"You chose... Wisely." Halo Evolutions Art Contest Winner!

My 'Pariah' illustration, which I featured in my last post, won for its category in Microsoft's (specifically 343 Industries) art contest!  The winners get to have their art published alongside the short story that they chose to illustrate in a future edition of the Halo: Evolutions anthology, published by Tor.


So to recap:  my art will literally be featured in the New York Times Bestselling "Halo" series sometime this fall!!!


You can check out the news (and a winners gallery) on the official site here.

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."