the details right quite difficult.
Interception
This sketch was also inspired when The Expanse was cancelled, it's a ship using its CIWS (Close-in Weapon System) to intercept an incoming missile, just like on real ships in the U.S. navy and others around the world.
McDowell Plant
Mr. Stevenson used to take the high schoolers on a mini-retreat to the McDowell Forest Preserve each year, and when I was walking around, I saw some flowers that I thought looked interesting so I decided to draw them. I spoke with my mother about a week later, and we were pretty sure the flower was a type of Purple Phlox despite being blue and not purple.
Moonbase
I don't remember what inspired this drawing, but one of the people I first showed it to thought it was a design for a coffee table, like in a Living Room.
Spaceship
I was looking for something to do on the bus ride back from Silver Birch Ranch, so I chose to try and draw a spaceship flying past a planet.