Halo Evolutions Art Contest Entries

The contest deadline just went by a couple of days ago, so I thought I should post my entry, and (sadly) the non-entry (since I discovered that I could only enter one piece) and a bit about how they came to be.

Illustrating Tobias S. Buckell's short story, "Dirt", I started with the linework below (after a few sheets of thumbnails):

The piece shifted drastically after I had scanned the original image in.  I didn't like what I had, so it became far more dramatic and grasped a much more oppressive tone.

 

Lot's of tweaking in the final stages - this period seems to be the big time-consumer in all my pieces.

  

And the final piece:

For B. K. Evenson's "Pariah", concerning a failed, tortured super solder, I came up with a much less dramatic and exciting piece... but also a much more subtle and conceptual one.

And to give it a bit more flair...

I stared at the two finished pieces for weeks, asking everyone I knew what they thought.  In the end, I went with Pariah, mostly with just a gut feeling... Hopefully I chose wisely, but I still keep imagining the old knight from the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade saying "You chose poorly."