David A. Kimble

David Austin Kimble, is the technical illustrator credited with creating the Star Trek: The Motion Picture Blueprints, and a cutaway drawing of the refit of the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701) from.

Andrew Probert, Production Illustrator on that movie at the time, and who collaborated with Kimble on the project, recalled on his involvement, "'I really don't know how David got brought into it. I think Richard Taylor contacted him. David Kimble is an artist who is known worldwide for his accuracy in doing machinery cutaway drawings. He has done ocean liners, spacecraft, oil rigs, and automobiles, which are very popular with racing fans. So he was brought in to do the cutaway of the Enterprise. That was the big carrot that was dangled in front of David, because he was drooling over putting those decks and other spaces together. Part of the package was that he also draw the blueprints, the six-sided views of all the ships. David just knocked himself out doing the blueprints, and those are all totally accurate to my designer's mind, and to the models, or they're close enough to the models to work, but they're totally satisfactory to me as the designer. The cutaway was a lot of fun. It took him a long time to do that. He did all the decks, we planned out the spaces together, and if you look in the botanical garden section, he painted my wife and me walking on one of the paths. We're just little dots of color, but I know it, she knows it, and David knows that those dots are us.'"

The cut-away drawing was originally a black and white illustration that was published in various magazines. Kimble revisited that drawing and upgraded it to a full color cut-away poster, published by "Mind's Eye Press" in 1986, and the first officially licensed one of its kind, though, like its successors, it is not considered canon.

Kimble's stint at Paramount Pictures apparently turned out to be a bit of a disillusionment, as was recalled by admirer Chris Cushman, as he sounded out Kimble for a possible co-production for a USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-D) poster, "I asked him what he thought of the Enterprise illustration I had started and he loved it, I pushed the conversation into the direction of a possible collaboration figuring he had the contacts at Paramount. He looked less than happy when I mentioned that, explaining that he had not profited from the first poster very well and preferred not to work with them again." Cushman's company, Sci-Pub Tech, went on to publish a series of Star Trek cut-away posters, very much reminiscent of the one Kimble had done.

Kimble, hailing from Los Angeles County, California, and a graduate from the Academy of Technical Arts, Gardena, California, is an accomplished illustrator and best known for his cutaway drawings of cars. His expertise is a highly sought after commodity by the automotive industry, like General Motors and publications in the field, such as "Sports Car Graphic" and "Road & Track". Repeated requests for art from the latter, led Kimble to found his own business company, "David Kimble Illustration", in 1976. Many, in fact, consider him the "king of the cutaway technical drawing". A Google image search under his name will net many fine examples of why his work is so well respected. He considers himself to be "very eccentric and very aberrant", with a collection of well over 1,000 movies and working as much as 17 hours a day on a regular basis. Mr. Kimble is married with one son, and was living in Marfa, Texas as of 2000.