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 - f13979c7d1fe627b104534c53362a1d1.jpg - 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.
Last edited by Owen E Oulton; 02-01-2015 at 07:42 PM.
For the Cygnans from Cygnet XIV - the ones who decided that the Enterprise's computer needed to sound more feminine - I've decided that they are the lavender-skinned blondes from the reception in Journey to Babel and am using stills of Trance Gemini from the early seasons of Andromeda as templates for them. The porcupine woman from Nightbreed I'm calling a Hystric, shortened from the taxonomic name for the Old World porcupine - Hystricomorph Hystricidae. I'm having to come up with templates for all these races, so I'll try to post them in the ICON forum when I get them done.
Last edited by Owen E Oulton; 02-03-2015 at 02:07 PM.
I have always been partial to a race called the Eridani (from Battle Lords of the 23rd century RPG), a methane breathing warrior culture who are called Sword Saints. Though they may be a little too militant for most star trek based stories.
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