Art Trek: "These are a few of my favourite things!"

Ah, Rutherford, you're so adorable! Adorable!!

 Well, that's August done and dusted.  And you know what that means: Time for some of my Star Trek fan art!

 Yes, one of the things that kept me busy last month was working on a rather ambitious piece for August's milestone 200th Star Trek art challenge.  Having helped to come up with the idea, I knew I had to pull my socks up and not turn in some half-arsed attempt that I hadn't even finished properly (like many of my other efforts).

 Oh, and half-naked Rutherford on the right there is not just gratuitous eye-candy - he's relevant to the proceedings what with being a particular favourite (not unlike Connor Trinneer's "Trip" Tucker, who also features later on).

 Anyway, here's the challenge theme:

YOUR Star Trek

Your task is to create something out of Trek that means something to you. It can be your favorite ship, character or idea. Or just some Trek thing that you like/wanted to draw, model, photograph, cosplay or sing etc. Do you own a Star Trek costume? Well, then snap a photo of it and submit it to the contest! You're into Trek gaming? Then make a screenshot of something you created in the game! Almost anything goes this time.  Have fun, and good luck!

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 I started by making a list of Star Trek characters, starships, locations and objects that I liked but, as you may have guessed if you know me at all, I couldn't whittle them down to a single (or even a few) thing(s).  So, there was only one thing for it: I was going to have to include all of them!

This was just a quick sketch to gauge the layout, so there were plenty of characters and things missing/undecided at the time

 I was thinking of a "Where's Waldo?" type affair after I came up with the idea of just drawing everything on my list - an image packed full of things to scour through.  And then I remembered Star Trek had some versions of sorts in the "50 Artists 50 Years" art book (which I then pulled off my shelf and flicked through): Amir Abou-Roumié's "Homestead" was the closest to what I envisaged. 

 It was going to have to be bigger than my normal efforts as I needed to fit quite a lot in, but not so big that I'd have to draw recognisable faces (which I'm absolutely rubbish at).  The initial sketch above is A4, but I resigned myself to doing the proper one at least A3.

This is the A3-sized version that I impatiently started inking and colouring in...

 Unsurprisingly, it didn't really work out as I'd hoped. I'm just not skilled (or patient) enough to create what I can see in my head - the cartoon (Lower Decks-ish) style that I envisaged just turned into crappy drawings because I couldn't help but go into too much detail to make things recognisable.  Plus, realistically A3 was still too small - I needed to go bigger, but it was already the middle of the month and time wasn't on my side.  It was quite overwhelming.  So, there was nothing left to do but have strop and sulk for a bit.  The image above is where I'd left it.

Strop over, this is how it looked once I'd pulled myselves together and got a grip

 Fortunately, after some encouragement from a few Trek BBS users, my mini-strop soon dissipated, and I went back to work on "These Are A Few Of My Favourite Things" (as I started calling it).  I was much happier with it once a bit more of it was done - and the addition of a few bold outlines really tidied things up as you can see above.  

Here's how it looked by Saturday teatime.  It's a bit on-the-wonk because I'd rotated and cropped the image to keep some things secret from the Fan Art Forum users - I didn't want to give everything away before the big reveal.

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 And by Monday lunchtime it was finished!  Despite it not being exactly how I imagined, I am satisfied with it.  This certainly is one of the most ambitious pieces I've done for these art challenges and, despite finding it intimidating at times, I've had fun working out what/who goes where (and what/who to include) - Gillian's spaghetti arm notwithstanding.  I kind of wish now that I had gone with a bigger size to fit more in - But then I wouldn't have finished it until the end of next month!

 Not everything you see here has appeared on screen, as many of my favourite Star Trek things exist only as concept art, merchandise, or in books (both behind the scenes and fiction).  Also, I discovered that my favourites are rarely those well known, iconic characters and ships, but I hope you can recognise at least one or two things from my little selection:

"These Are A Few Of My Favourite Things"

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 For those of you who are not Star Trek aficionados, I have helpfully provided a key to this "who's who" of my Star Trek world:

 The setting (1) is the interior of Earth Spacedock as first seen in Star Trek III: The Search For Spock (my very favourite Star Trek film), although the beige & tan decor (14) is from the Enterprise-A in the much maligned ST V: The Final Frontier.  The black shuttle (22) is the Kellogg Shuttle (there're some great 'photos' at the Sci-Fi Air Show), the little red one (37) was going to be the Hunhau yellow transport from DIS: "Scavengers", but I forgot what I was doing and coloured it in red - d'oh!  And I have no clue what the alien ship is (18), but I've loved it ever since I first saw it on the pre-publication cover of the Discovery: Designing Starships book (I suspect it's a Vulcan ship concept, but I'm not sure - I don't have the book, so I don't know if it features inside). 

 If you'd like to know about any of the others, either ask me in the comments, or if you'd rather not show your interest publicly, you can look it up at Memory Alpha in private ;)

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Previously on Art Trek (née It's a Faaaake! Not The Art Of Star Trek):

 

July 2021 - Andorian Piggyback

April 2021 - Ship Girl; May 2021 - TROI; June 2021 - Risa Revisited, all collected in Spinning Around

October 2020 - Under The Sea, I Spy With My Little Eye, and Lower Decks: Poo Patrol

August 2020 - Hellrunner Loves Spineback (Not Trek)

July 2020 - New Look Next Gen

June 2020 - Aefvadh
May 2020 - Princessium and the Po
April 2020 - Into the Arboretum
March 2020 - Brighter Future
August & September 2019 - here are the links to their existence on the TrekBBS: And it was *this* big! & Under the Sea... (August 2019), and Spytember (September 2019)
July 2019 - Blue Food (and the warm up: Baby Plastic Sperm Whales...)
June 2019 - Boldly Go in Infinite Diversity
May 2019 - (the leaked final scene) X Marks The Spot, and the main attraction: Treasure Map
April 2019 - Oops-A-Daisy!
March 2019 - Disco78
January 2019 - Caught Red Handed
October 2018 - Anomalous T-Shirt
September 2018 - Two Soups
August 2018 - Wild Things (and its prequel: Seeing Double)
July 2018 - Revenge of the Baby-Sat
June 2018 - Making Money
March 2018 - Murder On The Dancefloor
February 2018 - Narwhal in a Spacesuit
December 2017 - Unfinished Business
November 2017 - Let's See Your OC!
October 2017 - Celebrate Good Times, Come On!
July 2017 - Walk Like An Egyptian
June 2017 - Foreign Relations
May 2017 - Driven to Distraction
February 2017 - Of Prophet's Tears and Verteron Nodes (plus the warm up: The Celestial Temple Cries Golden Tears)
December 2016 - "Did the plan fail, Edward?"
November 2016 - Winter Solstice
October 2016 - Twisted October: Star Trek Art Challenge