Legendary Space Encounter
Ensemble
Scroll down to see
individual Starship Paintings below
I was asked by AMT/ERTL to create
a special cover for a special model kit. It was to be a diorama,
with special fiber optic lighting in the space ships. They wanted
me to paint a seperate background nebula for the diorama backdrop,
but they were unwilling to pay for it, so I suggested that I paint
four elements. The three ships would be painted on blank backgrounds
and the nebula would be a larger piece. Above is a composite of
the way I intended the final art to look. The next image below
is what they did to the cover to screw it up. Argh. This was just
the begining of the screw ups. Read on...
When the art director contacted
me, he asked me to do a painting of the USS Enterprise and two
Klingon Birds Of Prey, all from the original series. Being a fan
of the show I imediately spotted the first suspicious mistake.
There were no Klingon Birds of Prey until the movies many years
later. There was a Romulan Bird of Prey, so I went through descriptions
of the ships to figure out that what he wanted were two Klingon
Battlecruisers. I asked him for details about what they wanted,
but he couldn't give me any. I found out on publication that they
were doing a scene from an episode called The Enterprise Incident.
The Enterprise gets surrounded by three Romulan Battlecruisers
using Klingon design. What a mess. Yes, the Star Trek show was
a bit kooky here as well. They had done something with the Romulan
Bird Of Prey studio model and had to shoot the scenes with the
Klingon model instead.
OK, now that is all well and good,
but then ERTL started messing with my art. I take great pride
in getting details right. For some reason that I can't figure
out, ERTL seems to have a compulsion to get the details wrong.
Even when ya give it to them right, they will go out of their
way to make it wrong. Do yourself a favor. Don't buy this kit.
This company has been making the Enterprise in model kit form
since the show was on the air. You would think that by now they
would get it right, but no, they even put the elevator to the
bridge on the front of the bridge instead of the back, where it
belongs. It looks like a big clown nose!
Did they stop there? No. You would
think with a nice background painting designed to be in proportion
to their diorama sheet that they would just use it as intended,
but instead they felt some bizare need to take the worst possible
cropping. Then they decided to change the colors of the Klingon/Romulan
ships to green and purple. You know, if they would have told me
the episode I could have refrained from adding the KLINGON emblems,
but DUH! That they left in!
Still unsatisfied with their excercise
of godlike power, they then savaged the Enterprise itself. They
moved the ship's name and registry on the hull and made it look
like there was no dome rising from the disk. They also did some
oddball photo retouching of the glowing endcaps of the nacells.
Those Bussard collectors were fuzzed over and a dark anti glow
surrounds them. This was the last cover I painted for these guys.
Sadly, the 18X24" nebula painting was destroyed by fire in
a gallery.
Below are the three ships done individually
for the cover. After the work was returned by the client, I painted
backgrounds onto the panels:
USS ENTERPRISE N.C.C.-1701
8X10" Acrylic & Alkyd
KLINGON BATTLECRUISER
KOR'TOH
$850.00
8X10" Acrylic & Alkyd
KLINGON BATTLECRUISER
AMNOK
$ 850.00
8X10" Acrylic & Alkyd