Art Trek: The Andorian with the Rubber Ducky Room Tattoo

 Well, it's Tuesday, and fortunately someone did make a delivery to the Rubber Ducky Room which means I was able to escape from there to bring you this: a double helping of Star Trek fan art!   Unfortunately, I don't know who it was that left the door open while they stacked the tractor beam emitters, or nurses, or photon torpedoes, or whatever it was they'd delivered, so I don't know who it is you can thank for enabling this glut of self indulgence gallery of fine art?

 

[It all happens on Tuesdays]

 Before we get to the Rubber Ducky Room nonsense, we need to make a quick return to February when I eventually managed to drag myself away from my Rutherford action figures and make a start on that month's art challenge: "I like the Old Stuff better than the New Stuff" (art based on 20th century Trek).   

 I returned to an idea I had for January 2018's "Your favourite Trek moment" challenge, and which has been languishing in my files since then.  I'd got as far as selecting some screen caps from ST III: The Search For Spock (my favourite ST film!) and making a very quick sketch of how I wanted to put them together, but that's it.  I'd named it Uhura: Queen of Starfleet!

 

Speaking of favourite trek moments, here's some music from one of mine to accompany

your tutting, sighing, and scrolling: "Stealing the Enterprise" from ST:III, of course!

 

 Anyway, I chose some more screen caps (from TrekCore and Cygnus-X1), resized them, roughly "cut them out" in MSPaint, and slapped them all together in order to create a poster featuring my favourite scenes, characters, and props:

 

Clockwise from the top: Earth Spacedock, Commander Nyota Uhura, Vulcan guard and maidens, Spock (age 17), Lieutenant Saavik, Doctor David Marcus, Spock's and Saavik's hands doing the pon farr finger thingy, Grissom comms officer, Commander Janice Rand, USS Grissom, Valkris, and a Klingon Bird-of-Prey coming in to land near Mount Seleya on Vulcan in the centre.

 

Then, after adding USS Excelsior (which I'd somehow neglected), I set to with Paint's brush and spray can thingies in an attempt to make the cut-outs look less obvious:

 

Oops! Looks like Excelsior's lower saucer could do with a bit more work.

 

 Finally, I ran it through an expressive brushstrokes filter in FotoSketcher to see if I could get it looking a bit like I'd actually spent days upon weeks upon months painting this (but not too much, otherwise no one would be recognisable and their proportions would be all wrong):

 

 This was supposed to be just a trial to see if I could actually make something that resembled an 80s Trek movie poster, but it turned out much better than I expected - although, this extremely amateur effort is clearly not a patch on what regular Photoshop (and the like) users could have come up with, that's for sure!

 I definitely needed to sort out the background around Excelsior's saucer, and blend the background edges of Mount Seleya and the Vulcan maidens in a bit more, but otherwise I was quite pleased with the afternoon spent mucking about in Paint & FotoSketcher.

 

 As I may have mentioned before, I love Star Trek III - it's my favourite Trek film - and there's very little that I would change about it (minor cosmetic stuff, mostly).  However, some things could have been expanded upon, or maybe featured in their own little spin-off Short Trek?  So, this poster is for that "what could have been" short film montage.

 After producing the image below, I realised that I should have titled it "Star Trek IIIa" to differentiate it from the original.  Or, "Star Trek III-A", perhaps?

 

 So, I debigulated the image and tweaked the credits (amongst one or two other things), and decided upon a title: Star Trek III-B! (Because IIIa looked too much like Ilia [and we all know she didn't make it past TMP, poor thing], and III-A is probably the directors cut, or something):

 

And that's February taken care of.  Now on to March! 

 

~o~

 Well, sh-*bleep*. You wake up after a heavy night at the crew lounge only to find someone's tattooed your torso with the secret blueprints of the off-limits Rubber Ducky Room.  Is it a practical joke?  A mysterious game?  A Starfleet Intelligence op gone wrong?  Only one thing's for certain: You're in BIG trouble if Captain Freeman finds out!

 

Yep, this is my concept for this month's Art Challenge: Blueprints

 

Rubber Ducky Room identified by Star Trek researcher extraordinaire,

Jörg Hillebrand, in this tweet.

 I'm not one for drawing technical stuff (even though I love looking at everyone else's), and this was the perfect excuse to draw one of my favourite background ensigns from Star Trek: Lower Decks : "Andorian ensign 1" (according to Memory Alpha).  Isn't he adorable?!

 Not having any other ideas, I considered using the communal sonic showers for the background scene.  However, after a good look at them, I thought the translucency and grid-work would be too complicated for marker pens:

 

[Screenshot from LDS: "Kayshon, His Eyes Open" via Cygnus X-1.  Ahhhh... Rutherford!]

 I had a few goes at replicating the sonic shower area with marker pens, and while the translucent divider worked better than I expected, the gridwork most definitely did not:

 

 However, all the measuring and counting of the gridwork holes inspired me to do the background as a blueprint of the shower area.  Much easier!  And it meant there'd be more blueprinty goodness.

 So, here he* is in situ - Adorable Andorian ensign #1 discovering that he's been tattooed with blueprints of the off limits Rubber Ducky Room in Cerritos' lower decks communal sonic shower area:

 

I was kicking myself for not including an actual rubber ducky

to go next to the shampoo or on the towel!

 

* Of course, being Andorian, Ensign #1 is likely a chan (possibly a thaan),

and should be addressed as Cha (if one goes with the Novelverse interpretation

of Andorian biology and culture, which I do and Lower Decks seems to

if Jennifer's last/family name is anything to go by)

 The Andorian with the Rubber Ducky Room Tattoo now comes complete with an actual rubber ducky - and a couple of other delightful bathtime toys: Buddy the Vulcan** and the buff, pretty-boy nurse/med tech (who looks a LOT like my second favourite lifeguard at the pool - he was there this morning along with my original favourite.  Mmmmmm...)!

 

I haven't decided whether Buddy and Pretty Boy are the culprits, or just admirers?

Or both?!

 

** So named by the apparent fan club on Reddit and tumblr.

 

 I thought I'd finished, and then realised that I'd forgotten about the sonic shower FX!  So, I added some pixelation which vaguely approximates what we saw in LDS: "Kayshon, His Eyes Open", and enhanced the image somewhat (as the photo was taken in rather poor light):

 

 

~o~

 And that's the lot.  You've reached the end - well done!  Treat yourself to a drink or twelve.  Even though I did notice an awful lot of very fast scrolling from one or two of you...