The Star Trek Art of Neale Davidson

Updated: 30 June 2021

Contact: jaynz@patrickgoodman.org

All artwork copyright 2005-2016 by Neale Davidson.

This site and all its content are free, and will remain so. However, keeping it going is not free at this end. If you do find the site useful, monetary donations to keep it going are gratefully accepted. There are a couple of ways you can do that. I have a PayPal account, but I know some of you don't like that route, so I've also set up a tip jar at Ko-Fi.

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Special thanks to Shayna Davidson, for allowing me access to her husband's work and for permitting me to create this archive.

Thanks also to Shane Bradley and Nathan Kaiser, who provided extensive archives of Neale's work, which allowed me to fill in some noticeable gaps.

There are a lot of artists out there creating starship schematic drawings for vessels from the Star Trek franchise. This was also the case in the mid to late 2000s, though few of them at the time were as prolific or as well-regarded as Neale Davidson.

Depending upon the forum he was logged into, he was most commonly known as either TFVanguard (the name I knew him by on the Trek-RPG forums) or Vance (as he appeared on the Trek BBS forums). During the first decade of the 2000s, Neale produced hundreds of schematic drawings. He started, he told me once, because he couldn't stand the sloppy art that had appeared in old role-playing game supplements and he was intent on producing cleaner images for use in his games. Then he began to share those images in gaming forums.

Along the line, he became something of a legend in certain circles. I didn't know the legend. I knew Neale from the Trek-RPG forums, and got to know him on social media. He was a loud, opinionated, passionate man, in my experience; also an extraordinarily helpful and generous soul

Publications

Neale didn't create these drawings for their own sake. Inspired by works such as the Star Fleet Technical Manual by Franz Joseph, he was intent upon making his own. Before his death, he'd produced at least fiftenn compilations of his work. While some of these have been more or less easily available (Cygnus X-1 for instance, has several archived), many have not.

Jaynz Ships Volume 01	Jaynz Ships Volume 02	Jaynz Ships Volume 03
Jaynz Ships Volume 04	Jaynz Ships Volume 05	Jaynz Ships Compendium
Starships of Aridas Sofia	Starships of Dana Knutson	Starships of Franz Joseph
Ships of the Star Fleet Technical Manual	Ships of the Four Years War Volume I	Ships of the Four Years War Volume II
Ships of the Baton Rouge Era	Ships of the Line 2268	Ships of Support 2268

Images

Neale created a lot of image files. They were mostly Federation designs, and many of them are the same ships in different eras of the Star Trek Original Series (TOS) timeline, reflecting various upgrades over time (this was Neale's way of dealing with the many different ways the Enterprise appeared over the course of both of the show's pilots and the original three seasons). Many came from games, while some sprang from his own brow or requests from friends and fans.

Always seeking to improve his work, there are three distinct phases of Neale's drawings. He originally created them in grayscale, emulating the art found in many early gaming works such as FASA's Starship Recognition Manuals. Later, he stepped up to a cleaner, easier-to-work-with black-and-white line art style reminiscent of his beloved Star Fleet Technical Manual. Eventually, he graduated to color images.

I've chosen to split these into those three broad categories, with each category being further split by the distinct eras he worked within. There are a lot of drawings, so each style opens up its own page.

Grayscale Drawings - UPDATED

Line Art Drawings - UPDATED

Color Drawings - UPDATED

Sprites - COMING SOON