star trek
The last fake of 2001, and as you might have guessed, the Gallery's 100th. I've had
this picture bustling around hard drives since two computers ago, and was going to
get rid of it but decided to fake it instead. Something about the model's body
suggested it would be excellent for B'Elanna picture, as it indeed turned out to be.
Colour matching was the single biggest problem, as the headhsot came from a picture with a predominantly blue cast to it (the publicity shot for season 4 I think). Second to that was removing some writing from above the parrot, which involved cloning parts of the ceiling and the branch the parrot was sitting on. Last of all, I had to raise the crown of the model's head beneath B'Elanna's to blend in the klingon forehead and make the hair look like it was falling about her face properly. Photographic nudity.
I chose this as a B'Elanna base partly because of the subject's dark skin tone (most
klingons these days tending to be played by non-whites) which I thought I could
lighten to a more latino hue, and because it's really kind of cute. Also the animal
skull on the wall behind her speaks to B'Elanna's klingon herritage.
Because of my lack of suitably large headshots, I had to scale one of the ones I did have up a bit in order to fit, and thankfully iot didn't get particularly degraded. There was alot of tweaking of individual colour levels, contrasts and saturation levels on both sides of the construction in order to bring them to an acceptable match, and I think it worked out rather well. The hair line was merged usually a partialy transparent eraser, as was the blending of the cheeks. For those interested in composition, I flipped the image along its vertical axis so all the 'solidnesss' was on one side, giving it a more open feel rather than the impression that B'Elanna was between the badging and the pillar. Photographic nudity.
This started out as a black and white piece, and I settled on it as an Ezri base
because it matched quite nicely with the promo photo I have of Nicole De Boer from
Deepwater Black.
Happily for a trill picture, the spotting required was an utter minimum and the head meldeded pretty much perfectly with the base, requiring a just the smallest sculpting around the chin. After adding some grain to match the face in with the rest of the picture, I just had to dodge away the shadows on the right side.
Seven and the techno-organic. Ever the twain shall meet. And all to often it seems
they must do so as something small. This image came to me via gothic art list, and was
just begging to be used a base for our favourite former borg.
This one required a little doctoring to get the headshot to fit as it was at a different angle to the the original, so I cloned the head and shrank it a little on the right side. Seven's face was then over layed and the top and right edges translucently erased to blend it into the picture. After that I had to use the sharpen tool a little to crispen her features a tad, then colour shift them a couple of times to get them closer to the tones of the base.
Seven of Nine meets Annika Hansen. As I'm sure you'll agree, quite a delectable
mental picture. And in Star Trek, an all too likely possibility.
As with pretty much all multiple-subject images, each person had to be treated as a seperate project - Annika's face was lighter in colour than the source image for Sevens, so her body had to have its skintone selectively lightened. Seven's face had to be carefully altered, realigning the eyes so they looked up more than the positioning of the headshot to match the base had allowed. And because of the hue shifting required to blend Annika's face to her body the eyes were given a distinctly magenta hue that had to be airbrushed out.
The Voyager episode "The Killing Game" was a bit of a fun romp. It also contributed
to the lesbian subtext between Janeway and Seven in numerous small ways, particularly
in its casting of the captain's holocharacter as a rather lesbianesque bar owner. So
of course there's the idea that after the events of the story, that Seven and the
Captain migt want to return to roleplaying their characters. Of course, the whole
reason this came to me was the painting of the airship behind the picture's
subject.
Simple enough to assemble, the most complicated bit coming from reshaping the hair to make it fit in with Seven's face. The prosthetic on the hand I'm not entirely happy with, as the colours are a bit to strong, but attempting the fix that made it look bodgy so I left it alone. Artistic nudity
I think they've made Deanna Troi far more attractive since they decided to scrape
off all that excessive makeup the character used to wear. And there was just
something about this picture which appealed to that.
Hardly any work involved here at all - the headshot matched the colouration of the base almost perfectly, needing ly the tiniest of tweaks. Putting the combadge on was the hardest part, as it required tweaking to get the aspect and shading to match. The last step involved cloning the breasts and a bit of the image around them, shrinking it a few percent then blending that back onto the base so they more resemble the actual size of Troi's. Photographic nudity.
Saturday morning cartoons - it's such a pity so many of them just suck these days.
One such programme was Silverhawks, a pastiche of pulp fictiony material involving a
private detective agency staffed by cyborgs, fighting a collection of various
monstrous and technologically aided bad guys. It was just a huge advertising tool
for the toys, but it was quite fun. The base image reminds me quite strongly of
what the heroes looked like - they were almost entirely metallic except for their
faces and half of one arm. So when I came across this picture by Julie Bell (wife
of Boris Velajo), I was struck by that wave of nostalgia. And of course, cybernetics
and such always bring to minds thoughts of Seven of Nine.
Pasting a photo into a painting is always a difficult exercise because of their wildly differing looks, particularly in this instance; fortunately one of Photoshop's filters came to the rescue. I started off by flipping the picture around to match the orientation of the headshot of Seven, then cloned the background over the edges of the base's head before pasting Sevenen's head into place. A second copy of Seven's head was then run through the Photocopy filter and overlayed, partially transparent under hard light, to give a sort of illustrated effect. I also bleached the base a little to match it with the palor of the headshot.
Red and black usually signal an Aeryn sun picture, but the blondeness of the model
made me realise I hadn't done a Janeway in a while, so I dragged my favourite
headshot of her out into the light of day and let her loose.
The hair was so monstrously boufant thatI had to prune it down by cloning the wiremesh over it and to either side, then feathered in the merge with the hair from the headshot. The rank pips were stolen off another picture of Janeway, while the badege has a bit of the Dropshadow layer effect in an attempt to make it look a bit more 3D.
I'm not sure quite what it is, but this has become my favourite Ezri fake in place of
'survivor'. I really am quite excessively happy with
the way it's turned out.
Black and white compositions are usually quite hard, but fortuitously the contrast and brightness levels of the coloured headshot and the monochrome base matched up far better than I had hoped, even if most of the forehead belongs to the model. As for the spots, I've pretty much settled on a method where I had draw them on using the paint brush tool, set them at a slight transparency, copy the layer and pixilate it, then recombine it with the original at about half the strength. Photographic nudity.
I find Trills and elves both very sexy, so a picture that essentially puts the two
together is sexier still.
Amusingly enough, the trill was the easier half of the picture to get done. Oh, the vulcan ear was simplicity itself, but I had three attempts at trying to give her a proper greenish tint to her skin and failed each time. Photographic nudity.
Another stunningly inspired title, but it's got Angelina Jolie as a trill not wearing
very much leather to make up for it. Yum.
The spots were easy, but getting the head to sit right was a pain and involved the usual rigmarole of resculpting the hair and cloning the background in over it to disguise the fact. Though on reflection the badge looks a little naff, it looked alright at the time.
And here I give up for the moment trying to come up with witty titles altogether. But
hey, it's a blonde chick in silver, so it's always going to be a Seven picture. Even
better, I don;t have to do her hand prosthetic.
The headshot - a season four publicity pic from a magazine cover - had awful red lips that I couldn't stand to look at, so I used a hard light overlay to try and get them to fit in with the silver. The models' neck had to be lengthened slightly to remove the inconvenient line of her jaw - damn them for not making photos to match the angle of my headshots! the implant on her arm, culled from a screen capture, had to be tampered with a lot - transparency, contrasting, overlay filtering through cutout and pixilate - for it to even look like it might fit in.
More vulcan/trill lesbian goodness. Sadly the resolution isn't particularly hot, but the
base picture has been floating around my collection since the days of the bulletin
boards. No, really.
The vulcan was copied onto a new layer and tinted slightly green, then carefully erased into shape. The trill's markings were done by hand on their own layer then that layer was copied and each run through a different filter - some form of pixilation combined with the bevel&emboss layer effect - before being merged together and applied at a slight transparency to the model. Before the image was completely flattened, it was run through a filter to try and smooth out some of the noise created by its initial harsh jpeging by the original scanner. Photographic nudity.
Another Captain Proton inspired picture of Janeway, the base courtesy of Brom. It was
named as much for the droplet-of-blood spiders hanging off the web as for the bowl.
Easy enough to put together, with the high-light colour shifted towards the magenta and the edges of the headshot scultured into the outlines of the base shot using partial transparency. I tried making the lips red again, but ended up preferring the purple lipstick effectg I ended up with.
Again, I couldn't think of any particularly clever name for the piece, so that
namelessness has again become its title.
A fair bit of body work on this one - the breasts have been reduced from the ridiculously disproportioned originals, and the shaded skin of the arm they had obscured being replaced. The angle of the base shot resulted in the finished composition having a rather offensively blunt curve to the shoulder, so the line of the neck has been altered to suite the aspect of the new face. Finally, I had to decontrast Troi's face because the blackness was so intense compared to that of the base.
A break from the usual vulcan/trill pairing because I couldn't get any decent looking
markings, so I decided to make the other species a bajoran instead, stealng Kira Nerys's nose
to do it.
The vulcan eyebrows were just a clone and flp job, the ears smudge-tooled into place. The nose and earing I both nicked from my headshot collection of Kira, the ridges having to be skewed to fit the angle of the face and then contrasted to stand out. It's a very simple composton, but I rather like it.
A very simple picture. 'Nuff said, really.
Just a matter of copying the hair and slipping the head shot beneath the titan tresses and tinkering with the colouring. As the headshot was at an angle, I had to skew it slightly to suit the more direct pose of the base. Artistic nudity.
I've had the base shot floating around for a little bit, waiting for the right head to go
with it. A lot of the body shots for B'Elanna are of negro women as they're a lot easier to
come across than latino ones. So matching head and base is moreso a matter of colour than
usual. Hence the name.
This one took quite a bit of arranging given it only consisted of two components. While most of it was in the colour matching, a not insignificant componetn involved my repeatedly going back to get the size, angle and position of the head to look right.
One of my older base shots that's been upgraded as better copies came along, it's got a certain
classic feel to it I think.
To begin with this piece was easy enough to put together though one of the eyes troubled me - partially a result of tinkering with colour balance, partly as a result of subtly erasing some of B'Elanna's face to blend it onto the model's. then I caam back and decided that the head was all wrong and flipped/rotated it horrizontally, cloning and repositioning the hair to suit the new orientation. To finish I copied the layer, ran the waaterpaint filter over it than blended it on the soft light setting with the original, creating some nice darkening of shadows and enriching of skin tones that have helped compensate for some of my qualms. Photographic nudity.
A piece in the same vein as play time making use of that
wonderful publicity shot of Seven that was put out when she first joined Voyager.
I had to tinker with te proportions of the head shot to make this fit, as the camera is a little above the face and the model was looking down. The ears belong to the model, and were what acted as my guide to the face's positioning.
I originally came across the base shot as a Catherine Bell fake and saved it because it has
a certain fundamental elegance that I liked; naturally encountering the original at a higher
resolution was a neat thing. The head shot of Hoshi had a certain synergy going with the
base so that's why I chose it. The title came from a chain of thought that started with knots
and things nautical.
Because the headshot was B&W, I needed to desaturate the base to begin with. Inevitably this high-lights the difference in luminosity between the two components, which meant a lot of minute tinkering with hue adjustments and overlays. The hair had to be repositioned and copied to accomodate the change between original and headshot facial position, and finally the left leg just looked way too skinny so I enlarged it slightly near the hip. Photographic nudity. Bondage.
Again with the Seven/H.R.Geiger crossover. This is perhaps a more subtle fake than most, as the
identity of the subject is maybe a little difficult to determine. But both Seven and the Borg
Queen are there.
The victim's insectile mask was placed over Seven's headshot and the eyes erased at 25% transparency, while a good deal of her face was similarly rubbed out to blend it into the base shot. If you look quite carefully, the head of the thing inside the case has been overlain by the head of the Borg Queen which was then reduced in visibility until its more a suggestion than anything else. Behind the case, the pipe running down from the bottle has been replaced by the Queen's ganglia-wrapped spine. The tube coming out of the wheeled contraption was copied, recoloured, then combined under Hard Light to give the impression of vital fluids being either removed or injected into Seven, while the vein on her shoulder was recoloured to become an open wound where the skin's been pulled back up over something. Horror
A Brom base, I was going to make it a Jadzia Dax untilI went netsurfing for some more Kira
headshots and found one of hers from season seven that I liked better.
The hardest thing was altering the originalblack of her costume to a believable shade of red, which even then I don't think I quite pulled off. Naturally the palid skin had to be flushed up a bit to match the new face, which in turn needed de-contrasting and a little blurring around the edges. The final touch was replacing the symbol on the arm band with that of the mirror universe Alliance. The barest hint of areola.
This version came about as I was working on the portrait version above and at the same time
surfing renderosity.com. I came across an
interesting image of a woman standing in front of a rusted wall with oval window; immediately I
thought of DS9 and applied that thougght to the work in progress.
After a long time spent trying to find an appropriate full-length rust texture (the original was only half the height I needed) and failing I settle for a gothesque wall picture in my art collection, then super-imposed over that n Perspectived line of tiles for the floor. The window from the inspirational picture was cut out and placed behind Kira, then Dropshadowed to reflect the changes to the image's lighting I'd planned; the planet seen through it is Bajor (which is really a screen shot from Sid Meyer's Alpha Centuri). The same lighting effect was then applied to the frame, the wall and a copy of Kira (the latter being then partly erased over the original for a sense of reflectiveness), while a different one was applied to the floor to represent a change in the plane being illuminated. Finally I made the whip all glowy to turn into an energy whip, and put a faint blue 'reflection' of it along the outside of her leg. The shadow was hand-drawn. The barest hint of aerola.
A rejig of an earlier piece - caramel - that came about
because I was cleaning out the composite files in my Construction folder and forgot
that I'd already used this one. Glad I forgot, because I think this one is much cooler.
Most of the work was done already, but I redid the positioning on the head slightly before running the picture through - amusingly enough - the watercolour filter, amongst others, to give it the right texture. The hardest part was Googling the frame, which took three or four hours at least. The final touch was adding the "artist's" signature - I'd just acquired a new barcodey font, and it appealed to me to have the ever efficient Seven of Nine use it.
Although the original piece is one of my favourite
compositions, I'd always meant to go back and redo it. This second version is, I feel,
far superior to the original.
The most tedious aspect was stripping out the white background - doing it automatically tended to damage the shadow. When that was done, I inserted an appropriate background taken from a game texture site - something stoney with rising damp - then faded it through the grain filter to get it to match the art style of the body. Speaking of which, I redid the colours of both it and B'Elanna's head, then faded the result through the photocopy filter to get the darker tones on the body. The shadow was blacked in, the blood saturated and overlaid on the background so the pattern would show through. Finally I lit it from the top corner thus shadowing the legs so they blended better, and put a faint dark outline effect around the body to obscure the white matt lines. Artistic nudity.
I was in a... unseelie fey sort of mood when I did this one. When I came across the base shot, I
was thinking that Klingons in Trek had been defanged somewhat, made safe and acceptable. On the
whole, I'm not a big fan of them, and I somewhat resented Jadzia's running off to Worf when her
"special episode" girl friend dumped her.
Not much of an effort, though getting the forehead ridges on the two klingons was fiddly. I was quite pleased with the Trill markings. Artistic nudity. Adult concepts.
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