Tickle artists #163: interview with Justius

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) In your opinion, what makes tickling so interesting for fans of this phenomenon?
7 7) What are your works of which you are most proud?
8 8) Do you have any particular artistic goals for the future?
9 Informazioni sull'autore
- - 9.0.1 TickleScenes

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

I’m Justius. I don’t know how much i can tell about myself. I am one of many who likes to draw and post content on Deviantart. One who focuses on belly and bellybutton tickling.

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

For drawing, I use a software called “Krita.” It has plenty of brushes that are useful for drawing different lines and shapes, although the process itself takes quite a while to fully finish (it doesn’t help that I’m a bit of a perfectionist).

As for references, I use a program called “Easy Pose.” As the name suggests, you can easily create poses to your liking, and it’s not too difficult to learn if anyone wants to pick it up. It can be installed on Steam—just keep in mind it’s not free. I also use reference images of the characters taken from Google. To keep the explanation short, I just make sure the final pieces look as much like the characters as possible. Occasionally, I might ask my friends for help when possible, whether for ideas or to make small details look better.

As for artists who inspire me, that would be Kazemaru15000 and his co-artist “Tamashi” (they share the same account and both post their art there). I was deeply drawn not only to the story concept of “The Red King Vs The Blue Queen” (I didn’t know back then it was based on Clash of Clans), but also to the art style itself. That was exactly how I wanted my own work to look and feel. After finding out who the artist was—which was revealed much later after the series started—I took notes on the details and tried to adapt them into my own art style (like coloring the inner lineart of the characters). Shoutout to both of them! ^^

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

I’ve always loved drawing, or in general, just making my own content. I have some projects of my own outside of the tickling community that I’m currently still working on.

As for the tickling community, I was introduced to it somewhat early on. Throughout the years, I’ve seen plenty of art within the community, and the more I saw, the more I wanted to make some myself or commission some works. But what really made me want to start drawing my own content was when I noticed that there were barely any tickling works for characters from the games “Smite: Battleground of the Gods” and “Paladins: Champions of the Realm”—at least when it came to belly/bellybutton tickling. Both franchises happen to be owned by the same company, and both have sexy waifus with great potential for tickling artwork.

So, I took action and made one. It wasn’t too popular, given that it was my very first work and I was relatively unknown in the community back then. Maybe it was also the fact that it was drawn on paper and not digitally; either way, my self-esteem in terms of drawing and posting content on DA took a bit of a hit back then.

Some time passed, and my computer needed repairing. While I was waiting, I decided to try and draw some more pieces. The more I posted, the more popular each one became, which really helped my self-esteem grow. When I got my computer back, I had the courage to keep drawing and posting, but all I could do at the time was draw on paper and take photos of them. I knew I needed more if I wanted to make better-looking art and do things differently, so I decided to try my hand at digital drawing. In late 2022, I finally got the proper equipment for digital drawing, and ever since then, I’ve only made digital works.

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

Short answer: I always do bellybutton tickling—it’s S-tier if you ask me. Spread-eagle and other poses where the lee has their belly and bellybutton exposed and vulnerable to tickling are obviously my favorites.

I mainly do F/F works, but I can also do F/M and M/F (with M’s depending on the characters, but never M/M. It’s just not my thing, but I won’t judge). The story scenarios can vary depending on the characters, but most of my work features rivalries between two characters within the same franchise (or from two different ones), where one shows the other who’s boss by giving them a long session of bellybutton tickling torture. I tend to do both clothed and naked variants of these, with the latter tending to be more sexual.

The only work I can think of with something other than an antagonistic relationship would be the POV piece I did featuring Yuno and Yuki (which is both romantic and a little creepy, given that she’s a Yandere).

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?

Short answer: as mentioned earlier, my works tend to have belly and bellybutton tickling. Spread eagle tied positions often, and as for the relationships between the Ler and Lee’s there tend to be a Rival dynamic between which is somewhat antagonistic.

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

The idea’s and possibilities that can be made with the concept.especailly given that it is not just people having their Oc’s made for tickling but also people drawing characters from popular media with creative scenarios made for tickling art work as plenty of other artists have proven over the years.

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

I love all my works (even if I feel like some of them don’t look as good as I thought they did when I posted them—my earlier digital ones being an example), but the ones that I’m most proud of are my Shantae ones and the POV ones that I’ve done. Those seem to have put me on the map in the community. While we’re at it, let’s also add the one I made with Kitana and Mileena. But now that I think about it, I also made a gift for Kaze once, which was a behemoth to make. I wasn’t the only one who was extremely happy with how it came out. Honestly, it’s kind of hard to pick my absolute favorite, but those definitely are candidates.

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

My goals are becoming a better artist and content creator, and maybe one day being on the list of the other great artists in the community. That being said, I will definitely not just focus on that; I’ll make sure I also have fun making my work. You have to work hard for fame and to be on that list of greats who make amazing tickle art that others will enjoy.