Stella Botanica

 Have you ever wondered how all those starships and spacecraft in the Star Trek Universe are made?  Well, wonder no longer as I have discovered evidence that is sure to surprise you.  The starships are not painstakingly fabricated on a planet or in orbit, but rather their parts are sustainably harvested from the giant machine lifeforms that grow in the Lightspeed Lagoon Nebula as the following illustration shows:

This botanical illustration must have found its way back in time somehow for me to have discovered it 250 years before it was created.

I know.  Shocking, to say the least!

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 But really, this is just my latest piece for March's Star Trek Fan Art Challenge: "Retro Rockets", as if you hadn't already guessed.

"Everything new is old again! Take inspiration from older art forms, styles and designs to depict Trek tech and scenes. What would a cave painting of first contact with the Vulcans look like? How about a transporter room in an ancient Roman mosaic? Regency-era Borg? Klingons discovering America? Medieval away teams?"

 For the challenge, my original idea was to paint a picture of Kimolu in the Art Nouveau style of Alfons Mucha, but that would have meant buying some new paints (as my old tubes have long since dried up) and doing a lot of practising.  As the month neared its end - putting paid to any practise time - I remembered an idea I had four years ago (?!? How can it have been that long??): Stellar (sic) Botanica:

 

 

 I had grand plans for an ornate and colourful (using watercolour pencil crayons) 17th-19th century style illustration of one of the giant machine plants (and associated "wildlife") from the Lightspeed Lagoon Nebula.  Needless to say, considering the time constraints, those grand plans were whittled down to the simpler and less time consuming inked drawing at the top of this post. 

 (Despite having been on holiday for nearly two weeks, I just never got around to starting anything until yesterday - in part because the weather had been conducive enough to be working up at the allotment instead.)

 

This is the USS Enterprise-A, a Constitution-class starship "made from the Stella Nymphaea constitutio machine plant, two stella anguilliform naceels, and other assorted machine lifeform parts".

 

 To help and guide me in my hasty endeavour, I looked at botanical art & illustrations by the artists Pierre Jean François Turpin, Georg Dionysius Ehret and Maria Sibylla Merian:

 

I based my illustration on Turpin's waterlily, included wildlife as Merian did in some of her art, and labelled it like Ehret's Magnolia