USS Bill of Rights
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sarken was having a bad day yesterday, partly because I am insane, and partly because I wanted to practice freehand inking in GIMP. None of those are probably good enough excuses:
Captain Maddow of the United Star Ship Bill of Rights, with her department heads, left to right: Lieut. Commander Olbermann, Chief of Science; Chief of Operations Lieutenant "Andy" ch'Cuper; Lieutenant Stewart, Communications; and CMO Lieut. Commander Dr. Stehpen (DFA Vulcan Science Academy, and *don't* mention the ears.)
Q: Why does Captain Maddow wear the miniskirt & go-go boots uniform?
A: One, because it's an incongruity, and every time she walks into a Command meeting all those Admirals are forced to remember just how rarely women's uniforms get worn in command gold. Two, because it reminds Captain Kirk that he's never, ever going to get to sleep with her, and this makes her heart glad. Three, because it gets her all the girls. (Four, she still thinks Lieut. Commander Olbermann is only teasing when he asks her to please stop for the sake of his blood pressure.)
Q: Why USS Bill of Rights?
A: Because if there's any ship Captain Maddow serves, it would be that one. (A starship called Bill of Rights actually appears in the novel Best Destiny, one of the still rare Starfleet ships with a human female captain; Maddow's ship is the Constitution-class ship which bore the name before that.)
Q: What's up with Dr. Stehpen's ear?
A: Seriously, don't mention the ears.
Q: Why is the art so bad?
A: Because I don't practice enough. Also, I did this entirely with GIMP's inking tool, set to default (and eraser tool). It was good practice, both for brush inking, and for drawing in general; line weight depends partly on speed, so the greater the accuracy, the lower the precision. It *forces* you to use quick free strokes and be confident in them. Which I need much, much work on. But at least on the computer you can erase as much as you have to! And I would have failed totally without lots of reference from this ST:TOS publicity shot: http://greatbignerd.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/star_trek_csg_014.jpg
Q: No, really, WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?
A: Because Star Trek is awesome, and Pundit Round Table is awesome, and they both share the same commitment to freedom, diversity, and knowledge, and believe that evil only wins out over good if good is careless. I've wanted for ages to put them on the bridge of a starship anyway. Also, I'm a complete sucker for crossovers. And the art was actually flowing; that's even rarer than days when the fic is flowing.
Also, I was getting tired of The One Pig as my journal header.
(For those unfamiliar with the terminology, Pundit Round Table refers to a Real Person Fic sub-fandom in which Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Anderson Cooper, Keith Olberman, and lately also Rachel Maddow hand out together, snark a lot,and solve crime. They are all liberal-to-moderate US cable news commentators (more or less), they are all really good at what they do, and they are all magnificently geeky.)
Also, drawing this has made me realize that part of the reason I love Keith so much is that he exactly matches my mental image of Lieut. Harb Tanzer, Enterprise's chief of Recreation. (Also it makes me want Captain Maddow/Dr. Dehner. Or at least want to draw Ana Marie Cox in Dr. Dehner's uniform.)
sarken was having a bad day yesterday, partly because I am insane, and partly because I wanted to practice freehand inking in GIMP. None of those are probably good enough excuses:Captain Maddow of the United Star Ship Bill of Rights, with her department heads, left to right: Lieut. Commander Olbermann, Chief of Science; Chief of Operations Lieutenant "Andy" ch'Cuper; Lieutenant Stewart, Communications; and CMO Lieut. Commander Dr. Stehpen (DFA Vulcan Science Academy, and *don't* mention the ears.)
Q: Why does Captain Maddow wear the miniskirt & go-go boots uniform?
A: One, because it's an incongruity, and every time she walks into a Command meeting all those Admirals are forced to remember just how rarely women's uniforms get worn in command gold. Two, because it reminds Captain Kirk that he's never, ever going to get to sleep with her, and this makes her heart glad. Three, because it gets her all the girls. (Four, she still thinks Lieut. Commander Olbermann is only teasing when he asks her to please stop for the sake of his blood pressure.)
Q: Why USS Bill of Rights?
A: Because if there's any ship Captain Maddow serves, it would be that one. (A starship called Bill of Rights actually appears in the novel Best Destiny, one of the still rare Starfleet ships with a human female captain; Maddow's ship is the Constitution-class ship which bore the name before that.)
Q: What's up with Dr. Stehpen's ear?
A: Seriously, don't mention the ears.
Q: Why is the art so bad?
A: Because I don't practice enough. Also, I did this entirely with GIMP's inking tool, set to default (and eraser tool). It was good practice, both for brush inking, and for drawing in general; line weight depends partly on speed, so the greater the accuracy, the lower the precision. It *forces* you to use quick free strokes and be confident in them. Which I need much, much work on. But at least on the computer you can erase as much as you have to! And I would have failed totally without lots of reference from this ST:TOS publicity shot: http://greatbignerd.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/star_trek_csg_014.jpg
Q: No, really, WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?
A: Because Star Trek is awesome, and Pundit Round Table is awesome, and they both share the same commitment to freedom, diversity, and knowledge, and believe that evil only wins out over good if good is careless. I've wanted for ages to put them on the bridge of a starship anyway. Also, I'm a complete sucker for crossovers. And the art was actually flowing; that's even rarer than days when the fic is flowing.
Also, I was getting tired of The One Pig as my journal header.
(For those unfamiliar with the terminology, Pundit Round Table refers to a Real Person Fic sub-fandom in which Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Anderson Cooper, Keith Olberman, and lately also Rachel Maddow hand out together, snark a lot,
Also, drawing this has made me realize that part of the reason I love Keith so much is that he exactly matches my mental image of Lieut. Harb Tanzer, Enterprise's chief of Recreation. (Also it makes me want Captain Maddow/Dr. Dehner. Or at least want to draw Ana Marie Cox in Dr. Dehner's uniform.)
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Captain's stripes on that uniform are - well, actually there's only one person in Starfleet who wears a uniform like that, and she had to bully her Chief of Ops into reprogramming a replicator to make it for her. Oh, it's completely regulation, don't get me wrong, but promising female cadets still get steered out of Command track ("Why waste your career in Command when no woman has ever made Starship Captain? Better off going in to Ops or Science, where you might make Department Head and get command in emergencies.") And the few that push through despite it all always choose to wear the uniform with trousers, once they're high enough rank to get the choice.
Rachel wore the trousers uniform, too. Until her first real command, acting Captain of the science cruiser Shen Kuo while Captain Summers was on a research sabbatical. In her first week, she was approached by terrified but determined Yeoman Cho, asking if she could please be reassigned, because her lieutenant kept looking at her, and making her climb Jeffries tubes for spurious reasons, and pick things up off the floor, and it's true that Captain Summers had always said there was nothing officially inappropriate about it, but it made her really uncomfortable, so would Captain Maddow maybe transfer her to Maintenance? She liked cleaning sewage converters, really.
Rachel considers that her first real command decision. And she walked onto the bridge the next morning with a new personal yeoman, and a new uniform, and sat down in the Captain's chair, and crossed her leg over her knee, and just dared anyone to say anything about it.
When she wore the miniskirt six months later to her promotional hearing, after wearing it through that thing with the Orion pirates and the Omozdian cricket plague and the barely-averted disaster at Harrapa, she smiled sweetly, and the assembled (white, male) Admirals didn't dare say anything about it either. They stuck strictly to her record, and she walked out of that room with Captain's stripes and command of a Constitution-class starship. She hasn't looked back since.
(Then, once she officially wasn't in command of Shen Kuo anymore, she asked Yeoman Cho out for a proper night on the town, and was grinning irrepressibly for weeks afterward.)