| About Me | ||||||||||||||||
| Want to know more about me and my work? Hopefully this page will give you all the answers you want. Feel free to read through, but if you have a particular query in mind, try the FAQ links below. | ||||||||||||||||
| Who are youreally? | Do you have an MSN/AIM/ICQ/YIM address? If so, can I add you to my contact list? | |||||||||||||||
| What fetishes do you have? | Do you role-play? | |||||||||||||||
| When and how did you first discover your fetishes? | Can we meet in person? | |||||||||||||||
| When and how did you discover the fandom? | I'd like to draw one of your characters or write a story involving them. Is that OK? | |||||||||||||||
| How do you produce your artwork/animations? |
Do
you take commissions/requests/trades? |
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| The Real RipRoarRex | ||||||||||||||||
| It
is common in the fandom for people's true identities to be hidden
behind cute characters or animal aliases. But what about the person
behind it all? If one were to study my case, one would find lurking
behind the RipRoarRex name
a
21-year-old male university student from England who has been
interested in
art for most of his lifetime. I have a few low-level qualifications in
Art, as well as plenty of years of experience drawing, painting and
animating. I do have many other interests though: for one, I am an obsessive sports fan, particularly football (or soccer, as most non-Europeans would prefer to call it) following a not-so-prolific English Football League club side, Ipswich Town. I also keep reasonably informed with tennis, snooker, darts, and to a lesser extent the likes of cricket, rugby (mostly rugby union), athletics and even NHL. I'm not exclusively a spectator however; I do enjoy playing football and indeed many other sports, though my level of proficiency in any of these ranges from limited to non-existent! Secondly, I am a keen musician; I have played the piano since around 1995, and though my classical training only reached ABRSM Grade 5 level, I continue to develop through my own style and particularly enjoy teaching myself popular rock and jazz tunes. I also compose a great deal of my own material both at the piano and through digital mixing and composition software on PC. Thirdly, I have for many years been an enthusiastic if unsuccessful game-maker, ranging from primitive early days of programming using a classic 1980s BBC MicroComputer to modern 3D efforts with Game Maker, though sadly my record of completing projects is almost nil! Finally, I am very much your typical student in that I do enjoy a good sit in front of the TV, in particular enjoying many forms of comedy and also some drama series - one must single out The Sopranos as being one of the greatest televisual achievements in history, in this man's honest opinion! One thing I should stress - if you discover profiles under the name 'RipRoarRex' (or 'Rip Roar Rex') on MySpace, Bebo, Habbo or Gaia Online, these are not accounts of mine; they are owned by someone else using my name and reproducing my artwork/animations on their profiles. If you believe you have made contact with me on any of these websites, I'm afraid you have been talking to somebody else. |
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| The Many Interests of a Pawfan | ||||||||||||||||
| So that's enough of
the mundane. What about the RipRoarRex side of my life? Like many people out there with similar 'alternative' sexual interests such as macrophilia, podophilia and furry fetish, I have kept these unusual characteristics secret. Indeed, I have endeavoured to keep my real life and my 'RRRex' life separate at all times. As a result, I am rather paranoid about any possibility of the two crossing, be it people in my everyday life discovering my secrets, or be it people within the fandom finding out who I really am. Because of this, I am not what I would consider a 'furry lifestyler' acting in character; but instead my involvement in the fandom is exclusively to share my artwork with those that appreciate it and engage in discussion with similar personalities about how quirky these aspects of our personalities are. Though some of my characters bear a closer resemblence to my true self than others (most notably Mike), I don't truly identify with any of them, nor does the fantasy element of fandom life appeal to me very much. For this reason I don't role-play or behave in character. My sexual interests themselves within the realm of furry and macrophilia range pretty widely; though I am perhaps primiarily a fan of dinosaurs, there are a whole list of characters and animals that I have some form of attraction to (and many of which I have tried my hand at drawing on at least one occasion), including:
With regard to crush (paw or jaw), I enjoy both the non-violent and violent varieties. The latter is unquestionably controversial - I am a very placid person in real life abhorred by any tale of suffering or loss of life, and indeed I hold strong Christian beliefs, but my sexual fantasies do include violent and fatal trampling. Understandably this shocks and appals many people (and for this reason, the non-violent and violent content on this site is kept separate to avoid upset), but though I do not feel as though I am required to justify this interest, I have made efforts to increase people's understanding of it. Speaking only for myself, I find no appeal in seeing gore in itself. However, for more sexually submissive personalities such as myself, macrophilia and crush fetish are based on an attraction to power and strength. The destructive power of a macro creature and its ability to completely destroy the weaker and inferior creatures around it are what I find appealing, not the sight of blood. Another common misconception from my own experience is the belief that all crush fans somehow find the idea of being crushed to death an exciting one. Again, speaking for myself, I can only say this isn't strictly true. In my own fantasy, I might be interested in seeing a macro displaying their power and strength against other subjects around me before threatening to do the same to me, but somehow I would be able to persuade them not to hurt me; perhaps only to feel a small portion of the potentially crushing weight for a moment, or to feel momentarily helpless whilst being dangled over their open jaws. One may argue that such displays of power can be demonstrated upon non-living subjects, but to an extent, the interaction of contrasting personalities (dominant and submissive) and the control of the former over the latter make live subjects more exciting. Do not be fooled therefore - it is my firm belief that a person can have a violent crush fetish without being someone that finds pleasure in what most would simply call 'sick'. I am not proud of this however; my sense of moral objection to some of the material I draw is one of the major reasons why I do not reveal such interests to anyone in my personal life and why I refuse to take money from people for producing fetish artwork. |
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| History | ||||||||||||||||
| Where
and how did these bizarre interests originate? This same mystery
plagues the majority of paw, macro and furry fans, yet many usually
have a vague idea of an early image, story or film that may have
brought it on. For me, the earliest knowledge I have of unusual
feelings towards anything remotely macrophilic, podophilic or
herpetophilic was watching the "Mario Meets Koopzilla" episode of the
Super Mario Bros. cartoon show of the 1990s in which King Koopa has a
sushi-induced growth spurt and goes on a rampage in the city. This
episode is somewhat infamous amongst people with my interests as many
have had similar feelings towards it, but this constitutes my earliest
memory of a sexual reaction towards such material. Since then, this
same reaction has developed through other 1990s films and TV shows such
as Jurassic Park, Godzilla and just about any moment where feet or
stomping featured prominently. For many people who 'suffer' from the same unusual desires as myself, it is undoubtedly an enormous relief to discover that one is not alone. If you are such a person and this site is the first evidence of shared sexual interests that you have found, then the effort I have put into it seems all the more worthwhile! For me, this same moment of discovery happened on 15 April 2007. Until that month, it had been 3 years since I had the luxury of my own computer, and even in those days, I had no internet access. I was too afraid to search for anything remotely 'incriminating' on my brother's computer in fear of it being found in my internet history. Therefore, my only means of searching for any material which might satisfy my interests was my mobile phone; most notably, the Google Image Search facility! Searching for terms such as "dinosaur feet" or "elephant crush", I did stumble across a number of 'interesting' images. Incredibly, some of these were in fact hosted right here at the http://download.lavadomefive.com/ address, but having been unable to access their source pages at this point, I had not thought anything of it. It was not until 15 April 2007 that I thought to search for the very subject that I believe brought on my fetishes - "Mario Meets Koopzilla". In searching for the terms "King Koopa Feet", I stumbled across an exact word-for-word image match; a picture which showed King Koopa seated on a throne with his feet propped perfectly at the forefront. (This image was actually King Koopa Feet by Teaselbone!) My discovery of such a perfect image for my tastes led me to wondering why on earth such a picture would even exist. Why would anyone else draw King Koopa showing off his feet in this way? Luckily, I was able to access a link to the site on which the image was hosted, and to my astonishment, I found a vast array of images involving reptilian feet, all with an element of either stomping or paw worship! What I had actually discovered at that moment was the Artwork page of BigClawz - the first site I discovered dedicated to the very same sexual fetishes I had felt so ashamed and alone with all these years. Coincidentally, within 24 hours of this discovery, my brother's decision to buy a laptop allowed me to gain the use of his old desktop computer, complete with internet access. I finally had a means of accessing such sites without too much fear of detection. Immediately, on 16 April 2007, I wen to the forums at BigClawz and registered as a member under the name RipRoarRex. Since then, I have gone on and signed up to many other sites, founded this website, become part of the administrative team at one of the fastest-growing paw fetish sites around (namely Eccentricities) and shared a reasonable quantity of my artwork with people of similar tastes. To some extent, I have done so in the small hope that one day, another lonely paw fetishist might stumble across my material and discover that they are not alone. |
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| Artwork |
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| Regardless
of whether you believe you are alone or not, it does not stop you from
pursuing just about any material you can find to satisfy your
interests. For some, this can be a rather endless and fruitless search,
but thankfully my long-term interests in art have prevented it being
such a problem as I have been able to provide enough of it for myself
over the years. Though I believe I actually drew my first macrophilic
piece of artwork even before the age of 10 (consisting of a giant human
crushing another human - worryingly still to this day I do not know
what actually happened to that picture!) I did not begin serious
artwork until around 2002. I had before this point been drawing
occasional sequences involving T-Rexes, but my limited understanding of
their form led me to search for an alternative with a simpler anatomy.
Rexar the anthrorex was the result, and his relationship with
long-suffering raptor Tydo began at roughly the same time. Since then,
I have developed quite a cast of characters over the years and have
also ventured into drawing a large variety of other creatures.
Thankfully, as I was going through a series of art qualification
courses from 2003-06, I had plenty of materials and drawing practice to
keep me going, although only once was I ever required to draw a dragon
for my studies...! My effortss are somewhat hampered however by the limited tools at my disposal for producing digital art and animations - most notably, the absence of a scanner and a tablet, either of which would probably make the process of acquiring a high-quality outline ready for digital colouring a whole lot easier. Nor am I particularly gifted with software - I find Adobe Illustrator far too complicated to fathom, so I settle instead for the familarity of Jasc Paint Shop Pro. Since my degree studies have nothing to do with art and I fear being unable to justify purchasing any expensive software or hardware under questioning from inquiring members of my household, I have instead learned to make do with drawing on paper and then using a digital camera to take a photo of it before fiddling with whatever tools I can understand in Illustrator and Paint Shop Pro to increase the quality of the image enough for colouring. It is not a process I enjoy and occasionally I feel it significantly reduces the final quality of my work, but hopefully not enough to spoil anyone's enjoyment of it. Once I have drawn a sketch, taken a good enough digital photo, uploaded it and edited it, I begin by flood-filling with what I call 'base' colours - single flat tones indicative of the eventual colour of the subject. I then proceed to cell shade the image in several stages, strategically selecting certain areas of flat colour to be lightened or darkened accordingly. Having increased the number of tones to around four or five, I blend them together using a smudging tool. After adding a few finishing touches and any elements of cartoon dialogue, the image is complete. The pictures below demonstrate this process as used to create Talon - 'If You Wanna Live...'
More recently, I have also adopted a further stage between steps 5 and 6 which involves removing black outlines by replacing them with the colours from the adjacent zones. This creates a more realistic look as demonstrated below in Rocky - Cornered
For animations, I use a much simpler process. All my work is drawn using the mouse rather than uploading sketches. The drawings are done individually as layered images in Paint Shop Pro, then I load them in sequence to Jasc Animation Shop and animate them together. It's a long and tedious process, so I'd warn any budding animators - you have to have a lot of time on your hands, a lot of patience, and preferably some good software!! |
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| Other Frequently Asked Questions | ||||||||||||||||
| Q.
Do you have an MSN/AIM/ICQ/YIM address? If so, can I add you to my
contact list? My MSN address is riproarrex@googlemail.com Absolutely, by all means, feel free to add me! I like meeting new people who are into the same things as me. I am not on MSN very often, so sometimes the best way to stay in touch with me is via email. I endeavour to reply to messages as quickly and as often as I can. In any efforts to contact me, please note the time difference - I live in England and consequently live in the GMT+0 timezone (varying according to British Summer Time adjustments). Q. Do you role-play? Sorry, but I'm afraid I don't role-play in any shape or form. However, I'm always happy to chat to anyone who shares my 'unique' tastes or indeed any of my hobbies. Q. Can we meet in person? On account of my desire to keep my real life and my fandom life separate, I never intend on meeting anyone in person. I'm also not prepared to give out my real name, specific location or let anyone see my face. This is not meant to offend anyone, and indeed I'll be very happy to get to know more about people and let them know more about me over the internet, but I'm afraid it cannot get any more personal than that. Q. I'd like to draw one of your characters or write a story involving them. Is that OK? Absolutely, provided that somewhere on your picture or story you reference the character as being (c) RipRoarRex. I personally find it flattering when I discover someone else has created something involving one of my characters! Q. Do you take commissions/requests/trades? I don't take commissions and I generally do not accept trades, but I do take requests.. If you wish to request some work from me, please read carefully through the following guidelines as posted on my FurAffintiy journal following the reopening of my request status on 01/09/2008. 1. Feel free to send me your ideas. If you wish to make a request, you can either email your ideas to riproarrex@googlemail.com or send me a private message on any one of my profiles at BigClawz, Lava Dome Five, Eccentricities, FurAffinity and Macrophile. Please note that I do get a lot of requests, so I may not be able to reply to your message immediately. I shall read every suggestion I receive and
treat each one exactly the same regardless of whether I am familiar with the
sender or not. My response will vary from request to request, and sometimes
similar ideas may receive different responses as circumstances or individual
differences dictate. On the whole however, I shall try to be
fair.
2. a. If I feel that I would not like to do your request idea, I shall inform you as soon as I can, and I shall try to offer my reasoning. This is not to be taken as an offence to yourselves personally, as if to suggest that I don't like you. Quite simply, if I dislike an idea, I no longer wish to put myself in the position of feeling that I have to do it. I may also turn ideas down not because I do not like them but because I simply find them too difficult or demanding. b. If I do decline to take up your suggestion, I do not wish to be pestered into doing it. Besides, if I dislike your idea, there is little point in trying to make me do it because I will not be able to commit to it as much as you would wish. c. I will not accept requests for simple drawings of characters / fursonas / avatars, or images which do not involve fetish content. Quite simply, as I work very much on sexual interest, I will not have the enthusiasm to do anything as basic as this. d. I will not accept vague messages such as "Hi, I love your art, could you draw a picture for me please?" Sending me a message does not mean that we immediately become friends and that I subsequently should draw a picture for you. Anyone who is asking for work with little interest other than simply to get something from RipRoarRex will be consistently disappointed. This may sound a little harsh and unpleasant, but I have received many messages to this effect in the last year and have become tired of them. e. I will not accept requests that simply ask for me to draw a particular character without any suggestion of what you wish me to draw them doing. I receive many messages which call for fursonas, popular characters or even my own characters to be drawn without specific or unique ideas for a picture, and any such messages will be rejected. If I am merely asked to draw individual characters rather than actual ideas, I would prefer to choose which characters I draw for myself. 3. a. If I receive an idea that I like the sound of, I will not agree there and then to do it. I will instead send you a message informing you that I am interested in your idea and will consider doing it. This does not necessarily mean that I will - I do not wish to be tied down to ideas which I may like initially but then later find that I have no interest in. b. If I subsequently decide that I do wish to work on your idea, I will contact you again to inform you as such and to discuss the details of your idea further. I will inform you again when I actually start work on your idea, and once more when I have completed it. c. As I have stated before, I will not be held to deadlines. I have described the limitations placed upon my creative work both by commitments and secrecy, therefore I simply cannot be pushed to work within a timeframe. Rest assured that when I do make a start on your piece, I shall attempt to complete it as soon as I can whilst maintaining a decent standard. d. If, for any reason, I subsequently find that I cannot complete your picture, or find that I no longer wish to do it for whatever reason, this decision will be final. I work for free, therefore there is no obligation upon me to complete any work that I take on board. Of course, I will always strive to complete every piece that I attempt, and I will only be able to offer my sincerest apologies to anyone who I am unable to present the work that I agreed to do. 4. I do not accept trades. This is not because I am ungrateful. Firstly, it is for the aforementioned reasons that I do not wish to accept things in return for what I do. Secondly, it is because I am a firm believer in doing things for myself if I wish them to be done in the way I would like, and I would not want to make anyone feel uncomfortable about the standards of their work. If you wish to create work for me as a gift, I will of course accept it with the greatest appreciation for your efforts, but I will never deliberately ask for any such return. |
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| Want to know
anything else? Get in touch at riproarrex@googlemail.com |
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