Digital Starship Illustration

[Burning Hearts of Qo'nos]

Hello all! I've been recently getting into 'drawing things that make you happy' mode because of that whole vaguely everything thing. I got into digital illustration many years after I stopped drawing starships, so I decided last night to try something on my ipad.

This is a USS Excelsior doodle/sketch. I was doing this from memory so the proportions and details might be a bit off. The app I use is called Procreate. I use pretty simple brushes and basically built the ship out of cubes to figure out the proportions and perspective. It was actually a lot of fun to do and I am hoping to do a lot more and share them here.

 

[Santaman]

Nice work.

 

[Mage]

From memory.......?

Damn...........

 

[Professor Moriarty]

Your freehand skills are enviable. When I first opened this thread I was just glancing at the image, and it took me a moment or two to realize it wasn’t a model or a CGI illustration. Then I read the accompanying text, realized that you not only drew this by hand, but you drew this by hand from memory, and decided that I’m not worthy, I’m not worthy, I’m not worthy. That is all.

(Seriously, effin A man! Gorgeous!)

 

[Eckauskas]

That is absolutely excellent.

No idea how much time you want to dedicate to things like this, but I'd guess there would be a market for this kind of thing on Etsy if you found a way to turn your sketches into physical copies. You've clearly got some talent.

 

[TrekMD]

Very nicely done!

 

[Burning Hearts of Qo'nos]

Thank you for your nice comments!

From memory.......?

Damn...........

I use to draw a lot of starships, quite especially the Excelsior haha.

Your freehand skills are enviable. When I first opened this thread I was just glancing at the image, and it took me a moment or two to realize it wasn’t a model or a CGI illustration. Then I read the accompanying text, realized that you not only drew this by hand, but you drew this by hand from memory, and decided that I’m not worthy, I’m not worthy, I’m not worthy. That is all.

(Seriously, effin A man! Gorgeous!)

You are far too kind!

That is absolutely excellent.

No idea how much time you want to dedicate to things like this, but I'd guess there would be a market for this kind of thing on Etsy if you found a way to turn your sketches into physical copies. You've clearly got some talent.

Thank you! Actually, I have been actively thinking about doing art commissions in general and have been trying to figure out what kind of art I might want to focus on (or just do any kind of work that comes my way). I dunno about running an Etsy shop in particular, that sounds hard (lol) but I am am very slowly increasing traffic to my instagram where I mostly have traditional ink drawings and maybe a couple digital portraits. I'm not very well versed in social media so its been a psychological struggle, since I feel honor bound to hate social media. However! I recently started streaming on twitch (toe-dipping, really) and just doing art streams. I planned on doing a starship for my next stream, so if anyone is interested in seeing the process live, I'd love to link you guys. I'll check out the rules on posting that kind of stuff here.

Yesterday I started working on a Daedalus class painting, this time in photoshop. I made a board on pinterest of for reference and then just blocked out the shapes based on orthographs of the ship. Color wise, I was trying to go for that kind of purple-y tint that they sometimes get in Lower Decks from their style of ship lighting (the Titan in particular). Was planning on working on this all weekend, but it turns out I might not have as much time as I thought I would. If anyone is curious on the process, I have some images of the construction here: https://imgur.com/a/93EeCeI

I'll post updates on this painting here

 

[Rekkert]

That Daedalus is looking great, and I love seeing those perspective studies, amazing talent!

 

[publiusr]

There is a bit of Mike Minor in that softness...

 

[Burning Hearts of Qo'nos]

There is a bit of Mike Minor in that softness...

I will accept any comparison to the greats. Thank you!

Got to spend some time with this yesterday and today. Mostly spent building out shapes and preparing large areas for smaller details. Naming it the USS Shran because every era needs a USS Shran. I had to repaint the neck and that uh...that round part where a deflector dish would go on any other Federation ship a couple times as I realized pretty late that I had the perspective all wonky. While we're on the subject, does anyone know what the four circles that are supposed to go in the cap to the secondary hull are? I've looked at a few different designs for the class and they always look like little nozzles. Sometimes they look like searchlights. There is no line of sight from that part of the ship since the sphere blocks it, so I figure its not an old timey deflector dish or anything. I was curious as I don't really know what to paint.

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

The internet needs more Daedalus-Class starship art!

 

[Professor Moriarty]

And more Burning Hearts of Qo’nOs art.

 

[Burning Hearts of Qo'nos]

Threw in a random star background and blobbed together a generic TOS-y looking cloud planet temporarily to make it feel like I had done more work on this than I really did. It kinda helped ground the painting as well so I had colors outside of the ship itself to give a sense of what the final image would *feel* like. I spent some time sharpening lines and correcting weird perspective hiccups that accumulated. I think I'm just spinning wheels though because I'm not sure how to address the hull paneling and I feel myself getting stumped soon haha.

 

[Michael]

I *love* that Daedalus painting! Wouldn't look out-of-place at all on the wall of some ship captain. Really well done!

 

[Santaman]

Really nice.

 

[TrekMD]

The Daedalus looks awesome!

 

[Burning Hearts of Qo'nos]

I *love* that Daedalus painting! Wouldn't look out-of-place at all on the wall of some ship captain. Really well done!

I can't think of a nicer compliment; this is exactly what I was going for! Thank you

In today's update that doesn't feel like much of an update: Any time I spend on this I end up tweaking the sphere over and over again because rendering out a sphere in 3 point perspective is tricky and whack. It's mostly just whack. After getting frustrated for a few days I came back to it with fresh eyes and was able to (I think) fix the perspective.

And now looking at it as I've embedded it to the post, it looks wrong again.

 

[Santaman]

I'm not sure everything is alligned up 100% perfect but I can't say that it is bothering me, guess if you want to be sure you'd need a 3D render program which can allign the whole thing perfectly no mater the angle.