I will tell you right off the bat that I went through great pains to make this drawing! Since I have been working as a feature cartoonist for the Vidette newspaper and have taken on a heavy college class load I have seen my time to draw pin-ups like this disappear. On top of that, this image was nearly lost due to unexplainable file corruption (UPDATE: The file corruption was caused by a defective SDRAM chip) while I was coloring it. Without a lot of patience I would have lost this image completely! Luckily, thanks to a ton of hard work on my part, you are able to see this beautiful drawing before you!
Even though I made this drawing for my own enjoyment, I drew this picture to a set deadline. I have been a huge fan of the games Star Control and Star Control II for many years now. These video games, written by Fred Ford and Paul Reiche III, have an amazing cast of characters, races, and places that have filled my day dreams for over a decade. I have wanted to draw a cute Shofixti Maiden for a long time and I finally decided I would get the drawing done for Star Control II's 10th anniversary, which was in the beginning of November.
I spent all the free time I had over the course of 5 days to get this drawing done, one of the days being spent repairing the horrible damaged caused to it when Adobe Photoshop 7.0 horribly corrupted my image file for no perceivable reason. The damage was so bad that Photoshop refused to open the file after that even though it was a ".psd" file. Luckily, Jasc Paint Shop Pro can also read Photoshop native format files, and could open the Photoshop file when Photoshop could not. Thank God for Jasc Paint Shop Pro-- it saved my drawing's life on that one. I used Paint Shop Pro to export the file back to Photoshop so that I could repair the damage, which included manually changing off color pixels back to my best guess of what their original color was one single pixel at a time! Thankfully, I feel that working so hard to repair this drawing was worth all of the extra effort because this is my best digital painting job to date!
I had recently found the e-mail addresses of the original creators of the game Star Control II. I sent them both this drawing and one of them actually wrote back to me! Here is what Paul Reiche III had to say about my drawing:
Very cool, Dan! I always wanted to include a still or animated sequence of images in SC2 showing the nubile Shofixti maidens emerging from their sleep chamber clothed only in wisps of chemical fog. This probably makes me a criminal is certain Southern states.
Paul Reiche III is the greatest!!! Not only did he develop one of my favorite video games, but he actually took the time to write back to me as well, which is a very rare thing to have happen in this day and age! I love the animated sequence idea that Mr. Reiche mentioned in his letter, and I think that it is a real shame that he was never able to add it into the Star Control II video game. Currently there is an open source project going on over at Sourceforge that is ressurecting the old Star Control II code that was written for the 3DO video game console. Perhaps someday if I can ever find the time, maybe I can download the source code to the game, animate the Shofixti Maiden sequence myself, and then add it into the game where Paul Reiche III would have placed it. My actually trying to do such a thing is just mere wishful thinking right now, but if you have any interest in me actually going ahead with it, be sure to e-mail me and let me know! In the meantime, I just might have to draw my Shofixti maiden again, only this time covered only by some wisps of chemical fog that are only covering up her most personal parts.... Ooops! I guess that my even thinklng about such a thing could land me into a jail cell in a certain southern state right next to Mr. Reiche! Aw heck, drawing a hot Shofixti Maiden like that would be worth the prison sentence! In any case, I hope that you like the drawing!
UPDATE (11/26/05) - Back in August of this year I had the pleasure to speaking to Paul Reiche III, the creator of star Control II and who now works at Activision, on the phone. During our conversation, I asked for his blessing to be able to be able to develop original characters and storylines based on the universe of The Ur-Quan Masters (Star Controll II). He agreed under some conditions, and soon I will be creating a comic book and several promo drawings based on my new stories and characters that I have come up with! One of the first things that I have done with my new found freedom to develop new stories for The Ur-Quan Masters universe is to rename my Shofixti Maiden character "Kikka," which is Japanese for "Orange Blossom" and the name of a Japanese experimental jet fighter during the twilight days of the Second World War. Kikka is to be a key player in my new Ur-Quan Masters-based stories, and I am sure that you are going to be seeing a lot more of her in the future!
The pencil work was done on 80lb. Strathmore medium-surface drawing paper with a Sanford Col-Erase Non-Photo Blue pencil. I then inked the drawing with several sizes of Kuretake ZiG Millennium pens. It was than cleaned up in Jasc Paint Shop Pro 7.04. To color the drawing, I exported it over to Adobe Photoshop 7.0 and digitally colored it.
All text and original multimedia is © 2002 - 2005 Daniel S. Keller. All other information is copyrighted by their respective owners.