Saftkeur has created their own world through 3D avatars and digital processes called ‘Paeratopa’. With fantastical influences intertwined with fetish, Saftkeur’s work expresses both humour and an element of uncomfortably. They work in between using digital software’s, drawing and painting which helps Saftkeur establish their unique style. Starting from a young age, the fantasy fuelled artist began experimenting with a selection of software’s in order to create what would become Paeratopa. The world of Paeratopa is filled with Saftkeur’s own characters which they have named ‘Paerans’. Each individual Paeran has their own look and personalities encapsulating aspects of human life to them. Carry on reading to hear more about the wondrous world of Paeratopia.

What originally kickstarted your digital artwork?

From the very start? I liked being creative and artistic as a kid, and after I got my first computer, a friend gave me a copy of Photoshop as an upgrade from just doodling in MSPaint. I got really engrossed in just exploring that, and soon enough, I was hooked on the digital medium for creating.

For the content I create now, I pretty much stumbled into that by accident. Struggling to draw digitally without having great references to work off of, I happened to find a program called DAZ Studio, which at the time had advertised itself as (among other things) a digital artist's mannequin, which is what I initially used it for. Eventually though, I started exploring more into just what the program was capable of in terms of making art directly, mostly using it to mess around with content I hadn't tried to do in digital drawings or paintings - mostly the fetish stuff I've embraced doing now, once I ended up getting hooked on 3D rendering as the primary base of my work.

You have created an array of characters called ‘Paerans’ – can you explain this concept in more detail?

Simply put, the Paerans are just the name for the natives of Paeratopa! I'd originally just made characters without much backstory or reason before, but the more I got into it, the more I wanted to flesh them out and give them their own lore. In order to explore concepts like alien morality or just to have that freedom to ignore plausibility where it wasn't convenient. Give them all inherent magic, let them be as physically varied as I feel like, and still give them some grounding in a common (fantasy) reality.

I try to make them all varied in their own ways, since they don't have to follow any particular rules otherwise. They could be elven, or beast-like, or combinations of any number of concepts. Most often, I'm making new characters just based on whatever new inspiration or interest has crossed my path most recently. The main common thread I try to stick to with the Paerans is that they all share a more positive, playful outlook on life, because... well, it's fantasy for me. Sure, everyone's got their preferences on fantasies, but for me, I like positive and upbeat in my escapism. There's already loads of gritty and dark realism out there, I don't often feel the need to add to it myself.

What inspired you to create the world of Paeratopa?

It was the characters that came first, and so the world was just a natural follow-up to that, a place for me to build around them. So, in that sense it was more of a sense of necessity, but it definitely had its other inspirations too. Such as various other fantasy worlds from stories and other creators (the name "Felarya" is quite well-known among vorarephiles, and incidentally the creator behind that was my first introduction to the whole concept of the vore fetish). Video game worlds, and multiverses like you'd find in M:tG or D&D. I just took all of those ideas and shaped them into what appealed to me, and Paeratopa is the result of that. High fantasy mixed with some modern comforts, and a bit of game-esque glazing over the top.

In particular, something that was super important to me was for it to all be non-fatal, if you die in Paeratopa you just "respawn" as if it was a game. That's a really big part of the Paerans' particular sense of morality, and my own personal enjoyment of the setting, that all of it is low consequences. I couldn't really do that in existing settings, so that too became a necessity in making a story world of my own for all this.

Your work is greatly based upon fantasy and fetish – why is this?

It's not what I'd originally expected to focus on, to be honest! Fantasy illustration (drawing and painting) was my first big goal, stuff like you'd see in card games and concept art. Although, I'd always had interests in more fetishy stuff, I just hadn't actually considered making any of it myself. It still had a sense of taboo about it, and it took a lot for me to feel brave enough to explore all this "weird stuff", even just privately at first.

Ultimately, what got me creating primarily fantasy and fetish content was a sense of need. Sure, whatever your interests, you can surely find content out there that caters to them. However, some are more niche than others, and after getting frustrated with feeling like there wasn't enough content out there that was exactly what I was looking for, I just decided to start trying to scratch that itch myself. That's really all it's ever been, exploring my own interests and delving into all of the new content that exploration has led me to discover along the way. I'm really grateful that I did, and that I decided on a whim to just share a little bit of it online all those years ago, just to see what people thought of it. It's led me to learn so much more about sexuality and expression in general.

How do you create your work from a technical point of view?

To start with I head into DAZ Studio - the program is more of a posing/composition tool than a 3D modelling one - it's populated with premade models you can buy or create for yourself. If you've ever messed around with a particularly detailed character creation tool in a video game, you've probably got a decent grasp on what DAZ Studio is like, just... a lot more complex, and potentially expensive. Most of my characters are built from such models - to get extra-technical, I use a (now outdated) base figure called Victoria 4, as well as a bunch of add-on morphs and additional content I've amassed over the years - and I've put a lot of work into creating my own bases from these figures, so I can simply load up whatever presets I've saved for myself to streamline the whole process. For example, if I want to make a scene with my character Teena, I've already put in the hours to build up a full model of her with outfits and hair and all that, saved as its own file, so I can simply load that up and get straight into posing and building the rest of the scene around her. From there, it'll usually take me anywhere from a couple of hours to a few days of work to build out the scene I want and render it out as a proper image file.

From there, I take it into Photoshop to finish with post work, which can range from simply tweaking a bit of the colours, to directly painting in details like saliva, fixing render issues, etc. There are ways to render some super-realistic liquids and such directly in a program like Studio. Although, for me, I've always found it easier to just paint that sort of stuff in on top and make the finished product more of a mix of 3D and painting.

On occasion, I'll model my own content directly too, I use Blender for that. It's a bit of a rare occurrence, I prefer to keep things procedural and stay within Studio, where it's easier to edit and undo and redo as needed. However, sometimes what a scene needs is something I can't just find online or bash together with primitives or custom texturing.

What responses do you tend to receive about your work?

Well, this being the internet and my work occupying the space of kink and fetish, there's of course the whole spectrum from grossed-out to horny comments on a lot of my content, hah. For the most part though, it's been surprisingly positive! The positive comments I got on those very first experimental pieces I'd posted to DeviantArt all those years ago, on an account I'd never intended to use for anything other than browsing, are the reason I'm still creating and posting this stuff today. From there, it's grown way more than I would have ever anticipated, first on Tumblr and now on Instagram; it still boggles my mind a bit, I don't know much at all about the fashion world and yet here I am getting commissioned by clients to show off their fashion lines or make art for their albums, or people telling me my work is an "aesthetic". I feel super lucky to have been able to just stumble into all that I have.

I've tried not to cater my work to any specific audience, so the fact that I even have an audience at all - let alone such a varied one - is just amazing to me. I'd like to believe that, when someone creates work they themselves enjoy creating, that's something the viewer can pick up on, in perhaps just some subconscious way. I don't know if that's actually true, but it's an idea I've stuck by all the same. And it's such a wonderful feeling whenever I get a comment from someone who just stumbled upon my work and some particular piece just nailed exactly what they were looking for; that sort of response is just so satisfying, going right back to how I started making this sort of stuff because I couldn't find exactly what I wanted online. It makes it all worth it.

In the future, what will the world of Paeratopa look like?

That's a question only time can really answer! I've got high hopes for expanding my own skills and delving deeper into my content, getting more into story writing, creating images of Paeratopa itself - whether it's in 3D, or paintings, or whatever medium happens to work for it. Animation is something I've wanted to do but haven't yet developed the skills (or hardware) for achieving. High hopes, but as for what's in my reach moving forward, I don't know, I just know that I want to do more, and I'm always trying to learn new techniques and outlets for being creative!