Comments on: Model Kit: Tidbits shmidbits Vol.3

By: JamieH

JamieH — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 15:11:36 +0000

Jim- Thanks a lot. If I could make a living at it, I’d be a full time illustrator. I’m glad I had the opportunity to work on the piece. It looks like I’ll be doing more real soon.

We have discussed posters. Maybe some day.

By: eimb1999

eimb1999 — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 03:28:47 +0000

WOW!

(just hitting this blog for the first time in a few weeks)

Jamie, all this time I had no idea that you were the artist who created that box art! It’s a shame your signature wasn’t on the box! It should be!

Beautiful job!!!!! (any chance of making posters available to us?)

By: flamingakira

flamingakira — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 01:15:15 +0000

That is indeed beautiful. Reminds me of the painting Capt Picard hangs in his Ready Room. On a side note, I wanted to thank you guys for shrinking the size of the box on the E. Much as I love the Ertl size for room for art and such, your boxes are much nicer to have around.

By: BobP

BobP — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 14:17:15 +0000

I’ll chime in here, too: Jamie’s art turned out great, and we are very fortunate to have someone of his talents working here. It’s rare that a nice illustration like this can be produced “in-house.” I am more of a traditionalist myself when it comes to model kit boxes, and tend to prefer illustrated packaging, as opposed to Photoshopped or CGI.

I wish we could have left Jamie’s original background in, as the blue nebula has some lovely subtleties and complements the ship beautifully, and would have worked with the overall blue color scheme of our Trek packaging. Fortunately, the illustrated background from the Trek style guide is pretty decent and has worked nicely for most of our hobby packaging. For the final E-e packaging, Jamie recomposited the image himself in Photoshop, incorporating the background and adding some subtle motion and lighting effects to the ship. He also added a couple of the sparkles/highlights that seem to have become part of our graphic vocabulary for our Trek packaging. Compositionally, the ship crossing in diagonally and bleeding off the right edge gives it a strong, simple dynamic and implies an additional sense of motion and urgency.

By: djdood

djdood — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 07:38:29 +0000

Wonderful painting. For “not having touched an airbrush in years” it looks pretty fantastic to me. Neat to hear about someone still blowing paint for something like this, as opposed to shoving pixels around in Photoshop.

By: crikerat

crikerat — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 12:49:36 +0000

Wonderful image. The E-e is my second favorite ship and a great subject. I’m sure many people feel the way you do about a finished project. Especially in the modelling world (I could have done that just a bit better.)

The best part is you can always do that next time!