Last Night on Earth: Starfleet Survivor Nyota Uhura

Third in my Star Trek-themed survivors from the Last Night on Earth board game is Nyota Uhura, the Communications Officer aboard the starship USS Enterprise. To represent Uhura I used Sally the High School Sweetheart, the board game piece which I felt had a similar hairstyle to the one worn by Nichelle Nichols who played the said character in Star Trek: The Original Series. 

Starfleet survivor and Communications Officer of the USS Enterprise, Nyota Uhura

Uhura naturally had a darker skin tone

Clothes colour scheme was an interplay between purple, green and yellowish brown

Painting Uhura allowed me to practice blending and layering a dark skin tone. Based on the photo reference I used (see below), her skin approximated a light chocolate hue. In the end, I was pretty happy with how close I came to accurately replicating Uhura's skin tone. Vallejo Model Color acrylic paints were used to paint the skin while Reaper Master Series (RMS) paints were used for the clothes (jacket, blouse and skirt) except for the boots which were painted using Citadel paints.   

Nichelle Nichols portrayed the character of Uhura in Star Trek: The Original Series

Side views of Nyota Uhura, the Starfleet survivor

Colour scheme for Uhura's clothes were predominantly purple (jacket), green (skirt) and ochre (boots) with neutral off-white on her blouse and jacket buttons. At times, I still struggle with chalkiness issues when using lighter hues from the RMS acrylic paint line. In this case, more work is needed on my painting technique because I had previously eliminated hard water as a possible cause. Well, sort of anyway as I had tried using distilled water to reduce chalkiness without much success.  

Bright red on the axe was actually painted in the shade of Uhura's original uniform

Back view of Starfleet survivor, Nyota Uhura

To complement her dark skin tone, I used a purple-green-ochre color scheme

Meanwhile, the weapons - specifically the axe - allowed me to add a bright colour into the mix. Red kinda works well with the rest of the colors and is definitely preferable to plain metallic grey.

Shots taken by a DSLR with macro lens can be misleading hence a scale comparison above

Next up for the Starfleet Survivors is a Star Trek character that always speaks in an accent. Actually, there are two - one Scottish and the other Russian - so it will either be Scotty or Chekov as the fourth survivor. Imagining these board game pieces as Star Trek characters is making painting them so much fun. And that's why we are in the hobby after all - to have fun. Otherwise, what's the point?