Tickle Artists #48: Interview with Rabastanlestrange

1) Do you want to tell us something about yourself and your art?

For starters, I’m Rabastanlestrange, I’m from Italy and I work as a software developer. Contrary to many other talented artists whose interviews are published in this website, I’m a mere hobbyist. I draw exclusively out of passion. Art comes to my help every time I need to take a break from coding, computer screens and hours spent debugging and devising algorithms. Sometimes I open commissions for the public to make some extra money, but inevitably, soon or late I need to focus on my personal projects.

2) What techniques do you use to draw? Do you have a favorite artist that inspires you?

I do everything the old way: gloss paper, pencils and Indian ink. Then I scan the drawing and make any necessary adjustments on Photoshop. 80% of the digital work, at the end of the day, is a matter of removing the graphite stains (drawing with pencils is dirty work!) and impurities that were stuck to the sheet of paper. While developing my style, I was inspired mostly by several great comic artists from the Italian and Latin American tradition, whom I got to know and admire ever since I was a kid and who allowed me to appreciate the beauty of black & white. Great names like Alfonso Font, Corrado Mastantuono, Ernesto Garcia Seijas, Andrea Venturi, Angelo Stano, Miguel Angel Repetto, Leomacs and several others that I won’t list here for brevity’s sake. Instead, when it comes to fetish artwork, the greatest influences were BlackProf and Fire-Fox-America, two “colleagues” of mine on deviantArt. I learned a lot from their production. I should also offer my thanks to bebob4999 and WillGeorges, who are leading lights in the field of tickling- and bondage-applied engineering.

3) How much was the passion for drawing born in you? And the one for the tickle?

Like many young kids, up to elementary schools I used to spend hours drawing, often on my school desk, too. Then there was a gap in my artistic production that lasted several years, until my passion re-awakened during my years at uni. It could be said that I was exploring new hobbies and going back to the drawing board was the one thing that gave me the largest amount of satisfaction. My tickling kink started developing waaaay back in kindergarten. I was quite a handful at the time.

4) What are the tickling scenarios that you prefer to draw?

Asylum scenes. Not your typical asylum, of course. It can be a psychiatric hospital where patients were committed to because of a conspiracy against them, in spite of being completely sane before the orderlies with the straitjacket came to their place. Or it can be a place where psychiatrists and physicians espousing less-than-orthodox medical theories attempt to “rebuild” their patients damaged psyche after smashing it to pieces via torture. No matter the reason behind it, it always ends with tickle therapy, shock therapy and their most sensitive points being mercilessly vibed for the poor inmates.

5) What are the aspects of tickling that you intend to represent with your art? Example: the laughing, the wriggling, the relationship between tickler and ticklee?

The facial expressions of the ticklees are the element I put the most effort into. Not just the laughing—the despair, the crying, the physical exertion, the sexual arousal. The feet are where the action is, but faces are vital to set the “tone” of the picture. How’s the ticklee reacting to being tickled? Are they into it or do they just want it to stop? It’d be hard to tell if you couldn’t see their face.

6) Online there are countless photos and videos of tickling sessions. In your opinion, what do illustrations offer more than images of real scenes?

First of all, you’ll never find a fetish illustration where the tortured character is only pretending to be laughing out loud. Any time I realized that while watching one of the videos you mentioned, my engagement drastically went down. Illustrations are also more versatile than photographs since the artist can depict characters and situations which could never exist in our world—or would be too painful if not even lethal if they were attempted outside of the realm of fantasy!

7) In your opinion, what makes tickling so interesting for fans of this phenomenon?

That’s a nice question. In my humble opinion (which could be completely off the mark), that’s because tickling is a form of torture that is within pretty much everyone’s reach in real life. At the end of the day, all you need is a consensual partner and a pair of hands with fingers attached to spend an exciting 15 minutes. It does not directly involve physical pain and it’s possibly the most playful form sadism/masochism can take. You don’t even feel all that ashamed when confessing that you like tickling/being tickled.

8) What are your works of which you are most proud?

Since my production comprises many pictures that do not involve tickling, I’ll exclude the latter from my answer to this question. Therefore, these are the two works I am most proud of, one with a female protagonist and one with a male protagonist.

9) Do you have any particular artistic goals for the future?

I’d like to win first prize in an art contest. My best result so far has been a second place.

10) Do you think AIs will end up enriching or impoverishing the art of tickling representations?

It will impoverish artwork if the “creators” do nothing but present the software-generated images as they are. It will enrich it if, like it’s already happened with veteran artists like WillGeorges and pirata3, artificial intelligence is used to support the creative process, a tool which can create the base to start from which will then be reworked or used as a reference by the artist. While working in close contact with professional translators, who have been using IA-based tools to simplify their job for years, I realized that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with incorporating such technologies in one’s modus operandi.

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