Welcome to Deep Space Nine.

You may have noticed the change in decor. And uniform. And attitude.

Deep Space Nine is in general a very different sort of Star Trek. One with ambiguity, the possibility that someone wearing a color other than red might die, and a refreshing lack of Star Fleet monolithism and moral superiority.

Kira’s character is part and parcel of this new worldview. (Universeview?) She has internal conflicts, and a little more depth than ‘emotionally scarred tough chick security officer.’

Kira Nerys is the first Bajoran we get to know well. It makes it a little hard sometimes to tell which of her actions and opinions are general cultural Bajoran characteristics, and which are individual to her. She is a survivor, unwilling to forgive, vicious when necessary but also deeply spiritual and with a strong capacity for love and play that she has a long-standing habit of sublimating.

I’m very happy with how this illustration came out. Kira is often in the position of having too much to do: she moves snappily, and has a tendency to multitask. She looks like she is on the way to deal with some ‘problem’, and has paused to hear a shouted amendment to her to-do list. Her face has both good and bad points- it is a better portrait than I’ve managed to date on this project, and I love that her makeup came out looking like makeup. That said, the contrast is still a bit wonky, and her hair is definitely more cartoonish than accurate.

My backgrounds are… progressing. This one actually looks like an underpainting, which is a solid step in the direction I want to go. It’s just depressingly far from the last step.

In my memory, Dr. Beverly Crusher has a depth and importance all out of proportion with the role she actually played on TNG. I don’t have to look very far to figure out why: Crusher is a female doctor in her early forties, head of her own sickbay and a brilliant surgeon who struggles to balance her work with her mothering obligations to her child.

Change out ‘sickbay’ for ‘practice’, and that describes my mother as well, at least at the time when I watched TNG on thursday nights on the big TV in my parent’s room.

Re-watching the series now, I notice a different aspect of Dr. Crusher’s character. Certainly being chief medical officer on the Enterprise isn’t a bad gig, but it seems that Crusher never quite gets what she wants. She’s perpetually stuck in-between. Between whatever happened with Picard around the time Jack died and a relationship with Picard now, between the challenge of being chief medical officer on a starship and the promotion to head of Starfleet Medical, and between her clear command potential, her desire to practice medicine and her need to raise and protect her son. When she does have something unequivocally good happen to her (falls in love) her partner in a whirlwind romance has a mostly fatal shuttle accident and ultimately switches gender.

She never shows any particular disappointment with her life, but it’s hard to not feel a little sad for her.

I had quite a lot of trouble with Crusher’s pose, not the least of which because she’s a dancer and I wanted that to show through. Eventually I settled on a ‘treating the fallen’ pose, which worked out great… but left me with some serious issues finding background reference with a matching ‘low’ POV. I’m pleased with how the Enterprise passageway came out, but it’s a bit of a random choice.

And again, the blue/orange thing. It keeps happening. I think it’s following me.

It always bothered me that Troi didn’t look like an alien. Or act like an alien. She was raised on Betazed, yet she appears to have no cultural conflicts whatsoever living in Star Fleet.

Troi rarely acknowledges her mixed ancestry, and is even less often bothered by it. It is occasionally referenced, but in general characters like Worf wind up being a lot more fraught about their cultural heritage. But other than Troi’s mother being difficult (which appears to be personality rather than racially driven) she seems remarkably unconflicted.

So when I sat down to draw Troi, I knew I wanted her to look a little… off. Not quite human. I’m not sure I succeeded, but I at least I didn’t make her look awkward. I’m pretty pleased about that, given Troi’s preference for twisted posture.

In retrospect, Tasha Yar is clearly one of my childhood role models. Though I didn’t know the word at the time, I thought she was hardcore. She was also competent: Her opinions were respected by Picard and Riker, and they relied on her expertise. (In contrast to poor shot-down Worf.) She was pretty but not womanly, and seemed to find reminders of her gender to mainly be annoying. This resonated with me, because I was just beginning to notice the surprise or disapproval some adults exhibited when I enjoyed ‘boyish’ pursuits.

Re-watching the series now as an adult, I am struck by other aspects of her character. Most obviously, she suffers from first season syndrome. TNG was finding itself, (as many shows do during the first season) so her character presentation is a bit scattered and flat. Since she was only in the first season, that’s all we have to judge her on. Though her leaving the series did clear the way for Worf (who was a childhood favorite) it means she never got to grow a beard. Yar is good at her job, but she is not a generalist: She’s holding a hammer, and by god she’s going to hammer everything until she finds a nail. While she is strong, she is clearly also damaged in a disappointingly predictable way. Perhaps they would have developed that in a more interesting direction given more time, but the tough chick with trust issues/romantic anxiety is selling the potential of Yar’s backstory a little short.

On an arts level, and am very pleased with how her body came out. There are low points (the hands) but I nailed something about her character with her stance. She is clearly powerful and forthright, but also somehow brittle. I also like the contrast between her figure and Uhura’s: both are clearly adult women, but at opposite ends of the hourglass spectrum. (You’d think an ability to draw different body types would be part of an artist’s basic toolkit. Unfortunately it’s often not. )

The background… I’m still working on backgrounds. Suffice it to say that I didn’t just take a photo of the bridge and run filters over it. I re-drew it, even the damn woodgrain. But it doesn’t look like that’s what I did, it looks like filters. Bah humbug. I would like to note however that I attempted a complementary color scheme that isn’t orange and blue for a change. I think it works.

This series of drawings brought to you by Neil Degrasse Tyson. If you don’t know who that is, it is my pleasure to introduce an astrophysicist whose wonder and love of the universe is contagious. In many ways he is a successor to Carl Sagan, particularly in his effort to publish advanced scientific information in a generally accessible form, and to popularize scientific thought of all kinds.

The spark for the series I’m beginning today is a podcast that Neil hosts called Startalk. Not too long ago he interviewed Nichelle Nichols, whom you may recognize as the original Lt. Nyota Uhura.  While listening to the recent time capsule episode, I was inspired by the juxtaposition of the interview with Nichelle and Neil’s interview with Whoopi Goldberg, who of course played Guinan on TNG. (That’s [Star Trek] The Next Generation, for all the non-nerds.) Both were amazing and they reminded me of the formative role Star Trek played in my perception of women and gender relations in the future. While I never really fully bought into Gene Rodenberry’s utopia, I find I carry little bits of it around. I assume that the future will be full of women and men who can obtain equal levels of professional success, and that promotion is based on excellence. That sometimes even saying ‘men’ and ‘women’ will be a bit inaccurate, because not all people will fit under either heading. That no one will assume agression, tenderness, or other emotions are gendered qualities. All and all men, women, and other sentients will be presumed to be equal, without the assumption that they are the same.

I wanted my depiction of Uhura to primarily reflect two things: her competence/professionalism and her almost aristocratic grace. The facts: Uhura is curvy bordering on voluptuous, dressed in a miniskirt, and is typically presented sitting like a telephone operator with a funny-looking doohicky in her ear. I think I met my goals admirably, considering these restrictions.

I’m still not sure about the lack of chair. It works for me because I’m so familiar with the scene that by brain auto-fills that detail, but I think perhaps that her sitting on air may look strange to the general audience. Ah well. Like hell I’m drawing a full background of all those knobs and switches.

Once again, my webmonkey has afforded me an opportunity to pay him back for his monkery.

This time, he wanted a logo for a neat little tool he wrote.  This tool works with a Goodreads ‘to-read’ list and a local library system to give you a nice clean list of books you actually intend to read that are currently available at various branches of your library system. Well, our local library system. If you’re in the greater Boston area and use Goodreads, give it a whirl.

This is the cutest robot I have ever drawn. I’m not big on robots so it’s not a particularly broad selection, but still. Lookit his little underbite. D’aww.

The lines of this piece were not particularly difficult (thank you Netflix, for having Iron Giant available for inspirational purposes) but I am pleased by my integration of revolutionary war and robotic elements. Although on review I think I should have added a glow to the eyes.

Zeetha!

I’ve mentioned Girl Genius before, so I’ll just point in that direction and say read it. Zeetha is an awesome character but while I like her, I’m not totally invested in her, which is probably why I felt comfortable taking her quite tight character design and flubbing it as part of my learning process.

This is the ‘go faster and be looser’ part of that process. Again. The process is a cyclical sort of thing. On the bright side, there has been some clear progress. This one took about three hours total, and there were no outlines at any point in the coloring process.

Now, I implied there was news.  I’ve been spreading my branchy little dendrites over the internet.

Ever wanted to buy any of my drawings? I am now a member of a little artist’s association called Paper Ribbons, where you can buy both already made pieces and commission things based on a style choice and a short statement. Paper Ribbons is aiming to make art buying make a little more accessible. Pricing is based on size, so it takes some of the uncertainty out of trying to assess artistic value. (They make it my job, rather than yours.) My Paper Ribbons page.

If you’re more into my jewelry, I also now have a facebook page. Mostly because two people in one week gasped in horror when they wanted to ‘friend’ me and found out that I didn’t have one of those buttons. (They don’t actually issue them at birth. Surprisingly.)

And there’s always my etsy, which has been updating lately. Which reminds me, I’ve got some new pieces I need to take pictures of. Boo pictures. Hooray updates!

I realize there’s been a bit of gap since my last communique, but that’s because this is my 200th post.  Noticing that resulted in a nasty case of the Specials: I was struck with the sudden need to do something memorable… something special.  Which completely got in the way of making the damn post.

But hey, 200th post! And I have something very pretty to show for it.

I wanted to do something similar to an old piece I was very proud of at the time, both to try to do something awesome again, and to see how far I’ve come. You guys remember the first post-apocalyptic lady? This is like that, but more awesome. In part because this time the set up is better. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with your basic near-futuristic world weary lady warrior, but I think the idea of a private school punk who learned to survive after the bombs fell to be a lot better of a story. I mean, the husk of a dead city? The gattling gun/shillelagh dual wield? The ratty plaid skirt? This is a moment in a narrative, not just a moody girl in armor. (Not to insult the long and occasionally glorious tradition in illustration of brooding females with accouterments of implied violence.)

It’s also just flat better stylistically. Last time, I couldn’t build anything non-organic from scratch, I didn’t have a great grasp of texture, and an extremely simple angle for the lighting. This time? The only time I really needed to have reference in front of me constantly while I was making it was for the gattling gun. I made the scree field by hand, and I’m much better with texture. Still not totally happy with my texture technique though- Mr Donkey looks a little sandblasted rather than furry, but I was getting testy by that point and it was time to be done.

And now for something completely different.

It occurred to me that some of you might be interested in a guide to making stars like I did for the Diskworld post. It’s actually not too complicated. And besides, if you want apple pie you’ve got to learn to make a universe.

This tutorial has lots of pictures, so I’m putting it behind a cut so as not to clog up anyone’s RSS. It’s SFW, I promise!

Continue reading →

D’aw. Baby space turtle.

This young A’tuin sponsored by personal new beginnings. I won’t bore you with the details, (the specifics of other people’s revelations are rarely as fascinating as they seem to the person experiencing them) but I felt like celebrating/sharing with you anyway.

If you have no idea why there is a sea turtle with elephants on its back balancing what appears to be a platter of world-pie on their heads or why the whole shebang seems to be in outer space… Honestly I’m a bit surprised you read my blog. Everyone has a different opinion which book to start with the in the Diskworld Series, but this would probably be a good place to begin.