Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Hallowe'en Greetings

I do so love Halloween.  To this day I still carve a pumpkin and set up decorations.  I even have these cool gravestones to set up in the yard, but I didn't this year because a lot of their lawn spikes are broken and I didn't think of a workaround in time.  Sadly, my street is a little out of the way and so I never get many trick-or-treaters.  But I always have candy ready just in case.  One year I answered the door as Death and the children ran screaming!  Good times, good times.  Anyway, perhaps these old-timey greeting cards will help get you in the proper spirit.

Wait... Onion women?  Cucumber men?

 Romantic lettuces?

 Gourd golems preparing a layer cake?

Is that pumpkin... eating pumpkin pie?  That's outright cannibalism!  Macabre, I grant you, but still.

What's with all the chestnuts?  While I certainly wouldn't want to meet the Chestnuts of Despair in a dark alley, I feel like something is missing here.  Did Halloween used to feature a lot of lettuce and nuts?

A procession of cats in funny hats, now that's a little better.  Certainly an improvement over vegetables.

Ah, now we're getting somewhere.  But still I feel there's something missing..

Aha!  Bondage.  There we go.
Happy Halloween!

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Engineskye: Welcome to Wonderland

It's the best month of the year out there, you know.  October!  There's fog on the river.  A few leaves have started to fall and soon it'll start to feel like Halloween.  You can almost smell a hint of winter in the air, along with a hint of

Evil Dolly's Featured Fetish Artist of the Day:  Engineskye


In my earlier Featured Fetish Artist features, I've mainly focused on artists from the 30s through the 50s.  But did you know there are still people making fetish art today?  There are!  Like, right now!  In fact, there are a whole lot of them, and a lot of them who I really like.  There are so many they can sometimes blend together and I'm not sure whose art I'm looking at without a name attached.  But some of them stand out as instantly recognizable, so distinct are their styles.  One of these is the artist known as Engineskye.

I originally came across Engineskye years ago on Deviant Art.  She describes her online persona as being "not me, the artist, it's me, the aspect I came up with to understand parts of my personality."  I'm sure some of us out there can understand that.  I liked her stuff from the get-go, partly because of the artfully colorful style and partly because of the ideas she comes up with.  Also because she's willing to work with a wide range of different fetishes, enough to tickle all sorts of fancies.  There's latex and clever costumes, sissification and dollification, transformations of all kinds, furries, pets and livestock, extreme medical bondage, and many more of your old favorites (call now and choose either 8-tracks or cassettes!). 

As an aside, you don't have to be a boy to be a sissy, but it doesn't hurt!


Up until now most of the featured artists' drawing styles have been very technically precise, more in the realm of classic comics and illustration.  Engineskye paints with a broader digital brush.  What makes her stand out, beyond the character design, are the broad swaths of color and the saturated backgrounds of purples and pinks.  Sometimes there are happily garish contrasts of bright color, but she often paints the characters a color that is similar to the background, using linework and changes of tint to make the characters stand out.  The style is loose, sometimes sketchy, sometimes painterly.  Impressionist Fetishism?

I love her highlights, particularly when painting latex.  She's very good at making it look so shiny and slick, oiled and polished, and semi-transparent.  In other places she uses highlights to give things a ravey glowstick feel, or even Tron-like lines of light.

So glowy...
I asked her if she worked exclusively in the digital realm, since that makes up the bulk of her offerings.  She answered:

I am not exclusively digital, I've worked in pencil, oils, acrylics, soft pastels, charcoal/conte, watercolors, as well as college-only stuff like stone lithography, screen printing, but I work digital because it's faster and I am about process.  So faster is always better.  I am mostly self-taught despite having a BFA in illustration.  That taught me certain techniques and discipline as far as working quickly to spec, but most of the real understanding occured on my own, working hours each night.

Heh... I remember doing lithography and screen printing in college, too.  Haven't touched it since.

Let's talk about transformation!  Anyone who has read my work knows my love of transformation, whether it's physical or psychological.  I usually favor medical and scientific transformation, but magical TFs are good, too.  Engineskye does fantastical transformation very well, often by rams-horned demonesses, sometimes detailing a step-by-step process which is always fun to see.  There's everything from transformation into working carousel ponies to pampered pets on leashes.  The victims might be made into partial hybrids or full on animals.  Personally, when it comes to animal TFs, I'm partial to the piggies!


Not there's anything wrong with doggies.


 Or cows, or ponies.


 Or parrots, or even... condoms!


Many of her characters are fuller figured, especially the dominant ones, which I can appreciate.  Sometimes they force their pets to share in their, ah, largess.  In fact, her forced fattening themes are one of my favorites, since it's hard to find them done so... prettily.


Oh, and what's that last one?  She's a pillow!  A Limbless Furniture Slave, mayhap?

Hooray!
And a little hardcore never hurts.  Well, sometimes it can hurt.


...and the day had started so normally.
I asked her which artists had influenced her art or imagination early on.  Her reply:

I have a million influences, I could write a book on influences and art history in the internet age, but it's best served as a conversation, since it's just too much to list.  I've been all over the world, seen a lot of the big museums in Paris, London, as well as the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam.  But I'd rather talk about album covers, since that's my biggest influence ^_^

Music influences: Skinny Puppy, Siouxie and the Banshees, Killing Joke, The Sisters of Mercy, Yob, Voivod, Coil, Mastodon, Pink Floyd, Blue Oyster Cult, Hawkwind
Digital art influences: Rick Berry, Dave McKean
Album cover influences: Roger Dean, Storm Thorgensen
Movie/video influences: Dario Argento, Cronenberg, David Lynch, Peter Christophersen from Coil, Matt Mahurin
Comic influences: Matt Howarth, Michael Manning
Fetish influences: Simon Benson, Mamabliss, Trevor Brown, Olivia, Thierry Muegler
That's just off the top of my head, there's always more *_*


I'm just happy I recognize many of those!  Some of that brings back memories.  For instance, my father had some Roger Dean art books that I used to look at all the time, before I could barely read.  That's cool.

The bottom line is that I think her art is just pretty.  Playful.  Fun to look at!  Regardless of the often degrading nature of the subject matter, there is a wicked playfulness shining through.  A hint of darkness without seeming dark, cruelty without feeling cruel.  I respect that.  And did I mention the latex?  By all means, check out her work.  If you've liked any of the pieces of shared with you here, you're bound to find lots more to love.  You can find her at various convenient locations:

FurAffinity
Deviant Art
Hentai Foundry

My policy is to get at least one dolly transformation in before breakfast every day.