Inside the Wild and Highly Lucrative Erotic Art Industry

If there's one thing that seems practically infinite, it’s the amount – and sheer variety – of porn on the internet. In a world of seemingly almost inexhaustible erotica, why would anyone want to spend their own money to commission more?

Though skyrocketing rent might put personalised illustrations out of most people's budgets, the world of custom-made erotic art is booming. It’s hard to estimate exactly how much people are spending, as many of these deals occur in private, but carefully scanning through transactions agreed on platforms such as Reddit and DeviantArt would imply the value of these custom commissions could easily exceed thousands of dollars daily. 

Anybody who's ever had to delete their Google Search history in a hurry will understand how having an obscure fetish can put you on the receiving end of social ridicule. Persecution can often take a much harsher turn – one BDSM enthusiast in the UK was even dismissed from a public sector job as a parole officer after being outed.

But for struggling, low-income artists seeking work – another plentiful resource on the internet – kink commissions can provide a lifeline. Often, this type of work gives them an outlet to explore their own personal artistic fascinations and interests while getting paid for it, or to pull off otherwise unaffordable career changes without help from the Bank of Mum and Dad. 

Val, a 40-year-old Brazilian born in a poor neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro, far from artistic hubs like Paris and New York, was an “art kid” at school, he says. Like all the illustrators in this piece, he’s speaking anonymously due to the nature of his work. 

Despite his early talent, he couldn’t afford to go to art school due to the costs involved. Then, at age 38, he dramatically quit his IT support job and gave himself one year to pursue his long-deferred dream of being an artist. 

“One day I went to work and I saw this sad-looking old guy sitting down next to me,” he recounts. “I said in my mind: ‘If I don't take care of myself, I‘m going to end up like him one day. I asked myself what I would really like to do deep down, and then decided to give it a shot. To try and make my living off art, and to try really hard, for at least one year.”

Initially, he found it difficult to secure well-paid work in his native Brazil, often being paid half what he was promised for his art or offered pay “in exposure”. Then a close friend introduced him to the world of fetish art, where he found his current crop of clients, who mainly hail from the UK, the US, and Canada, and are generally happy to pay 50 percent upfront. 

Val now specializes in commissions involving hyperrealistic violent imagery and group sex. These can range from depictions of comic book gangbangs involving the Hulk or the Joker to celebrity yacht orgies with The Rock and Conor McGregor. He cites his strong points as faces and anatomy, and draws inspiration from Western comic book artists such as Dave Stevens, the illustrator behind the acclaimed 80s comic book Rocketeer. That’s in marked contrast to the work of many in the scene, who draw mainly in a Japanese manga-influenced style. 

One of the most shocking commissions which Val was asked to produce was an image of ten high school locker cabinets filled with decapitated cheerleader heads. Sketching severed heads, or Mario getting railed next to Jason Momoa, isn’t Val’s idea of an ideal commission, but feels that “violence is what sells”, pointing to the generational success of director Quentin Tarantino as evidence of this. 

“For me, it's just imagination,” he says in his defence. “This is not a real thing. It's not real people, even though sometimes people ask me to draw a realistic likeness.”

The Rio native doesn't struggle financially – at least not anymore. A basic erotic image takes him less than a day and gets him $90, but he charges up to $480 for complex art involving numerous characters, which may take him up to four days with colour. To put this in perspective, the monthly salary of a qualified accountant in Brazil is roughly $1,685. 

But it’s not just Val. For many artists worldwide, the value of art school simply might not feel like a worthwhile investment. In the UK, the average student coming out of top art schools like Central Saint Martins in London can expect to rack up a debt of £45,000 – and that doesn’t even include the substantial living costs of living in London for three years. Graduate salaries for illustrators, however, are stuck at somewhere between £18,000 and £23,000.

American illustrator Lorelei has been an artist since her early childhood but found work in a different field after graduating college. Over the pandemic, though, she was able to revisit her lost passion, which she dropped during middle school. Lorelei doesn’t have a formal art education and didn’t have much in the way of a portfolio when she first started out, but the people commissioning her didn’t care. 

Erotic art was the first time she’d ever been paid for her artistic work, and she now specialises in a genre called “big and tiny” – where larger characters have sex with much smaller ones, with scenes involving fairies, giantesses, and “giant nude women destroying cities”, as she puts it. 

Though cartoon giantess porn might not be the go-to PornHub choice for many, the American illustrator theorises: “It’s just a natural elevation from having a size kink, involving a tall partner and a short partner… This is just the next level up.”

But this type of theme isn’t just commerce to Lorelei. As a young person, she loved books like The Borrowers, James and the Giant Peach, Gulliver's Travels, and Studio Ghibli’s 2010 movie The Secret World of Arrietty, where larger-than-life characters interact with much smaller ones.

“I think I like it because of the dynamics,” she says. “There's a lot of interesting stuff in there, a lot of ways to explore humanity and compassion and cruelty.”

“The two characters are basically still human. There's just a large difference in power based on their size. A lot of the aspects of it I like are based on the initial fear and the growing to trust each other.”

Lorelei charges up to $90 for an erotic illustration with two characters, $50 for images with a single character, and much less for safe-for-work commissions. It’s sometimes much more than what she gets from her skilled full-time job working with disabled children.

“Money is a big motivator here,” she says. “But this is just another type of commission I offer because I can make slightly more money from it.” 

Lorelei is still dedicated to pursuing a career in another field but sees erotica as a way to supplement her income and engage her passion for art long-term.  “It's something for me to focus on,” she explains, “something exciting, something new.” 

Why do these artists feel that the industry is booming? Despite Rule 34 (“if it exists, there is porn of it”), Val says that many of his clients are motivated by a desire for incredibly specific images. His work often goes through multiple redrafts, with clients demanding the perfect angle, an image of a specific character doing a specific thing in a specific way. Lorelei agrees: In her experience, clients want a perfect image that doesn’t quite exist yet. 

“I think some people just have very specific tastes,” she explains. “There are lots of people with giant fetishes, there's a ton of it already out there. There are whole websites for it. But sometimes they want something very unique and niche and they want someone to tailor-make it for them. They like a certain theme, but none of it exists in the exact way they want it to. If they can’t do it themselves, they commission me.”

Val feels that his clients’ extremely rigid requests often clash with his freedom of expression as an artist, but as a professional, he will acquiesce to their needs. But business is booming in the world of ultra-violent sex illustration.  His pipeline of work has never once dried up – there’s always more paid work that needs drawing.

Morgan Black, a PHD student at the University of Dundee, has spent decades exploring sexuality and is currently studying gendered aesthetics – which is not the same thing as kink, she stresses. 

She has some theories about the demand for abstract custom fetish art: “I can only imagine it has something to do with early life experiences informed by internet culture in a younger generation; there's probably a few research theses that could be produced on that subject.”

Black also thinks that it could be as simple as commissioning clients not wanting their search histories to be flagged by the authorities – which, in the case of Val’s cheerleader commission, makes sense.  

But when it comes to illustrating hidden fantasies, which are suppressed from the public eye, where do you draw the line, and how far is too far? In many cases, these artists are forced to make difficult decisions, balancing money and morality. 

Despite the violent – often shocking – nature of his output, Val has strict boundaries that he has promised himself to never cross. “I’ll draw an alien fucking your wife, but no kids,” he says. Lorelei draws the line at bestiality, children and violence but says: “It’s hard to find work that doesn't involve the above.” She refuses around 75 percent of the requests that come her way, calling them, simply, “unsavoury”.

She's developed a close relationship with many of her returning clients – though sometimes she's had to enforce hard boundaries. One man with a sock fetish spent top dollar on images of beautiful women wearing large woolly socks or wearing straitjackets. Then he offered Lorelei $120 to draw herself in a straitjacket, wearing her favourite woolly socks. 

She considered it – being in bad financial straits at the time – but ultimately refused. Sometimes the incident wanders back into her mind: “It felt like something so personal that it made me uncomfortable,” she says. 

Mainstream porn isn’t exactly an industry known for its respect for copyright, either. “There's a lot of risk of your art getting stolen,” Lorelai says, “because a lot of people that are only focusing on the porn aspect don't really care about the artist.” 

She’s seen her work pop up unaccredited on DeviantArt and Pinterest, with fetish art subreddits and Discord servers circulating lists of banned users who try to catfish illustration clients. “People love to steal artists’ portfolios, pass it as their own, and scam people to make a quick buck,” Lorelai explains.

For the non-nepo babies among us, an art career might never look like an affordable or realistic option. But even if you don’t feel that illustrators spending their days drawing “catgirls with cocks”, as Val puts it, is the best use of the world’s talent, fetish commissions have allowed many to pursue passions that would otherwise have laid dormant. 

It’s an opportunity that artists like Val and Lorelei are thankful to have ever received, unleashing talents otherwise trapped in the humdrum of nine-to-five jobs and IT careers. Ultimately, both enjoy their work and feel it's valuable – at least, in a highly specific way. In Lorelei’s view, it’s how she can “both create and help people”.

“Even if it's just creating something for someone to jerk off to, I'm still helping them,” she concludes.