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!

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.

Namio - A Face Is For Sitting

The weather is turning!  The nights are getting colder.  There are piles of pumpkins for sale at the grocery store.  A few posts ago I related a dream that put me in mind of an artist I might review.  So now I think it's time for...

Evil Dolly's Featured Fetish Artist of the Day:  Harukawa Namio.

There's not much I can say about the Japanese artist Namio (1947 - ?) as a person since I've been able to find out little about him.  His art, however, may be instantly recognizable by many in this particular subculture, especially by submissive males.  It's possible you've come across his drawings without even knowing it; so common are they online that most any search for femdom or smothering topics will come up with a few of them. 

The reason it is so common is because the man produced over a thousand detailed drawings during his career.  Now that's dedication!  Or, possibly, obsession.  I can only assume most were published during the 80s.  Scans of varying quality were disseminated across the internet mainly in the 90s.  I've seen a few that bear the markings of having been around during the BBS days when the dialing modems were much... noisier.  And fetish art, especially femdom, was harder to find in those days, so Namio likely helped shape the fantasies of many a submissive male.

The work was almost entirely pencil sketches using soft shading on textured paper.  Done in a pencil gray, the only other colors were very minimal skin tones and a dark red, most often used to put a woman's dress pattern, heels, or lipstick in bright contrast.  Namio's very favorite subject, it would seem, was serious facesitting, with a smaller, wimpish men's faces and heads being absolutely enveloped by the plush posteriors of much larger and full-figured women.  Stanton did the same thing, having weak tiny men being physically overpowered, dominated and smothered by stronger, taller voluptuous women.  I don't know if Namio and Stanton influenced each other way back in the day.  I suppose it's possible.  Or perhaps small men being overpowered and turned into furniture for big women is simply part of a Jungian zeitgeist for many submissives.  A convergent evolution, if you will.

Other common Namio subjects were graphic toilet slavery, watersports, and various forms of cruelty.  He sometimes diverged into fantasy such as doll-sized men in, ah, awkward situations, and some kind of mutant male race evolved to service women.  He was inventive with the use of harnesses and special outfits to hold a man's face firmly in a woman's rear while she strolled about town.  The women, apart from being plush, often smoked and bore serene expressions even when engaged in acts of sadism.

Speaking personally, I'm not generally a fan of F-m subject matter.  I can't empathize too greatly with the male sub situation.  I would have enjoyed seeing more female-on-female domination, but that was extremely rare in Namio's art, so you take what you can get.  However, despite being a domme myself, I do love facesitting/smothering even to the point of being the bottom, and so can easily imagine myself in some of the positions Namio's males find themselves in.

I'm not aware of any current publications featuring Namio's work, though there may be some.  I saw that there is one company, a VW Productions, which claims to have the rights to publish, though I don't know anything about them or if they're on the level.

I'm a plant person

I got Guild Wars 2, so that's been a distraction.  It's pretty and seems fun so far.  Playing as a plant person.  I haven't played many MMO's, but I did play Star Wars Galaxies for a number of years.  Like, seven years or so.  Ended up as the leader of a guild and the mayor of a player-built city.  My favorite profession was the creature handler.  I had all manner of strange and rare pets.  Had a lot of good times in that game.  But then SWG closed shop as SW-TOR started up.  I played it for a couple months but found the limitations discouraging, and I quickly lost interest.  At least GW doesn't require a monthly subscription, so that's a plus right away.

On a completely random note, there's this.  I don't know where it's from, but it's fun to look at.

Windy Windy Rainy Rainy

What's been going on?  A hurricane went overhead!  Okay, more like the remnants of a hurricane.  I'm nowhere near the coast.  About 400 miles from the coast, give or take.  But it still got plenty windy.  As windy as it gets here.  And lots and lots of rain.  But that's good.  The lawn was looking a bit dry.  Now things are looking extra-soggy.  Drink you plants, you!

I've been writing some.  Actually, I've written a fair chunk since my last post, but the last couple of weeks haven't been too productive.  I've been all scatterbrained.  Can't focus!  I can't even focus writing this post.  What was I saying?  Wasn't there something I was supposed to be doing?  I'm sleepy.

And now geese!

Productivity

What have I been up to?  Well, nothing productive!  For a couple weeks I've been playing Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 (with the water park and zoo add-ons).  I just love little building sims like that.  Planning layouts and themes, making them work.  Of course, I don't have the patience and creativity of some people who go about replicating the entire Magic Kingdom in their spare time. 

Playing that kind of game has got me thinking about making my own game again, so then I go and torture myself by looking up game programming tutorials (which is so totally over my head and sooo horribly mathematical) for that slave mansion simulation game I got in my head.  Everything I'd want to do with it is entirely feasible from a programming sense, as in it could be done, but would require so much modeling and animating.  Just think of the work involved in the props alone: different wall, floor, and rug textures, chairs, sofas, tables, lamps, cabinets, potted plants, all the little details to make it look right and give the rooms some variety, not to mention the kinky bondage props and all that.  And then there's the grounds, with trees and flowers, architecture and walls.  And then of course there's the coming up with a variety of costumes.  eeeeee.  Yet despite all that I just can't get it outta my head.

Also, I've been watching some of those Olympics.  Oh Olympics, you and your tight, tight spandex.

The princess and the amazon.

So I had this odd dream.  There was a medieval sort of capital city in the middle of a large country with a central temple.  Inside they kept a woman who was selected to be a "princess goddess", an idol of sorts, chosen to be a kind of elected goddess.  Quite an important role, one might imagine.  The various surrounding provinces each picked a girl of noble blood and the right attributes (some kind of psychic attunement or other), and she was pampered and groomed from youth to be a candidate for the next goddess for when the time came.  The candidates knew that there would be a degree of physical immobility and so trained for that, but they had never actually met the princess goddess, and certain details of the position were kept secret from them.

Well, the time came and one teenage girl was selected.  She was greatly honored and excited, though nervous as one might expect.  She was taken to the capital and brought to the temple where she would be staying.  In the temple, in the center of a round dais, was a hollow, polished stone cone.  Picture a traffic cone cut in half.  In a solemn but rather rough ceremony that ignored her confusion, she was seated naked inside the cone, the top level with her neck.  A fancy neck brace of brass and ebony was fixed around her neck, though it was just slightly too long for the girl's neck, so they had to force it shut despite her discomfort... she was too overwhelmed and too well bred to complain.  Then two thick halves of a round wooden lid with a hole in the center were closed around her neck like a pillory with her head poking out the center, so that she was trapped inside and her head and the top of the brace were the only parts left visible. 

She had been trained for this, so while she didn't know it would be quite so immobilizing, it wasn't terribly traumatic.  But it turned out they weren't quite finished.  A naked woman was then brought in... a tall, heavy, amazonian sort of woman with her head and hands encased in brass spheres.  She, too, had been groomed, had only one duty in life and sight and hands weren't needed for it.  She was also filthy, spattered with mud all over.  As she approached the dais, the frazzled girl attempted a formal greeting, but the woman was uninterested in formalities.

The people, it seemed, worshiped their goddess, but also believed that something of such importance and reverence should be kept humbled.  So the dirt-spackled woman turned around, leaned back, and rested her weight against the girl's face.  The stunned noble girl, her nose and face buried deeply in the large round cheeks, could breathe only through the narrow space below the woman's crotch, in the gap between her spread thighs.  And that, apart from ceremonies and audiences, was how the girl would spend most of the rest of her long tenure as a goddess.

Heh.  Dreams are funny.

Though the imagery did put in me mind of a possible future featured fetish artist... Namio!