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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)