Today was our Zoom with June and I decided to give the Uhura painting I’ve been wanting to attempt a start. There is a Color of Sci-fi show coming up soon that is featuring Captain Sisko from Star Trek: Deep Space 9 and Uhura from the Original Series.

As a lifelong Star Trek fan I love both of these characters, so even though I am still learning and working to improve my portraiture, I wanted to at least enter one of each character. I painted Sisko a few weeks ago and while I like it I felt that I could do a better job as getting the skin tones correct. As I am just starting to work on portraits, I have been painting mostly me and my kids. We are all pretty light skinned, so while I have started to learn tricks to capture my skin tone, I did some research after Sisko and before I started Uhura. One of the things I read was to use a yellow under painting to get the highlights. I think I’ve done a better job on her skin tone with this technique.

I don’t like how I have her hands. They are a bit stretched looking. I think I might crop it like this for the final presentation. I’ll need to cut a custom matte but if I can’t fix the hands it’ll at least salvage the painting.

Who is your favorite character on Star Trek and how can you use them to inspire your creativity today?