In The Captain's Chair

This is a picture of Data from Star Trek - The Next Generation. Originally this was a picture of Brent Spiner sitting in the chair, much like he is in the final work, except he is wearing a pin striped tux. This picture was made by first combining a fair quality upper torso and head picture with a larger full body one that was of pretty poor quality. It looked even worse after I enlarged it to match the size of the head shot. I then put on some digital 'make-up' to make his skin the right color, gave him some gold 'contacts' for his eyes, restyled his hair and put on his Starfleet uniform. I think I used about 3 or 4 different pictures to get his shirt done. I just painted the pants and boots.

After that was pretty much done I went after the background. There were bits of it, the chair especially, that looked horrible. I didn't have any pictures of the chair to use so I had to blend and paint quite a bit to get it to look good.

I used Photo Paint and Photo Shop to do this picture. I had recently learned how to work with layers from a web site I had stumbled upon. It wasn't for the exact version of Photo Shop that I have but got me experimenting. I can honestly say that without using Layers I don't think I could have made this picture.

I had tried to create similar pictures several times in the past and they had always come out looking awful. I was so proud of the way this one turned out I started another one. It's quite a bit more detailed than this one and since my digitizer pen went on the fritz has been put on hold. I hope to get a chance to finish it some day.

This picture was finished 1/19/02 and is a combination of photo manipulation & digital painting.

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