Trek Fan Mapping: Five Projects Now

Works in progress, all, uploaded to DeviantArt a night or two ago: https://www.deviantart.com/dewline-ottawa/art/Dominion-War-Base-Map-28-March-2025-1176423191 https://www.deviantart.com/dewline-ottawa/art/Coreward-From-the-Izar-Zakdorn-Line-28-Mar-2025-1176427032 https://www.deviantart.com/dewline-ottawa/art/Taurus-Reach-And-Beyond-28-Mar-2025-A-1176436890 https://www.deviantart.com/dewline-ottawa/art/Edge-of-Midnight-Disputed-Zone-28-Mar-2025-A-1176439292 https://www.deviantart.com/dewline-ottawa/art/RomulanZoneBaseMap-28Mar2025-A-1176456387

Edge of Midnight Base Map - A Work in Progress

I've been working on this for fun, for mental health, for skills retention and development. It's inspired by Star Trek: Star Charts and Stellar Cartography, of course, and ties into a work of fan fiction as historical textbook: The Edge of Midnight - A Narrative of the Federation-Klingon Cold War (2256-2293). There are some *ahem* deviations from the work in those first two volumes, some of them per the text of Seamus Devenish, others via the out-of-print FASA-published Star Trek Role-Playing Game product line. Where not confirmed by Star Charts and Stellar Cartography, or stated in the text of The Edge of Midnight, the choice of host stars for many planets is mine, with no small additional input from Jed Whitten's HYGMap website and Kevin Jardine at GalaxyMap.org.

I do expect that CBS/Paramount and their Star Trek production partners retain the right to ignore any or all of this material as it suits them.

Again, this is a work in progress. If you have informed opinions on how I might fill in the remaining gaps, feel free to comment. I won't promise to either heed or ignore you.

If you want to read the material that inspired this project, I recommend you to visit this website.

Inspired by Inktober, Yet Apart From It

This was inspired by Inktober.

Since this was drawn using Clip Studio Paint, I cannot claim this as an Inktober activity. I still intend to use those prompts for this year's edition of Inktober to inspire some efforts at daily illustration practice. Hence this generic gargoyle design.

I've already given up on the idea of getting a sketch finished per day...and I still want to try for addressing every item in the Inktober prompt list for this year anyway.

Sketch # 2 - "Scurry"

This was the first thought I had for it.

Anniversaries That Matter To Me Today

 There is more than the one. As a reminder, this link to an earlier blog entry.

https://dewline.dreamwidth.org/1559387.html

Portfolio Progress

 I finally got something done for this quarter on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/DewlineO/status/1415110762805276674

Map Galleries Volume 2

So, I found a few more maps of interest to me, thanks to help from quite a few other people on Flickr...

ComicsTech: Solved My CSP Question

Turns out I had brushes set to "millimetres" rather than "pixels". That was my mistake. Anyway, problem solved now. My apologies for taking so long to post an update about that!

FONTS: Personal Favourites

Last week, spoke about preferred fonts for accessibility re: websites. Also, she asked this question:

Do folks have favorite fonts?

She has her own goals in mind for the answers to that question, regarding accessibility, and she's been getting useful answers from her friendlist. For myself, selfishly, I do have a list of favourites. Many - most? - of these favourites have very little to do with such concerns. There's a lot of aesthetic considerations and a lot of personal nostalgia in play with my list. There is a certain amount of privilege - the privilege of being sighted all my life thus far - in my thinking here. This is selfish. Absolutely so.

That said, I am going to go into some detail about my own list of favoured fonts. In this entry, and probably others down the line.

I start with Space: 1999. That TV series in the mid-1970's created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson was where I first started to care about typefaces, fonts, that sort of thing. Particularly the first season. Moonbase Alpha, the main backdrop of the series, doomed to wander the universe by an ill-placed nuclear waste dump turning a large chunk of our Moon into a giant fusion rocket...that place had a particular design aesthetic. Signage across the moonbase was in a font called "Countdown". Designed by Colin Brignall, I don't know how it reached the attention of Space: 1999's set designers and graphic designers.

He also designed Superstar, the font that Milton Glaser incorporated into the classic "Bullet" logo of DC Comics. So there's two.

Back to Space: 1999. The space suits were jumpsuits with the helmets, life support hardware, and so on worn over them. The life support hardware packs - front and back - were numbered. The numerals came from "Data 70". The packs labelled "1" were usually worn by Martin Landau in character as moonbase commander John Koenig when a scene would call for him to expect to do EVA work, and had that numeral inverted. Not sure why.

(There's apparently an argument over whether Data 70 is a knock-off of another font, Westminster. If you're interested, check this essay out.)

More to follow...

COMICS/TECH: A Software Question

Anyone who's using Clip Studio Paint, does this look right to you?

CBC: Ideas - A Search for the Common Good

Listening to this one at the moment:

Our Future Ancestors Deserve a Voice...

Food for a lot of thought for any storyteller.

Noting the Russian Attention

Twenty-one page views of this blog, all from Yandex-dot-ru this past four weeks or so? Interesting. I really should post some sketches or photography more often to get a wider audience.

If you're trying to check my home page?

National Capital FreeNet's telling all of us member-users that web-hosting is temporarily down. I'll let you know when it's back up. Update: The website's still viewable, but apparently my ability to edit may be temporarily kaput.

Getting set up on Cartographer's Guild and DeviantArt for promoting my illustration and design stuff, if you're wondering what's up lately. Not done here yet, as there's a bunch of blogs I want to keep on watching. More to follow...and yes, I'm watching where the visitors here are visiting from.

PHOTOS: New to Me in 2014...

Pericles Project

This is something I've been toying with off and on for a few years. Inspired by SHIELD - the Marvel Comics soldier-spy organization - and some of the work of people in comic books, movie-making and TV series adaptations of the comic books. Eliot R. Brown, Jayse Hansen, Rick Sternbach and Mike Okuda (No, those two have yet to be hired by Marvel for either TV or film work, but they ought to be!)...and it led to this latest step: laying out a single deck on my version of a Helicarrier.

More on the other side of the link. Just click on the image below.

Repairs and Renovations Notice 2020-1

Okay, I just found out now. (Yes, just now!) I can't set up publicly accessible Google Photos galleries the way I used to with G+. That's been taken away from us users as of when G+ became a paid-only option.

As a temporary fix, I'm setting up links with this posting.

Logo Experiments

Other Graphic Design Stuff

Photos

Mythical Maps

Sketches

Trek-Inspired Design Sketchery

Op-Ed Portfolio

Courtroom Art

Transit Map Ideas

Hoping that this works...

PHOTOS: Seen On a Weekend Walk

I'm probably not the only one who did a double-take when they saw this. Nor in uploading an image file of it.

Making progress, however slow.

PHOTOS: Place d'Orléans Mall in Happier Days

Back before we'd all been rudely reminded that we share the world with coronaviruses...at a mini-convention organized by the local comics shop, Entertainment Ink. They're still working on getting their new business model of delivery set up as I write this entry. If you're in Orléans and you're interested, post a comment. I'll flag this entry to the owners' attention.

Creeping Along With the Inks...