A little back ground of the "road" I took to do these figures:
Primary target audience: Star Trek Fans (not figure collectors)
Research areas and process:
Uniforms: deep and many months of discussion with The Admirable at The StarTrek Uniform Club. Robert Fletcher, and William Theiss personal notes were also consulted.
Findings:
Season 2:
Because the fabric used, Velour, has the tendency to shrink (Watch Season 2: All uniforms were tight and too short)
Spock had 3 uniforms in Season 2, all have different colors because the dye fades every time when they wash them.
Conclusion: Season 1 and 2 were not the true representation of what Roddenberry. (They were on very low budget, couldn't afford to redo the uniforms in season 2. They laid off Yeoman and even want to lay off Uhura.) Then in season 3: More money came-in. They remade all the uniforms. Note: the uniform also began to fade after the forth episode.
Further Conclusion, first 3 episodes are the best representation of what Roddenberry and Theiss intended.
Beside having the above conclusions, I also noticed the followings based on my observation:
Color TV just came about in the 60s. Picture tubes were not at their prime.
The light source and the surrounding colors of the TV set would greatly affect the color perceptions.
Everyone have a different TV.
Therefore, everyone had their own perceptions.
To support my findings, I did 4 surveys, randomly picking ST Fans at Star Trek Las Vegas Convention in 2013 to find out their opinions in 4 areas:
uniform colors (specifically the commanding and science department colors),
ideal Kirk and Spock portrait.
50 screen caps were taken from those 3 season episodes for each of these 4 surveys.
In the uniform color survey, 50 randomly picked Star Trek fans had 35 different choices of the Blue uniforms, and out of these 35 choices more than half chose Season 3 Blue. This Science blue is the blue that I am using now.
The above applies to Kirk likeness too. Why Shatner is so hard to capture? My conclusion, most artists would use "a lot" of different screen caps. Mr Shatner changes his body weight every 2-3 episodes. To remedy this, we use only one specific episode to gauge Kirk likeness. Same thing applies to Spock's ear; he used 4-5 sets of ears, all different.
Anyway, if you have the recently released "Star Trek Costumes" by Paula M Block and Terry Erdmann, you will find my findings were supported by this book.
Since everyone has a different idea of ST TOS, the best way to go about doing this project is to follow Roddenberry's idea (Again, note my primary audience are Trek fans)
The above is the simplified version of my road map of my research.
Also, do note that Roddenberry wants Commanding Green, NOT Gold, and do note that "EVERY" Trek fans have their own individual idea of Star Trek TOS.
Side note: I went through a similar process with the phasers, tricorders, and Communicators. Each of these items had more than 4 versions. Which one is right? All are right. So I decided to use Season 3 prop (based on my assumption that TOS had more money to spend in Season 3).
My suggestion for getting "Individual" desired Science Blue is to do some Post-purchase customizing by soaking the blue uniform in really Hot Water. The color of the uniform will fade. With careful control of the process, one can achieve individual desired color (fading) as in the later parts of Season 3.
*takes deep breath*
