The Boot Fitting

Illustrations often start with a pencil draft and sometimes those are so immediate in creating a response that refining them sometimes seems retrograde. The completion processes of inking in, painting with gouache and watercolour, scanning and then formatting the illustration to further refine it can be tedious. Those stages to completion can also drain the illustration of its immediacy and impact. How much of that is just down to the tedium of the process, familiarity breeding contempt, is difficult to say because the illustrator is rarely able to judge the final result objectively.

The Boot Fitting was an illustration in the Madam Van Arden story in Leather World Madams series at Studio Oridomain. Madam Van Arden goes on holiday and consigns her long suffering wealthy cash cow of a husband Boocock to the Bottisserie of one of her cronies, Madam Nina, where he is put to work for the duration suitably uniformed as a Boot Maid. I prefer the original pencil rough for this illustration (seen above) because I think it captures something that the completed illustration loses. I can’t say what that is because it is difficult if not impossible to define – and probably very personal! Playing around with the final illustration also creates different moods, with black and white or sepia versions giving a retro look which can be nostalgic towards that way way back, long before internet age of cheaply published under the counter FemDom booklets of the Nutrix kind. The reproduction process for those illustrations often made for a sort of compelling charm, a lure into a world where who knew what other forbidden delights might lurk.

In the illustration Boocock, the evergreen pervert, is both appalled and excited by his predicament. Just to make sure that he keeps Madam Van Arden’s supremacy in mind as he toils in the Bottisserie she has subjected him to a stocking shame hood and shoe gag, with the toe of the shoe strapped firmly into his mouth to keep him quiet. The stocking and shoe are, of course, the very personal possessions of Madam Van Arden. The Bottisserie reeks of new leather, expensive leather, exotic leather, and Boocock himself has been put into a leather maid’s uniform of such aching tightness that every beck and call required of him is an ordeal of movement. Vignettes in the original sequence illustrate that and hopefully express the curious excitement and delight of the impediments of the hobble skirt on movement. To be made to walk quickly in punitive clothing that most severely hinders that, urged on by a beautiful tormentress armed with a flexible implement of encouragement and correction, is a sublime thrill.

Painting the leather is the most tedious process of all, with multiple passes of watercolour and gouache to build the necessary depth and the results are by no means consistent. Sometimes it comes together and sometimes it doesn’t. I’m largely self taught so I break a lot of rules, often deliberately, but Sardax, inspirer, mentor and patient guide, has helped me immeasurably along the way. The late Eric Stanton is another influence who often resolves problems for me. I don’t pretend to be the equal of those two masters of the art of illustration in any way and the furrow I plough is far less sure and certain in draughtsmanship, but I hope that the illustrations have improved over the years and that some of them, the absence of the ubiquitous strap on notwithstanding, can create a response that shares my own passions. I thank you.