1 Attachment(s)
Depicting alien races other than Canon
I've begun doing up the crew for the Timeship DTI H.Beam Piper and I decided to actually include an image for every crew member (the ship has 33 crew and 12 DTI ) - a total of 45 characters. I decided to have a lot of alien character, only a few of which are canon races - Human, Bajoran, Klingon, Caitain, Tellarite, Andorian, etc... I also tossed in a few that were "background" aliens from the movies and the various Star Trek shows, but that still left me with a few to come up with. Using Google images, I found a whole bunch of secondary races from Babylon 5, as well as a bunch from other SF movies, like the Drac from Enemy Mine and horror movies, like the porcupine girl from Nightbreed. There are a wealth of aliens out there, even some that aren't even vaguely Humanoid, like the mobster N'Grath from Babylon 5, who I use as various Kaferians (hey, they all look alike to us mammals). I tend to photoshop uniform shoulders in if they're Starfleet, resize/trim them to 160x180 pixels, with a 20 pixel label bar across the bottom to identify them. I even found an image of John Delancie from Special Unit 2 with a cranial prosthetic that looked like a naked brain for a Gallamite - Attachment 1732 - That's the unretouched image. I just put him in a Starfleet uniform and removed the thumb-tacks from the skin around the brain and voila!
I've noticed a lot of webpages doing this now, and most of them are better than I am at Photoshop, but I get by. Most pages seem to like putting actors faces on their characters, but I only do that in a few cases.
