Tickle artists #161:interview with Biomacchia

Contents

1 1) Do you want to tell us something about yourself and your art?
2 2) What techniques do you use to draw? Do you have a favorite artist that inspires you?
3 3) How much was the passion for drawing born in you? And the one for the tickle?
4 4) What are the tickling scenarios that you prefer to draw?
5 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?
6 6) Online there are countless photos and videos of tickling sessions. In your opinion, what do illustrations offer more than images of real life?
7 7) In your opinion, what makes tickling so interesting for fans of this phenomenon?
8 8) What are your works of which you are most proud?
9 9) Do you have any particular artistic goals for the future?
10 10) Do you think AIs will end up enriching or impoverishing the art of tickling representations?
11 Informazioni sull'autore
- - 11.0.1 TickleScenes

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

I’m Biomacchia, an artist from Brazil. I’ve been on the scene for about 8 years now. I personally started learning how to draw around that time since I felt some of my personal tastes weren’t very well represented. Just a few short years ago all these niches that are now growing and blossoming were very sparse, and we were lucky to have dedicated artists for specific communities. As such, I figured it would be nice to contribute to a community I enjoyed that shared the same tastes as me while doing something I love, which is drawing and creating new artwork. Nowadays I branch out from only illustration to game development as well.

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

I’m exclusively a digital artist. Because of the subject, the internet is pretty much the only venue in which these types of works can circulate freely, and working digitally helps a lot more than going through all the hoops of scanning artwork or taking a super high-resolution picture with perfect lighting in order to digitalize a traditional piece. As for the inspiration, the game Valkyrie Profile and one of its main illustrators, Yoh Yoshinari, changed my life. Back in the day I was mesmerized by the artworks featured on it, and that single game did an entire 180 in my life where I veered from a career in microbiology to pursue art professionally. Nowadays, my hope is that I can manage to inspire even a single person that same way I was inspired by Yoshinari’s artwork.

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

When I decided to pursue art as a real career, I was VERY motivated. I knew I had to study a lot, and that art wasn’t just something you could just pick up. To this day, studying and improving my art is one of my favorite things in life, even though for years now, many other necessary demands have been taken away from that time. Tickling has been one of the things that pushed me to keep drawing in the earliest years. Being young, erotic art was a tremendous draw, and tickling as a subject was something I was always fascinated by, so being able to put the scenarios I thought to paper felt really nice.

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

I really enjoy more light-hearted tickling scenarios and those involving some type of game. Something like tickling as punishment for losing a bet, or a competition— the idea that there’s a clear forfeit to be paid raises the stakes of the situation in a way that’s playful and enticing. I have to say I really enjoy body writing as well. Playful teasing with silly things such as “Pinch here!”, or having little arrows drawn is a really good draw for me.

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?

I’m more a fan of the scenarios and situations that tickling can provide. When you see a piece and think “Oh, it would be really fun to do this”, or “If this was me, I’d be done for sure!” are what sparks interest in me for tickling related artwork. As an extension of that, POV compositions are very hard to get right, but they’re also one of the best.

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

Naturally, there are fantastical elements that illustrations can provide that real life couldn’t. I immediately think back to a couple pieces I did way back based on D&D traps, with things like Gelatinous cubes or Mimics that, save for some extremely expensive CGI effects, work better on 2D illustration. There’s also something to be said of the fact that not all art is intended to provide an accurate depiction of real life. Stylized works also have their place and provide a much different feeling than looking at something real life can provide.

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

I come from a biology major background, so for myself, I was always fascinated by the mysterious physical response tickling has on people, and the evolutionary/neurological reasons why it happens. I’d imagine that’s not true for everyone haha, but it might be that in a small way for other people too. Isn’t it very fun to see someone squirm and laugh playfully when touched in seemingly random spots? Conversely, it feels vulnerable and fun to have someone make you seize up with laughter only by touching specific spots. That reaction, which you can’t really get any other way— I think that’s what draws a lot of people to the subject.

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

The number one work of art I’m most proud of is the game I developed some years ago, Occult Rewrite. That displays several different kinks. As one of my goals, besides telling an emotional story with endearing characters, was to have a little bit of something for lots of people. Of course, some subjects were more richly represented than others. Tickling is probably the one that has the most scenes, and I recall spending a week on this one very involved tickling minigame with lots of branching dialogue, actions and triggers. It was a game that took three years to fully develop and release on Steam, but I think I managed to provide a really good experience to fans of all sorts of different kinks, especially those into tickling.

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

This might sound childish, but as the lyrics to the Pokémon intro go: “I wanna be the very best, like no one ever was.”. That was my goal from the beginning: Being the very best artist I could be. Naturally, that’s an unattainable goal, more akin to a dream. I would have to be reborn quite a few times to get there. So, my more realistic goal is to, much like Yoh Yoshinari was for me, be an inspiration to someone, be it with my erotic pieces, or my more serious work, like the game I’m currently developing, Scarlet Elegy. My apologies if I snatch someone from a very successful career and plunge them into working as an artist, yet I can say my life changed for the better with that single artist. I hope I can change someone’s life for the better like that as well.

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

Thinking critically about the subject of AI is something every artist has had to do in the past very few years. My thoughts on it are bleak. I do believe that AI implementation will be a net detriment. Much of the AI push, and those who rely on it, strive for what I believe to be a misguided sense of “perfection”. The prettiest artwork. The cleanest composition. The most cinematic lighting. Artificial intelligence strives to reach a goal of perfection that’s very useful in specific areas, and I don’t believe art is one such area. Naturally, looking at a pretty drawing feels good, yet I truly believe it takes an artist to really draw out what makes a piece of artwork “good”. Even the impressionists, who spent their whole lives perfecting the form, had something to say with their pieces— a very particular and specific feeling they wanted to inspire the viewer with. It may be naïve, yet I don’t believe I would ever have been inspired as I was by Valkyrie Profile’s artwork if it was generated procedurally, and thus as consequence, my artwork would never exist. I believe there’s no enrichment in that road.