Nathan Warner was educated in the Planetary sciences with degrees in Geology and Geophysics. Since then, he's worked in engineering support and church ministry. He's a 3d-animator, graphic artist and designer, and an amateur artist with a love of God's amazing creation. In 2016, he sought a creative outlet to get "off-world", and his childhood love of Star Trek, with its optimism, sense of duty and responsibility, exploration, and discovery, which was a natural allure. He began by composing audio tracks to compete with city sounds; then, he turned to digital composite paintings that "beamed" him up for a little healthy escapism, as he hopes they do for you too.
From his website: My own journey to making Star Trek artwork and short-stories was an accidental one. It began one day when I dusted off some old Star Trek ship toys from my childhood and started photographing them. The next thing I knew, I was making complex collages in PowerPoint that developed into full-fledged action sequences. Subconsciously, I think I was rediscovering the old tracing paper “collages” I did as a child—tracing the Enterprise, Klingon D-7s, Romulan Warbirds, and shuttles from my copy of “The Art of Star Trek,” making space scenes and battles with them.
In a similar fashion, my artwork can be thought of as a collage of photographic elements that are masked, combined, and overlaid painstakingly to produce the final image. There can be upwards of a hundred individual elements per finished piece. Most of the background photography is my own, but occasionally, if a space scene was needed, I reached out to NASA’s public domain photo collection—or other public domain imagery.
As such, my art style is an homage to traditional, pre-3D animation special effects that relied on models and real film footage to produce photographic composites, which are to still some of the most iconic images in cinematic history.
Slowly, I opened the door into this world, trying to visualize the scenes that had played in my own imagination as a child, watching the TOS movies, The Next Generation, Deep Space 9, and Voyager. I wanted to see a refitted Galaxy class Saucer landing on a mysterious planet on the edge of the Federation frontier, a Romulan Bird of Prey arriving back at Romulus after a successful campaign against the Klingon Empire, the Borg excavating a “sample” of a Federation colony for analysis and assimilation, and Defiant class starships messing around in atmosphere—all images that fueled my imagination.
Before I knew it, I had produced a large collection of art that went no further than my own computer screen. My brother saw a few samples on day and suggested other Trekkers might enjoy them. So, I began sharing my art weekly on a dozen or so Star Trek Facebook groups and that is when the stories started. I found I couldn’t post the art without sharing the klaxons, smoke, phaser fire, and feats of daring-do that the images had inspired in my mind.
My desire with this artwork is that it will also fire your imaginations as you pass from ship to ship, jumping from location to location like a Q being – disguised as a “fly-on-the-wall”, observing the actions and adventures of starships and their crews on the edge of the final frontier.
I am not an “artist” in the official sense of the word—just a kindred soul who longs to travel the vast unmeasured sea of stars and share these dreams that inspire me.
I hope they inspire you also, and that you enjoy the journey as much as I have had making it.
