WHO DRAWS ALL THIS??
Hi! I'm Raigr.
(It's pronounced RYE-gur.)
I'm a queer independent artist in the midwest who's been spitting in the face of God for almost three decades now. I'm a digital illustrator, a sculptor, a costumer, a furry, a monsterfucker, a bagpiper, a professional bird person, and a public nuisance. When I was asked, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" as a kid, the only thing I could think of was "a dragon," and that's persisted throughout my life. I spent the first 19 years of my life larping as a heterosexual Christian and I've spent the last decade making up for lost time. I believe in freedom of expression, compassion, having fun, and making a lot of noise. I enjoy playing broken multiclass combinations, watching long-form video essays about movies I'll never see, listening to podcasts about unsolved missing persons cases, subjecting strangers to the smorgasboard of bumper stickers on my van, and indulging in carnal pleasures under a full moon.
So how did this all happen?
Well, you see, back in high school I took some classes on graphic design, and the gods have yet to stop me.
MONSTROUS ON MAIN started back in 2015 with just enough art prints to cover half a table. My first few times selling prints I didn’t make more than $300 in a weekend--just a little extra spending money that was hardly worth the effort to manufacture.
Later that year, someone commissioned me for a kaiju body pillow. A friend, inspired, commissioned me for a Negan body pillow. Another friend commissioned me for Gladio, and by that point I was doing them for fun. It was a rocky start at first--a lonely four or five designs my first year selling body pillows didn’t garner many sales, though they were pretty popular at cons (especially Gerudo Link--people love that little twunk).
My friend Jasper, who runs Queerest Gear, and my friends Ickah and Sammy of BoldEgoist have been my biggest cheerleaders, and they convinced me to keep going when I was about to give up. I love them all dearly. ❤️ Since then, Monstrous On Main has grown & changed into what it is now--a cheeky side business with a lot of character that I genuinely enjoy producing. Not only do I get to make products that make people laugh incredulously and ask, “Is that Godzilla?” but I also get to play with the unusual eroticism of teratophilia, monsters, horror, and furries. It’s a niche that I’m both content and proud to occupy.
Who is Raigr?
Raigr is my fursona! I created her back in 2015 when I joined the furry community.
A few friends from art college mentioned they were going to start a furry porn blog for extra tuition money and, thinking this was a great idea, I decided to delve into the furry fandom. Of course, I'd need a fursona, so with this motivation in mind I created Raigr to be a sexy little animal doll onto which I could project my weirdest fantasies. As a result, she has very little lore or backstory attached to her and mostly just exists as a muse for strange erotic art.
While she exists now as a unique fluffy dragon, she was originally a dragon-dog hybrid. I drew inspiration from borzois, salukis, and Irish wolfhounds. Dark red and bright yellow-green are one of my favorite complementary color combinations, and I had to give her glowing eyes and mouth because the ghost of my 2009 deviantArt days possessed my body and made it so.
When I first designed her, and for a long time afterward, she was actually a boy. As someone who presents very masculine, it felt right at the time to make my online persona a boy. Portraying her this way for so long isn't a negative experience to look back on; I'm glad I explored that dynamic and I'm really appreciative to the fandom as a whole for allowing people to explore identity in this way. But I wanted her to be a truer representation of myself. The change came from a recent shift overall in myself over the last few years, learning to appreciate myself and other women as women. I like being butch, I like being a woman and still doing typically masculine things and presenting myself in typically masculine ways, and I'm excited to have a fursona that represents that.
I've made two fursuits of her, though the first is currently out of commission.