I was born in Germany. My father was in the british army and stationed there at the time. It was there, in 1990, when the quarters we were living in received a cable connection to Satellite TV, that I discovered Star Trek. I was about 10 when I first watched it. Don’t judge me, I was an outdoors kid so was rarely to be found in front of a TV! Anyhoo, after that I soon discovered The Next Generation and that was me hooked. I’ve watch everything Star Trek has to offer since then, including Enterprise which I actually really liked! Some time around 1996 I got my first PC and started dabbling with Paint Shop Pro by JASC Software and started getting good. Then in 2001 I got a job working for Adobe, which opened me up to Photoshop, Illustrator and more. I’ve never looked back. My dabblings have even resulted in two airlines flying in colour schemes I designed and a charter jet too. I eventually turned my attention to making Lcars “Master System Displays” for ships we never saw any for, or for ships we only had small, blurry, copies of. I eventually got a good handle on them and have a large database of them now. In fact, that is how I came to be part of Axanar. Alec Peters came across my blog page. Seemed to have been impressed and e-mailed me asking to come aboard and design the interface for the Ares.
2 – what about Axanar(and the four years war) intrigued you to want to do fan art of that era in Star Trek?
I liked the format of “Prelude”. I thought it was unique amongst fan films. I love the look of the Ares class. It’s very much in keeping with the canon aesthetic design, doesn’t have any fanyboy elements so many fan designs suffer from. It had the right number of nacelles and was a well-balanced design over all. It spoke to me, told me this is a fan project that is doing it right. So naturally, I wanted in on it!
So, I guess you can say the visual look of it was enough for me.
3 – how long does it take you to create and finish a piece of artwork?
It depends really on what it is I’m working on and in what detail I need to go into.
A generic LCARS based control panel can take a couple of hours. But a control panel for the Ares can take days. The difference is the detail. The LCARS is just a lot of random buttons with random text or numbers on them. The Ares panels however, each button has a meaning. Everything has a purpose. That takes time to research and execute.
An MSD can take anything from a few hours for, say, a Nova Class, to a few weeks for, say, a Galaxy Class. The size of the ship matters. I have a full time job, so my graphics are done in my spare time. Sometimes I can devote an entire 8 hours to a project, other times only a couple.
4 – what is your favorite ship in the Axanar time period to draw/create?
Easily the Ares class. She is a delight. I’m enjoying fleshing out the inner workings of her in a set of blue prints.
5 – do you do commissions for fans? If so, what are the normal costs for them
All the time. My inbox is full of requests. At one point I got so many requests for a high-resolution download of something I did, or a customised version of one, or an entire new graphic, I decided it was time to monetise the time I’m spending. Not the artwork, but my time. So, I set up an ETSY page offering vectorised PDFs of my MSDs and LCARS panels. Each purchase gives you the option of a free customisation of the name and registry on the MSD. The more you want to customise = the more time I need to spend on the project = the more it will cost. I think that’s reasonable.
The waiting list for completely new, from the ground up, MSDs for fan designed ships or ships from Star Trek Online is in the months. I have so much to do.
6 – website plug/contact information
If you want an infinitely scalable vectorised MSD version of an established, canon design, ship, you can find many of them here: https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/LCARSgfx
My wordpress blog, featured many things is here: https://lcarsgfx.wordpress.com
