Today’s Fan Art Friday is two great works from the convention program.  For winning the art contest sponsored by the convention organizers, both of these artists won the honor of having their art printed in the convention program.  The first is an excellent original “blueprint’ of two small spacecraft created by artist Geoffrey Mandel in the style borrowed from the book The Star Trek Starfleet Technical Manual by Franz Joseph.  (Mandel later won a greater prize, doing production work on later Star Trek incarnations! Talk about a Trekkie’s dream come true! )

The second is a fantastic pen and ink pointillist piece by artist Monica Miller  called Pirates of the Empire.  I love this, with the proud but menacing Vulcan and that leering sneer of Kirk.   Monica did a lot of work for Star Trek ‘fanzines’ at the time.  Fanzines were home-made mimeographed magazines featuring Star  Trek-centered stories.  Many fanzines were written by women and the stories were often erotic, with lots of starship romances; e.g. Spock and Chapel, and where the Kirk/Spock ‘slash’ stories were born.  Miller created many memorable covers for publications — see here a similar design for an  issue of Off The Beaten Trek.  Unfortunately I could not find any online bios for Ms. Miller, but I’m sure her unique style was greatly appreciated.