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.

Guinan.

What can be said? She added charm and emotional depth to every episode she was in, (I think the only character she didn’t *always* steal the scene from was Picard) and became a well loved character, despite being almost entirely superflous to the plot.

When I was a kid, I assumed that her backstory was shown at some point and if I just kept watching I’d get to find out what was up. I didn’t really realize until I watched through the whole series as an adult that A) she isn’t actually in that many episodes and B) you never find out what her story is. Whether intentionally or through a quirk of Whoopi Goldberg’s acting schedule, Guinan preserves her mystery.

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.

I’ve been doing some reading on basic graphic design principles lately, so I thought a re-vamp might be a good excuse to practice a them a bit in InDesign.

Here is my spectacularly unsuccessful flyer from two years ago.

In order to make the redo, I needed to make two short lists based on the original poster: one of the necessary elements, and one of what’s wrong with the original poster.

Requirements: Header/Teaser, three informational statements, tear-off contact info, and what is hopefully a good graphic.

Fixes: Too low contrast. Everything has approximately the same visual emphasis, which defeats the whole ‘eyecatching’ requirement. In an effort to show as many drawings as possible, I’ve pretty much eliminated true white space, which doesn’t help with the contrast issue. Also, alignment? What alignment?

Much better. Still, there are a few things I think I could improve if I wanted to spend more time on it. The graphic is not my best work, I’d prefer to replace it with something a little more recent. And I’m not sure how to resolve the header. The zapfino font ‘d’ makes horizontally centering the header problematic. Also I’m pretty sure the alignment between the header and the three statements should be consistent, but that leaves the header looking like I meant it to be properly centered and didn’t succeed. Foo.

The original flyer is old, but the special is current! Valentine’s day is approaching rapidly, and now would be a good time to begin to panic… that is if someone weren’t to hypothetically offer you a totally affordable and unique gift option. Just sayin’.

I’ve already done two color studies of this character, but while Sylvannas in her Undead Queen persona turned out really well, the younger Ranger General Sylvannas was, um, bad. (For one thing, I misread my reference picture and made her hair blue. In my defense I was playing a blue-haired elf at the time, so it didn’t seem weird at all.) So when I needed a subject for my adventures in painting faster and with less useless detail, I thought I might give her another chance.

Continue reading →

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.

I finally feel like I’m learning to sketch on my Wacom tablet. It’s a different skill from paper sketching, maybe because the physical motion of the pen doesn’t have a static relationship to the movement of the cursor, (a tiny movement can have very different consequences depending on how zoomed in you are) and maybe because the picture is appearing on an entirely different surface from the one it’s being drawn on. Regardless it’s taken me about four years of practice to get reliably tolerable results.

So I had a passing fancy to draw my three main comic characters in their underwear. I justified this on two counts: One, I should really know what the character’s body looks like, not just their clothes. Two, I think one’s choice in underpants can visually say something about a character.

Here’s Adiyenko. She’s all about practicality and is even a little modest, but she’s also entirely aware that boyshorts flatter her butt. (Digitigrade legs predispose towards some serious butt.)