I don’t remember thinking much about the spot illustrations I submitted to Factsheet Five. For the most part I just thought up some images that seemed cool (and disturbing) and then drew them. I was (and am though I don’t use it much now) very fond of stippling and cross hatching so most of the illustrations feature those techniques for shading and texture.
Author Archives: skook
Twenty Years and Counting
I’ve been having illustrations published for a little over 20 years now. I started publishing my own minicomics in 1989. Kinkos 24 hour self service copy shops were a new phenomenon and I took advantage of it. There was (and is) something very satisfying about folding and stapling a little zine together. Once I started publishing minicomics I quickly discovered that other people across the country were publishing as well. One of the best sources of information and reviews in those ancient, pre-internet days was Factsheet Five. Mike Gunderloy reviewed just about anything sent to him. And he liked (or at least had positive things to say) about much of it. Factsheet Five was illustrated with drawings and photos contributed by its readers.
The next series of posts will be drawings I sent to Factsheet Five. Most of these were intended as filler illustrations for Mike to put wherever he had an empty space in his layout. Not all of them saw print. I have a hard time looking at a lot of work I did prior to the mid nineties but I still like most of this stuff.
Sentient 39 – Lili
A version of Lili Veracruz drawn in 2001 while I was drawing a variety of the alien species for the Sentient 39 universe. I was drawing the aliens so I could practice coloring them in Photoshop using my Wacom tablet. Once I was done with the aliens I planned to start coloring some Misspent Youths characters.
Sentient 39 – Burrabb Cub
Burrabb cubs leave the pouch when their muscles have developed. Unlike human babies who spend a couple of years being pretty helpless and needing to be taken care of constantly Burrabb cubs are physically capable and active. They’re also not very bright. Burrabb brains take about 5 years to develop to a point where a Burrabb can begin to learn language and “civilized” behavior. Until that point they are also primarily quadrupeds.
Sentient 39 – Burrabb Maha
A Burrabb family consists of a maha and “his” herra. While the maha are, for the most part in charge of the family, the herra actually run it. They have to. Mahas have a very hard time getting along with other mahas. The same pheromones that keep their herra bonded to them make other mahas aggressive and hostile. Burrabb society works when the herra negotiate and the maha give advice from the sidelines.
Sentient 39 – Burrabb Herra
The Burrabb are the non-terran originating species that I’ve spent the most time designing. They’ve been in my imagination in some form for decades. This version, from my 2001 Sentient 39 universe building exercise, is close to how I currently imagine them. Given that they’ve spread themselves across hundreds of systems and adapted themselves to a multitude of environments this could just be an example of one of the sub-races. The Burrabb have two sexes but a slightly more complex breeding cycle than human beings. Fertilization occurs in the mahas. At a certain point the (fetus? larva?) developing cubs leave the maha and finish their development in pouches in the herras. Imagine a social structure of a pride of marsupial lions in which the (not)male gives birth and the (not)females finish the gestation. Only not quite that. The mahas are about twice the size of the herras. A burrabb family has a single maha and two to ten herras.
Sentient 39 – MiGo
Back in 2001, when I was working out the major species in the Sentient 39 universe I ran into a major stumbling block – the limits of my own imagination. And my desire to have the different alien species actually be different. I didn’t want to just toss up intelligent lizard and cats and just-like-humans except for the shapes of their ears and eyebrows. The more I’ve read about life on this planet the more I’m convinced that life on other worlds is going to diverse and strange and not simply terran life with different colors and slightly mixed up parts.
So, faced with the limits of my imagination I did what authors and artists have done since man started telling stories – I stole from another author. In this case I swiped the Mi-Go and the Elder Things from HP Lovecraft. In Lovecraft’s stories these creatures were supposed have existed for millions of years and spread their empires across the galaxy. They seemed like a good fit and they are in the public domain. I didn’t get the Elder Thing illustration past a very rough sketch. This is a Mi-Go, one of the so-called Fungi from Yuggoth.
Sentient 39 – Trisymmetrical
The idea of a species with a trilateral symmetry has been in my imagination since high school. I only started really thinking in detail about the biology and ecology of such a species when I started looking for creatures to populate the Sentient 39 universe in 2001. I sketched out a variety of animals that might populate that biosphere. The humans in this sketch are exploring part of that biosphere.
Sentient 39 – Warrior Penitent
This creature is another alien species idea that I updated for the Sentient 39 universe in 2001. I originally invented them back in high school for a comic series that was never more than an idea. Seriously. I don’t think I ever did more than one or two sketches of any of the characters. I never did get around to naming the species. As I’ve said, names are often the last things I think of. While they did develop space flight they never used it for more than local resource gathering. As a species they are xenophobic, prone to religious fervor and ecstacies, and constantly at war. They’ve most destroyed their ecosystem and, by all indications are their way to extinction.
Another species would never see one of them like this. They wear their armor like a second skin. This is what they look like without it.
Sentient 39 – Symbiote
This fellow started out as a bartender in my never more than plotted high school graphic novel Shiptrap. Every frontier needs a bar and every bar needs a bartender. Originally he was just a big intelligent reptile. When I sat down to draw out the Sentient 39 aliens I wanted something more exotic so I reinvented him as a planet/animal symbiote. Most of the creatures of his world are symbiotically linked plant and animal combinations.
