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Description
Made with Blender, rendered with Cycles, editted with GIMP.

I'm really pleased with the reaction I've been getting to the JR-Prise. "Meet the JR-Prise 04" is likely to become my most popular piece, possibly in a few days. I've gotten far more comments on the JR-Prise renders than on any of my other stuff. I've been trying at comics for years, and one of the projects I worked on was published, but I'm not much closer to being a successful comics artist now than I was 25 years ago. There are some guys who are parlaying YouTube videomaking into book sales and crowdfunding campaign success, but it takes me all day to upload a ten minute video to YouTube. I'm lucky to have DSL-lite, one of my neighbors can't get high speed ("high speed") internet at all. So comic-making is pretty much dead to me. I can be hired to do it, but I'm not making my own.

I had planned to take a couple years off from doing my own art, but that is two years of more or less not being out there growing an audience. The JR-Prise has moved the needle more for me than anything else I've done though, so maybe I should reconsider. It seems like I actually can build a following doing Star Trek fan art. I'm trying to figure out what is a sensible course of action here, especially in the light of the Axanar and Stage 9 shutdowns. That's a little foreboding, but to be honest both projects were playing in the same sandbox of Paramount/CBS's commercial products, i.e. film and games. If Axanar/Stage 9 had attempted to become a licensee in advance, rathering than trying to get their projects adopted after the fact, maybe they would have had better luck. It used to be easy to pitch Star Trek product ideas to Paramount/CBS. I'm not able to find the info ATM, maybe someone can point me to it. At any rate Trekyards doesn't appear to be in any danger of being shut down. They'll eventually blow past the $50,000 fundraising limit, and don't appear to have plans to close their Patreon when they get there. So it looks like it's possible to work with CBS/Paramount if you aren't trying to do the same thing they do to make money, and don't proceed as if you're going to have nothing to do with them. FWIW I still think Paramount/CBS would be wise to adopt Stage 9, the optics of that shutdown are ruinously bad, but the reality is that the Stage 9 guy could have and should have approached the Paramount/CBS product development department a long time ago.

The question for me is, can I take the skills I have and turn them into a licensed Star Trek product? I'm mulling it over, it may be possible. For the immediate future I'm going to focus on building ships and posting renders so I have an audience to work with. I can handle renders with the equipment I've got. I may be able to get very short animations done, but don't expect the world in that area. Eventually though I may be able to build this into something good.

Description
Made with Blender, rendered with Cycles, editted with GIMP.

I'm really pleased with the reaction I've been getting to the JR-Prise. "Meet the JR-Prise 04" is likely to become my most popular piece, possibly in a few days. I've gotten far more comments on the JR-Prise renders than on any of my other stuff. I've been trying at comics for years, and one of the projects I worked on was published, but I'm not much closer to being a successful comics artist now than I was 25 years ago. There are some guys who are parlaying YouTube videomaking into book sales and crowdfunding campaign success, but it takes me all day to upload a ten minute video to YouTube. I'm lucky to have DSL-lite, one of my neighbors can't get high speed ("high speed") internet at all. So comic-making is pretty much dead to me. I can be hired to do it, but I'm not making my own.

I had planned to take a couple years off from doing my own art, but that is two years of more or less not being out there growing an audience. The JR-Prise has moved the needle more for me than anything else I've done though, so maybe I should reconsider. It seems like I actually can build a following doing Star Trek fan art. I'm trying to figure out what is a sensible course of action here, especially in the light of the Axanar and Stage 9 shutdowns. That's a little foreboding, but to be honest both projects were playing in the same sandbox of Paramount/CBS's commercial products, i.e. film and games. If Axanar/Stage 9 had attempted to become a licensee in advance, rathering than trying to get their projects adopted after the fact, maybe they would have had better luck. It used to be easy to pitch Star Trek product ideas to Paramount/CBS. I'm not able to find the info ATM, maybe someone can point me to it. At any rate Trekyards doesn't appear to be in any danger of being shut down. They'll eventually blow past the $50,000 fundraising limit, and don't appear to have plans to close their Patreon when they get there. So it looks like it's possible to work with CBS/Paramount if you aren't trying to do the same thing they do to make money, and don't proceed as if you're going to have nothing to do with them. FWIW I still think Paramount/CBS would be wise to adopt Stage 9, the optics of that shutdown are ruinously bad, but the reality is that the Stage 9 guy could have and should have approached the Paramount/CBS product development department a long time ago.

The question for me is, can I take the skills I have and turn them into a licensed Star Trek product? I'm mulling it over, it may be possible. For the immediate future I'm going to focus on building ships and posting renders so I have an audience to work with. I can handle renders with the equipment I've got. I may be able to get very short animations done, but don't expect the world in that area. Eventually though I may be able to build this into something good.