After a long hiatus through the peak of the pandemic and over a year of intense personal challenges, 2023 was the year I finally felt the pull to pick the fine-liners back up. I needed a subject that felt raw, surreal, and deeply immersive to shake off the rust. This dense, tangled cluster of surreal eyeballs was the exact spark that brought my creative drive back to life.

Leaning away from realistic animals, this piece let me focus entirely on pure form, spherical shading, and creeping, organic textures twisting through the negative space.

Hand-inked by meticulously mapping out overlapping spheres, then using heavy stipple gradients on the undersides of each eyeball to give the entire pile a heavy, unsettling weight and three-dimensional pop.

This drawing is incredibly significant in the studio timeline because it proved to me that the muscle memory and passion hadn't vanished during my time away. It was the ultimate therapeutic project to mark my official return to the ink archive, showing that even after years of life getting in the way, the dots always wait for you.