This critter is a member of one of the second oldest alien species I invented. Sometime in high school I plotted Shiptrap, a comic about a planet populated by ship wrecked alien species. I never got further than plotting it and sketching out a few pages of action. The main character was a human being. One of his best friends was this thing. I’m not sure whether I named the creature in original plot. It wouldn’t surprise me if I didn’t. I often put off naming things until the last minute. I’ve just called this species the Carpets for so long that that’s the name that’s stuck in my brain. They’re some sort of intelligent invertebrates. Their main sensory organs are on the “head” at the top of a stalk that can be raised or retracted as needed. I’m not sure how they communicate or how such a creature developed space faring technology.

Part of the premise of the Sentient 39 “universe” is that life, while somewhat plentiful in the galaxy, has actually evolved fairly rarely. Life evolved on a few worlds and then spread out to populate other planets. Usually this was done because some species on a planet evolved intelligence and with intelligence technology. With technology the species is then able to leave its world and colonize others.

This critter is a Dunak. His species is named for the original Dunak, a character in a novel I tried writing in 8th grade. The Dunak in my novel was basically a human in alien drag. He was inspired by both the Frank Kelly Freas cover for Conscience Interplanetary and Michael Whelan’s Little Fuzzy covers. For some reason the alien on the Conscience Interplanetary cover is always blue in my memory so that’s probably why Dunak ended up having blue fur.

Honestly I don’t remember if I drew the male human or the female human first. I tried to make them look as generic as possible. Which isn’t really possible since humans have a lot of variety to them. I drew them naked since I planned to draw all the other races (the aliens) without clothes. It seemed to rude to give the humans clothes if their fellow sentients didn’t get them.

I like to invent worlds. Ecologies. Cultures. I grew up reading science fiction and fantasy. It seems like the thing to do.

I’ve ended up with a number of different “universes” in my head. The biggest one is what I call the Sentient 39 universe. While I’ve been building bits of it most of my life I made an active project of it starting at the turn of the century. In 2001 I bought a WACOM tablet so that I would have more control working in Photoshop and creating digital art. I especially wanted to learn how to do computer coloring. First though I needed something to color. So I decided to do a series of illustrations of the major “races” in the Sentient 39 universe, starting with my own race/species – the human being.

Since humans come in two rather distinct sexes I drew one of each. This one is the male.

(I did color this and the other illustrations I’ll be posting but I’ve lost those files over the years. Even if I found them I’m not sure if they would open. A number of my older digital files seem to have gotten corrupted.)