Monochromatic Rainbow Impression: Fear Factory

I just read the "Rainbow Factory" grimdark fic. That's the sole reason this is marked "Mature".

And now that's aside...

There are rare moments when an idea captures me to the point of distraction. The point of this? When I finished reading the whole thing, I felt in a curious mixture of fear and awe. Both by how the story goes, but also by the masterful manipulation of emotion. So I was moved to impress that feeling I had about the fic into what this resulted in.

This can fall loosely under Impressionism; it took me all of 45 minutes to do, far less time than I would normally put into something. But in order to capture the mix of fear and awe properly, I knew I needed to start right away and not even think about what I was really doing so I could capture as much of that emotion as possible. So the form does suffer a little for that.

I chose pure, compressed charcoal to do this image; there is zero underlying line work in pencil. It was the medium I felt would work best to capture the emotion; pure black and white with smooth gradients would take to long in pencil. There's also a looseness to the medium that helps.

The split down the middle is where the conflicting emotions arise; the eye expresses the fear while the mouth expresses the awe. To reinforce the contrast, slightly differing shading at the border plus a slice shift was needed. I will say that the expression in general was more or less what was on my face when I finished reading the fic; thousand yard stare, went a few minutes without blinking more than once.

The last curiosity about this... there was the entire possibility of me not even doing this exact piece. The charcoal used in this was bought just this morning on a whim. If I didn't go into college today (I have no classes on Wednesday), I wouldn't have read the fic (at least today.) If I hadn't been experimenting with charcoal in general and the smudging stlye of shading within the last week or so, this exact picture would have turned out completely different, or even not at all.

I don't usually do grimdark things. I don't usually feel comfortable drawing sexual or grimdark themes in general. So if you see this and think "Wow, I should follow this guy, he's hardcore." or "Wow, I should go bleach my brain out now, then completely avoid anything from this guy." or something along those lines, don't worry. This is extremely rare for me to do, and I certainly don't actively use it. This is an exception.

Here's hoping that I don't have nightmares tonight.

...I might use pure charcoal impressionism for something else later. I kinda like the look. Though I hate how the dust gets everywhere...