Lonely Universe no. 003 (Reworked in 2025)
“Carmuke and Tobee wander through a grove of abandoned stiltpods. With their defenses long ago deactivated, the local flora is slowly reaching upwards and will inevitably return the elevated metal sentinels back to the spongy soil. As with all things here.”
This was a piece I originally composed in my sketchbook in early 2024. Notably, some areas of this piece began my experiments with pointillism. I liked the general composition and storytelling, but it had significant issues with value contrasts, the sense of volume in the forms, it lacked any kind of atmospheric perspective, and the linework felt sketchy and rushed (particularly in the background imagery.
In March 2025, I reopened my sketchbook to that page and began reworking the illustration by overlaying some of my new stippling techniques. Between that and some minor digital paintovers in Photoshop for refinement of areas that couldn’t be fixed just by additional dots, I slowly worked back and forth between the traditional and digital to get the final image to a place I was finally happy with.
The dense stippling really added a sense of tactility to the piece that helped sell the lush, spongy, flora-carpeted landscape and shifting the lighting dramatically worked much better with the star-lit night sky which was present in the original version. I don’t think there’s many pieces from my older portfolio that I’ll directly rework like this (although there’s quite a few I’d like to revisit as entirely new illustrations), but I saw an opportunity with this one to elevate the existing linework.
Ink fineliners (Sakura Micron 005)
Sakura Graphic 1 & 3 ink markers
Sakura GellyRoll 08 white ink pens
Crappy 5.5″x8.5″ sketchbook paper
Digital cleanup for print in Photoshop
About “Lonely Universe”:
Lonely Universe follows the wanderings of young human Carmuke and their dog Tobee as they explore the rich, varied, ruined remains of a long defunct galaxy-wide robotic empire. Steeped my usual inky details and a hint of retro-futurism for flavor, each new locale is a stop on their solemn pilgrimage through the stars. Despite succumbing to their doom thousands of years prior, the bodies of the robot citizenry still remain. Frozen in place for eternity, they’re preserved in the pose of whatever they were doing when the kill signal spread across the galaxy and eventually reached them. An interstellar Pompeii. Superstition and fear prevents the scattered pockets of humanity from recolonizing the mechanized worlds, but some, like our curious protagonists, inevitably yearn to learn more of what came before…