Star Trek: TNG

Here’s a whole mess of little portraits to augment my painting exercise! This is the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation, apparently taken quite recently. Perhaps a piece of promotional material for that Picard show? A friend shared the reference image, with its wonderful high-contrast photography and marvelous facial expressions, and I knew I had to try my hand at it. I’m not sure where the original came from. I did a search on TinEye and came up blank. I sure had a good time working on it.

This is using the Lane Brown charcoal pen set. Over the course of this set, I found some techniques that worked well for me. No smudging here, but I did a lot with a “dust brush” tool to dirty up my marks and make blends. I tried to pay attention to shapes while still aiming for likeness and for the most part I think I hit it. John Delancie in the bottom left looks great. I started at the top left with Patrick Stewart and snaked my way around, and you can see the work getting looser as it goes.

In a big Z pattern from the top left, they are:

• Patrick Stewart
• Jonathan Frakes
• LeVar Burton
• Gates McFadden
• Michael Dorn
• Denise Crosby
• John de Lancie
• Marina Sirtis
• Brent Spiner