Photo References

A classic photo-based work of mines, some six hours...

A drawing "from scratch": four hours.

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Nowadays my works are based, mostly, around a photo.

However,the  truth is... I am a bit faster drawing on my own.  Not much, but a bit.  It takes me a quarter of an hour to whip up a sketch with four characters, it takes me some twenty minutes to find a photo I want to "mod". With one character. If I have to use two or three characters... the photos really becomes just a limit, as I have to redraw the characters anyway, in order to get them to interact believably.

So, to spare time is not really the reason why I use so much photos. I have a couple of other reasons.

The first is that, if I go on  for a while without "checking in" with reality, I tend to use a style that is not very realistic but, rather, quite cartoonish.

It doesn't come as a surprise - cartoons were my first love, and I still love them dearly.

There is nothing wrong with it, really... just, realism goes out of the window, which places those works well inside the realm of fantasy.

Now, most often than not, it is not really my purpose to draw out my fantasies as such - as fantasies, that is.

Often, when I draw, what I want do is to illustrate, as credibly as I can,  a possible alternate reality. 

This because it is evident - to me, of course; may not be the same to you - that most of what we call reality, most of what we accept for granted is just, really, a collection of social constructs.

Other societies, in the past, created different values than the ones that we currently believe in.

Even our society has changed its values notably, in just the span of our lives - which doesn't really make it that much more enjoyable for the likes of me, of course.

So, when I draw, I often like to hint at some other ways things could go - not really any better than what we know, just... different.

Maybe, a little more "honest" world... plenty of our rules and laws are just the by-product of the current balance of forces, in our society, and have not much to do with any "objective" justice.

And not so rarely, the values are also pretty arbitrary, if observed with even a modicum of "scientific spirit"... what is the difference between liver-destructing alcohol and Marijuana, for example? Why one is still a mainstay of our culture, the second a proscribed product with an almost illegal market?

Not that something like any "objective" moral value actually exists, or have ever existed in any society...

In this, I am rather with Ken McLeod.Right or wrong... it is all just balance of social forces struggling against each other and economic necessities, where "economy" must be taken in a broader sense.

A different world, one even almost unrecognizable from the one we live in, is always possible. And such worlds are what I, really, like to draw.

Worlds were I, hopefully, could feel less hopelessly oppressed than in the one we live in.

- I do not care that this is the better of the worlds we have seen so far, that every other society our species has generated was almost inevitably harsher, more classist and unjust, less forgiving... fucking worse. I still feel oppressed by the shitload of crap that it does charge on almost everybody that lives. Better than anything till now, doesn't mean that it is not, still, a gigantic bag of crap. It could be worse, and it seems all intent growing into something that will be much worse, a much needed (if you believe the assholes that writes on Forbes) return to the moral  values of middle XIX century cut-throat capitalism... shittier than shit -


I am not so interested in providing more sexually tinted fucking escapism, so that some more dumb fucks like me can lower their head, eat their daily dish of merde and keep soldiering on, till they are finally allowed to die.

I prefer to hint that thing could be different... nothing less than this  cuts it, for me. 

To do so, the more realism, the better... for which, photo-based works are better.

Even when, to render justice to the original material, it takes me a lot more time in the "inking" phase than what would be needed for simply wrapping up a sketch and go with the flow.

The harsher nature of the non theatrical sadist.

Saturday I went to a short seminary in basic shibari(1) techniques - the base knot, the takate-kote box-tie, pelvic harness and a semi suspension.

A basic takate-kote.
The skewers are a dabotzian addendum, you don't use them IRL

It has been extremely nice, and fun.

Being the kind of semi-reclusive oddball that I am, I didn't manage to get a hand on a model but, luckily, there was one fine woman that wants very much to be  tightly bound and had no rigger at hand, so we got paired. 

To be honest, the fact that she is going to move out of the area soon, to find her forever domme (... yes, domme (2) )  was a bit of an help, because... I really am one horny dog.

In more than a couple of moments, a very unprofessional and a bit unethical hard-on went in the way of the ropes (3).

Fear not, my reader... I managed to maintain a shade of decency.

However, this was not my main mistake during the event.

My partner - blessed be her heart - looked pretty serious most of the time.

Me being me, I read that as being bored, which is quite unusual - the mean time between an half mile and a full laugh, around me, is measurable in minutes.

I am, after all, an intelligent human being affected by a sometimes sulphurous sense of humour and a lingering fear of being a bother to the world. I make people laugh, because so I know that they are at ease with me around - I do not take it as a given.

She, instead, went on in serious mode for what are - for me - unnerving stretches of time.

In the end, I asked her, and she said that she was psyching herself in the role of the victim.

Unfortunately, my ideal victim is giggling, outside of the moments of rough play, so it kind of messed me up a bit.

Meanwhile, the instructor (Sr. Interior) explained that, in reality, shibari is more about "service and satisfaction", and humiliation, than anything else. I didn't really understand, right then, so I had to sleep over it.

When I refuse to go along and play the part of the terrible kidnapper, in a way I am failing my part of the show. The shibari action is also a bit of theatrics that allows the rigged person to let her ego go, for a while. The rigger has to take the responsibility of strip that  ego from the model to fully fill his role, and I really am not much into this part. 

Maybe, because I can't seem to be able to shake the grip of my bothersome super-ego on almost everything I do, and I am somewhat envious of someone that manages to do it? 

Any way, I realize my mistake, now. 

I hope I'll do better next time. 

1) Shibari, or Kinbaku, is a form of bondage play with roots in the Japanese tradition.

2) Domme, or Dominatrix: A female dominant person, to not be confused with dom, which is nowadays almost always referred only to men .

3)Next time, I shall cut the caffeine the day before - let's hope that having a more sedate limbic system will help.

Proof of Coherent Identity

Every now and then, some geniuses tried to get me to draw a picture of their preferred "starlettes", under extreme bondage and torture (I am me - said myself).

It has winded down - mainly, because of the powers of Google images search by image, and the moron-ness of most of these guys... if someone sends me photos of two different women saying they are their photos, chances are that I am going to see it - but, for a while, it was a bit embarrassing.

The denials of these guys - "No, I never never heard of her, this is me!" (I only found these 15 different places where this photos appear, associated to that actress, so I may be mistaken... of course, it is at most one possibility in 2^14, imagining that each site choose the actress name by picking randomly in a hat with two names ) - were more than a bit comical, but I rather go and rent a good film, when I am in the mood for a good laugh.

I'd also like the idea of having some kind of authorization, when I make portraits of a person that wants them.

I thought for a while about how to go over this, without actually asking name and last-name of my extempore models (the privacy is important), and I came out with a very minimal authorization scheme...

It would be nice that whoever wants to appear in one my drawings sends me a photo like this one:

The face is not so important, though it would ease my paranoias, as long as it is clear that the person in the authorization is the same that appears in the other photos.

And as long as it is clear that Photoshop has not been used to write the phrase in the paper.

You know, just to be sure that I am not inadvertently creating some nasty revenge porn.

By the way, it is incredible how many "hot women" seems to - suddenly - lose their access to a mobile with a photo-camera, when I ask this "proof of coherent identity".