I absolutely adore your art - I have to say that my favourite pieces of yours are the gravity bubble habitats. There’s just something about all that open air to fly around in! And then there’s your spaceships, your adorable cuddly characters, I could go on and on!
But I just wanna ask: what inspired you to draw tougher sci-fi?
aww thank you! depicting space stations as nice and interesting places to live is one of my passions so the gravity balloon / aerated cavern / hollow asteroid concept really spoke to me. i'm proud of those pieces. yes, it really is quite something how much room there is when you can build cities in 3D instead of on flat ground, right? 2 billion people can live together within the radius of NYC and still have a half kilometer of open air between them and their neighbors on any side. square cube law and all that.
my first brush with hard SF was Allen Steele's Coyote series, then i moved on to transhuman fiction with Charles Stross and Alastair Reynolds, but i guess i didn't really grasp the distinction between "realistic" and "soft" SF until about the time i simultaneously discovered tabletop nerds and Atomic Rockets lol. i also got into Kerbal Space Program around that time which really cemented things i suppose. to a large degree i credit AR and KSP with teaching me math and research skills, which ultimately opened my learning horizons immensely, so i have a lot of respect for hard scifi and i was pretty obsessed with it for a long time. i'd still say i'm writing hard SF, or hard science fantasy, though i'm definitely a lot more open to fantasy and soft scifi. ultimately, i think you can come up with the math to justify anything if you think about it long and hard enough.