#used like.. three different shading techniques

[dangermorph]

[asthmaticplushiedragon]

The child!

[linaaawrites]

Hi! Hope you are doing great 🥰 I was wondering if you could write a Connor Bedard x reader scenario where he does the reader's makeup? Imagine him taking it way too seriously like it’s a hockey game, staring at the beauty blender like it's alien technology lmao. Tysm for your amazing work!! 🫶🏻

Pink Egg Thing

pairing: Connor Bedard x female reader

description: Connor treats doing your makeup like his most important game yet.

TW: Fluff.

masterlist

The morning light filters through your bedroom window as Connor props his phone against the pillows, his brow furrowed in concentration. He's watching a makeup tutorial for the third time, his lips moving silently as he tries to memorize the steps.

"Okay," he says, turning to you with determination in his eyes. "I think I'm ready. But first, what's the difference between concealer and foundation again?"

You laugh, patting the space on the bed beside you. "Foundation goes all over your face to even out your skin tone. Concealer is for specific spots, like under your eyes or on blemishes."

Connor nods seriously, as if you're explaining hockey strategy before a big game. "Got it. Foundation first, then concealer. Where do we start?"

"With primer," you say, handing him the small bottle. "It helps everything go on smoothly."

He squirts a small amount onto his fingers, examining it like it's some kind of alien technology before gently dabbing it onto your face. His touch is surprisingly gentle for someone who spends his evenings throwing his body around on ice.

Next comes the foundation and Connor stares at the beauty blender in your makeup bag as if it's just materialized from another dimension. "Do I… use a brush or this… pink egg thing?"

"The beauty blender," you say, trying not to laugh at his description. "Dampen it first, then bounce it onto my skin."

He follows your instructions, his tongue poking out slightly as he concentrates on blending the foundation evenly. "Am I doing this right? It feels weird."

"You're doing great," you assure him, closing your eyes as he works.

The concealer comes next and Connor carefully applies it under your eyes, his touch so light it tickles. "This part is actually kind of satisfying," he admits, blending it with his ring finger like the tutorial showed him.

Now comes the real challenge, eyeliner. Connor has been practicing on his own hand for days, determined to get the winged eyeliner technique down. He watches another tutorial, his eyes wide with concentration.

"I don't understand how people do this every day," he mutters, taking the liquid eyeliner pen in his hand. "This is harder than stickhandling."

"Just a thin line close to the lashes," you coach him, keeping your eyes closed and trying not to flinch.

His first attempt is wobbly, but he doesn't give up. He wipes it off with a cotton pad and tries again, his competitive spirit kicking in. "No, no. I can do better than that."

After three attempts, he finally creates a decent wing and you can't help but be impressed by his determination. "Not bad for a rookie," you tease.

"Hey," he says with mock offense. "I'm improving."

He moves on to mascara, carefully coating your lashes. "How many coats do you usually do?" he asks, genuinely interested.

"Usually two," you reply, trying not to blink as he applies the second coat.

For eyeshadow, he chooses a neutral palette, following the tutorial's instructions to blend the colors carefully. His tongue is still poking out in concentration and you find yourself completely charmed by how seriously he's taking this.

"Should I do the cut crease look or just a simple blend?" he asks, holding up two different shades and the question catches you off guard a bit.

"Simple blend is probably safest for your first time," you suggest.

He nods, carefully applying and blending the colors until you're satisfied with the result. The finishing touches, blush, highlighter and setting spray complete the look and Connor steps back to admire his work with the pride of a player who just scored the game-winning goal.

"Well?" he asks, searching your face for approval. "How did I do?"

You turn to look in the mirror, surprised by how well he's done. It's not perfect, but considering he'd never touched makeup before today, it's actually quite impressive.

"Connor, this is… really good," you say, genuinely impressed.

His face lights up with a grin that could melt glaciers. "Really? I was so nervous I'd mess it up."

"You did amazing," you assure him, pulling him in for a kiss. "Thank you for doing this."

"Anything for you," he says, his cheeks flushing slightly. "But I think I'll stick to hockey. This makeup stuff is intense."

You laugh, tracing his jawline with your finger. "Well, for a first-timer, you've got some serious skills. Maybe you have a future as a beauty influencer if this hockey thing doesn't work out."

Connor groans dramatically. "Please don't even joke about that. I'd rather take a slapshot to the face than do eyeliner again."

"Even though you secretly enjoyed it?" you tease.

"Maybe a little," he admits with a shy smile. "But only because it was for you."

[witchwolfwriter]

✏️ My Boss Dislikes My Panties📏

Harper Spiller Boss x Reader Fanfic! | Read More Darkfic +DeadDove

Warnings : NON CON / Sexual Harassment In Workplace / Strap On Smut / Harper Spiller Smut / Adultry / Boss Power Dynamic / Workplace Non Con / Office Supplies used as Kinky Toys / Spanking and Crying / Forced Impreg / Bad Boss / NDA's & Blackmail / Dead Dove Fic / DDDE Aubrey Plaza Fic / No Panties & Free Use /Daddy Kink 3k words/ ONE SHOT / Ethan's Semen / 18+

You lamely attempted to take a deep breath, but the vibrating butt plug was making it hard to answer the phones. 

Your hand twitched as you typed. You waited for Mrs. Spiller to turn the plug higher. Your labia brushing together under your pencil squirt made a wet noise. 

You were so glad the law office wasn’t bustling this morning, you were working the desk as your boss, Mrs. Spiller, was a thin door away from you, getting her morning coffee and NPR in. 

You tried to stay on task as she’d instructed, the sound of other paralegals, front desk assistance, and high-end big dick lawyers getting into the large firm was only a door and a hallway. 

The door wasn’t locked; anyone could come in. 

Ask you as a paralegal at this firm to supply documentation or contact information for a case Mrs Spiller was working on. 

If they asked you to make a copy, or worse, go into your boss's office, they might see that you weren’t wearing pantyhose…or underwear.

You hadn’t work pantyhose in the office for the last three months. 

Your boss instructed you to stop wearing them, finding it not soft enough against her cheek. 

She’d used a letter opener one lunch time to tear them open, letting the cold blade play at your skin but it’s medical grade sharpness only splintered the thin material. 

After that Mrs. Spiller was done with your pantyhose. 

Done with your lacey panties too. 

She found it a ‘distraction’ which you’d bit your tongue not to say it was only a distraction because she’d stolen every pair you owned to sniff into. 

The married older lawyer was a bit of a control freak. A lot of a control freak. 

A control freak with an iron-clad NDA with your signature. 

Harper Spiller is stealing you as a paralegal from another office. When the gorgeous carmel skinned power hungry 40 something year old had decided you were to work for her. It was hard to deny her - in her power suit, she waived morality in your face and you hadn’t budged. Telling you it was for a good cause. But you weren’t that innocent; nothing legal was ever truly for a good cause. 

So Mrs. Spiller had  gone a different technique, sliding a fancy bit of cardstock your way with a number for salary grander than anything you’d thought to find in life. 

The paperwork you’d signed had strange verbage, but the change in your income was too good to pass up. 

You worked for Mrs. Spiller for two days - two days was all it took for her to find blackmail material. 

She’d called it ‘collateral’ nothing she’d ever use, ‘in your best interest, I’m only protecting my own.’ Harper had been a fucking liar. 

Collateral wasn’t a file saved at the office, but a little treat for the cold blooded lawyer. Something that quickly turned into a pass for touching, lingering on your lower back. Playing with your hair, changing your makeup, her thumb smearing your lipstick. ‘I don’t like that shade.’

You’d thought it was friendly, I mean the type of lawyer made you never guess Spiller would do this. She fought these cases. 

But it only escalated, and with that much collateral, you’d signed documents that were far darker than Ariel signing away her life to the sea witch. She owned you legally, financially… physically…

Harper Spiller was the devil. 

You hated her at first; her sexual harassment made your skin crawl - until it didn’t. 

Until she’d pointed out how…wet you got. How your heart rate changed, how you leaned in. 

You’d heard of victim blaming, but this - this wasn’t something you’d ever considered. Needing this level of cruelty in the workplace made you feel…alive. 

Mrs. Spiller was creative, you’d give her that. She was always finding new ways to own you. 

Your brand new work phone had more dirty talk and pictures then a snuf film makers hardrive. 

You reached over to press the voicemail button on the landline on your desk. 

As you reached, Harper activated the remote on her phone . 

You gasp and slam your palm against the desk. 

Sweat drips between your shoulderblades as you arch and work to keep quiet. 

Your eyes meeting the camera Harper had installed, it wasn’t pointed at the guest seats or the door, or even the locked filing cabinet with sensitive documents. 

No,no, no, it was pointed right at you. 

You slam your thighs closed, working so hard not to gush on the office chair. 

You’d been through 4 this months and it was only the 15th.

This was a fun game for your boss.  

“What’s this?” Harper would raise her voice just enough to scare you. 

You follow her eyeline to your desk chair, a small patch where you’d leaked. It was hard, Mrs. Spiller pretended it was the 50’s and wouldn’t let you wear pants. Only pencil skirts, no pantyhose, no underwear! But she was constantly sexually torturing you. 

It was only natural your body would react! 

Harper bent forward and sniffed the spot on the chair. Inhaling a little too hard to be disgusted by what you’d done. 

But quickly, she’s scowling once more, taking the chair roughly out from behind your desk. 

“You know I can’t have this filth in my office; this is a proud firm. You throw this out! You get it out of my office.” She’s instructed, pointing menacingly at the offending object. 

“Mrs. Spiller I- I need a chair!” That had been a mistake, talking back with any logic. 

“You don’t deserve a chair, you know that? Throw the chair out, then bend over my desk, raise your fucking skirt so you can dry off. Work with your chin on my desk, don’t think you’re getting time off for this.” Harper spat, anger radiating off of her - but something else, a power high. This dominant display a type of drug for Harper. 

You gasped and chewed on your lip. 

“But someone could come in…” You tried to reason.

“Well you should have thought of that before you soiled my office property. Everything I give you is a gift and if you misbehave you lose things, don’t you?” Harper arched an eyebrow, asking you to defy her again, to question her judgement. 

But you’d only grabbed the chair and began to wheel it out, aware of how your body would be sore after 6 more hours of being bent over a desk, pussy in the air for Mrs. Spiller to abuse at any moment. 

You pinched your knees together and tried to breathe through your nose. 

You didn’t want to lose another chair, not if it meant being bent over the desk all day. Two chairs ago you had found out just how creative the lawyer was. 

Harper had taken a yard stick, and instead of spanking you like she did if you didn’t get your workload done by 4pm. No, she’d taken a bit of ribbon from a thank you basket that had been delivered that morning. 

Winding it to keep your arms spread - a makeshift kink spraderbar. Then you’d bent over the desk, unable to stop as Harper made phone calls and would stick pens and highlighters inside your pussy - just to see how many would fit. 

It was humiliating, her free use of you, treating you like a fleshlight. Not even, like an experiment to see how much your sore cunt could take. 

If you squeaked at the object insertion, Harper would take a rubber band and snap it against your ass cheeks. 

A reminder of what would come, as there was no way you could finish your workload like that. Something that you’d brought up and constantly were reminded that ‘wasn’t a lawyers problem what her paralegal couldn’t do.’

You grind your teeth together and hit the button for the voicemails to start over. 

You hadn’t heard a singal thing around the rumbling of the vibrations in your asshole. 

Then you felt scard, finding a message from Ethan Spillers voice. His shy voice cracking on the phone, and your cunt dripped just a little more. 

Anytime Ethan called, Harper would get angry, when she got angry, your boss would use you as stress release. 

On too many occasions, Ethan was used as a cuck without his knowledge. The poor nerdy millionaire had no idea. But it seemed like Harper wasn’t getting sexually satisfied, and instead of seeing what you two were doing as cheating, it seemed she found it closer to using a sex toy. 

Except you weren’t a sex toy. 

You’d gone to fucking school to be a paralegal, you’d had a life before this firm. 

But now you were practically working for Miranda Priestly. 

There were no such things as office hours, and your body was made for Harper Spiller and only Harper Spiller. 

Not that you had free time to date, but Harper was beyond possessive. 

You’d changed body soaps and she’d noticed, then shipped to your apartment the old body wash with a glaring reminder that your life was not in your control. 

You moaned and stopped the voicemails, not able to listen to a single one of them. 

You went back to check the morning emails only to have your computer ding with an IM from Mrs. Spiller. 

‘Get in here.’

She messaged you, instructing you like some kind of dog, something below her. 

You stood up and grabbed at the side of your desk to not lose your balance, but then the vibrator stopped completely, and you sighed. 

Walking behind your chair to open the door to Mrs. Spiller's office. 

It was lavish and cush, just like the waiting room, creams and beige colors. Nice feministic art, degrees, flowers in the corners. 

A huge desk with giant monitors and papers perfectly stacked, a coffee table, small bar, a bathroom, and sofa. 

A sofa that you’d sobbed into the cushions of as Harper lost a case last afternoon, then spent hours spanking you with a large office binder. 

It burned so bad you’d cried non stop, the whole office could hear, knew why and who. 

But that was just the rules of the firm. 

Harper tilted her head to the side in a ‘what are you an idiot’ sorta way. 

You stepped into the office, closing the door behind you. As you’d learned from experience that Harper wouldn’t instruct it, but you’d be scared someone would walk into the waiting room at any moment as see inside. 

You slowly moved to the front of her desk.

A moment ticked by, and you waited for instructions, but Harper was rubbing the bottom of her chin as the reflection from her glasses told you she was reading your work from yesterday. 

Mrs. Spiller seemed to be deep in thought, which could only mean you’d done something right. Now she was looking for something to reprimand you for. 

You waited still, as the only noise in the room was Harper scrolling with her mouse on the computer. 

“Sit.” Harper said, and you hesitated. 

Mrs. Spiller smiled wickedly. 

You were learning it seemed. 

Harper pushed back on her desk and you quickly rounded the space. 

Your boss was wearing slacks, but they were unbuttoned and a strap on was stiffly at attention. 

It was see-through, and there was a long tube down it. 

You didn’t have time to wonder what the tubing was about as Harper cleared her throat. 

You walked forward but Mrs. Spiller put her hand up. 

You tried not to blush as you lifted your skirt up to your hips, Harper smirked, then twirled her finger. Signaling for you to turn around and sit down, facing the computer, facing the door. Always causing you to fear someone walking in. 

You gulp, then shift your hips so you are over your boss's lap. But Mrs. Spiller doesn’t have all day, she’s got court later this afternoon. 

So she grabs your hips and thrusts into your cunt. 

The thin wall making the strap and your butt plug brush tightly together. 

Harper doesn’t give you time to adjust; she bottoms out, and you yell at the mixture of pain and pleasure. 

“Write the casenotes now.” Harper tells you, and you shake from the intensity of the shaft against your cervix. 

Your hands are unsteady as you reach forward to the keyboard. 

Harper let’s you work on case notes as she watches. 

But it only lasts an hour or so on cock warming until Harper wants more, her hand going into her desk drawer to root around. You think it’s for the remote to turn up the vibrations. But that's for later,  instead she finds a sharpie, her thumb lifting the plastic clip on the side of the pen cap. 

She moves it and you jerk but Mrs. Spiller doesn’t mind as she slides the tight pinching plastic over the base of your clit. You squirm and shriek as you can feel the blood flow change. 

“I thought it might work, you’re clit so tiny. I bought a pump, I want to see how you taste when you’re all puffy for me.” Harper told you and you arch as she pushed the pen down more, making the clip stretch around your hardening bud. 

“It’s tight-tight.” You say, but your boss takes it as more of an observation. 

She hums but nudges you back to your work. 

You're leaking down her shaft, probably on designer work pants. 

You try not to think of this, but rather tomorrow's courtroom documents. 

Harper unbuttons your shirt and unclaps your bra; you try your best to ignore her. 

Like a child taking what she wants with little regard for anything else. 

You work hard to focus, to keep your breathing even. 

You vaguely see hand movement and then Harper sigh and open a sharpie, the cool wet ink touches your thigh first. 

Your holes clench on the toys, you already need to cum. 

It should feel pubescent, getting drawn on, until your eyes cast down to see the sexual names. ‘Spit Whore’, ‘Property of Daddy’,’’ heat fills you. The humiliation doing the trick to make you embarrassingly wetter. 

She takes the black sharpie ink and moves across your breasts. Setting her initials, H.S down from your clevage to your nipples. 

Then she moves to your womb, your white button-down fully open and crumpled behind your back, she annoyed breaks the shirt, pulling it off completely. 

You go back quickly to typing, but as wet sharpie moves over your stomach you can’t help it.

Your chin drops to see her writing ‘Cum Dump.’

Your cunt squeezes the shaft, the noise of the attempt at suction echoes in the room. 

“You are losing patience.”

You were about to ask ‘yours or mine’ Harper throws the marker onto the table and pushes back on the desk. 

Stopping you from typing. 

“Bounce, bounce, bounce.” Mrs. Spiller says, and you move up on the shaft and down. You listen to her and pull yourself up only to impale yourself on her clear cock once more. 

The wet noises made you shy, but you noticed from the mirror Harper watching your tits bounce, then the sight of your cunt swallowing her dick. 

“Bounce, be a good paralegal and bounce. Ride my shaft, you know who owns you. Daddy’s paying you, Daddy takes care of you. I decide everything for you.  I own you.” Mrs. Spiller reminds you and you shiver as her silicone tip hits hard against your cervix. 

You gush and Harper smiles at one more thing to punish you for later. 

But you throw your head back and your thigh muscles bend an clench hard. 

Harper lifts you enough to do make you stand so she can thrust hard into you. 

“Silly little girl. Now I have to do the work myself, if you want something done right…” She says as her dark nails grab and your throat all around. As though she’s put you in a collar for misbehaving. Yanking your jaw to the side for you to look into the mirror. 

Your breasts bouncing from the rough pounding. 

Cunt leaking and mouth opening too arousal. 

You yell as she plunges against your G-spot rougher than any lover ever had the guts to. 

“MRS SPILLER I CAN’T-I’LL!” You scream but it’s too late. You’re squirting all down your bosses pressed nice slacks. You’ll have to clean them with your mouth before going out to get them dry cleaned. 

You shut your eyes tight so you don’t have to see Harper’s satisfaction in the mirror of the office. 

Your toes curl in your thigh heels as you scream high pitched and lost.

Harper sits back on her chair and signs content.  

You take a ragged breath no longer being held by the throat. 

But something warm fills you, you look down your body, past the sharpie names to see Mrs. Spiller with a plunger. It’s..empty?

But you feel something in your womb. 

You had been given an enema in that bathroom before, you knew the slowshing of water…this wasn’t that. 

Your post cum body was twitching and spent. 

A time Harper would take advantage of you to ride your face. Then tell you how horribly you’d done so she could make you start again, after your boss had in fact cum. 

The gushing of warm…thick - what was that? It dribbled out of you. 

“What is that!” You say as fear makes you confused on what trickles out of you. 

“Ethan’s semen,” Harper kisses along the back of your neck, it’s wet. Her wet mouth mixed with your sweaty neck, something about is sweltering. 

Your panic sets in too slowly. 

“I’m not on birth control!” You shout too loud for the office, which is a joke since no one is under any false ideas on what happens in this office. 

“I know that, you take a low dose of Zoloft and Effexor. You have low iron, I ordered us those carnitas asada tacos from the corner.” Harper says, and you are never more sure she’s got some kind of disorder that makes it impossible for her to share emotions. 

Because that almost sounded romantic, but she just ejaculated her innocent husband's semen into your womb. This was fucked up, why did you want more?

“Mrs. Spiller - no, no.” You start to panic and move to lift off of your boss's silicone shaft. 

But her arms wrap tightly around your middle keep you from moving. 

“No, stay there, I want it to take.”

“Mrs. Spiller! You shriek, and somehow Harper decides this means you need more information on her thought process. 

“Ethan decided we want kids. But I’m too busy,” Harper opens her mouth wide to scrape her teeth across your shoulder. “I wasn’t too into the idea, but then I thought about you swollen. How I’ll hold your stomach as I double penetrate you….I like that idea.”

“Harper - y-you can’t just impregnate me!” You try again, but as her fingers move up your stomach to your breasts, she pinches your nipples the sharpie a reminder to you both. As she fondles your breasts - you hate to think of what she’s envisioning. 

“I own you. I’m bridging you on vacation, I’ll do this everymorning after Ethan masturbates. Then I’ll watch you walk around naked on the beach. Fuck you on the sand, it’ll be great. I already put it on the outlook calender.”

“You can’t just get me pregnant you-you can’t!” You say again, dumbly, and Harper lifts her hips to make the white cum move around you. You moan at the sensation, and your boss chuckles darkly. Ready to go for the second round, microwave the semen cup she’d saved. Stuff you so full you have to keep your legs in the air to not make a mess on the nice office carpet. 

“I just did.”

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[heaventarnished]

˚₊‧꒰ა TANGLED & DETACHED ໒꒱ ‧₊˚

(or, A Matinee Guide to Industrial Hazards and Bad Impulse Control..)

a series by heaventarnished ©

where Rafe has an absolute monopoly on her nervous system and a deep, smug appreciation for how easily she collapses into a pathetic little puddle for a couple of sparkly gems.

word count: 4.8k

ᥫ᭡ CONTENT DISCLOSURE...

dark humour & mean-spirited affection | psychological objectification & fixation | dehumanisation | recreational cruelty (played for comedy) | morally questionable tenderness | unsettling affection | dark praise & patronisation | size difference | general filth & domestic containment themes | explicit smut & public degeneracy | dangerous/non-consensual public exhibitionism | unprotected oral sex / deepthroating | heavy face-fucking & choking | rough handling & hair-pulling resulting in physical injury (scalp trauma/bleeding) | age-regression coding & childlike dependency | transactional compliance | bribery as affection / reward-based aftercare | clinical sociopathy framed romantically | severe emotional whiplash | etc.

The local matinee was a hollow shell of suburban rot, reeking of rancid coconut oil, synthetic butter, and whatever cheap industrial-strength bleach the underpaid high school cleaners used to mop up the sticky, bodily-fluid remnants of public degeneracy from the faux-leather upholstery. It was three o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon. The theatre was a cavernous, air-conditioned wasteland, occupied only by a miserable smattering of morbidising retirees two rows down and a screen bleeding some soft-washed romantic comedy that Rafe Cameron had zero intention of wasting his cognitive load on.

He had far more interesting anatomy to track. Or rather, he had a much softer target to keep pinned beneath his palm. It was a strange sort of domesticity for the Silken Strangler of Kildare—having his fingers occupied by a girl’s ribbons rather than her windpipe, though the urge to squeeze remained largely unchanged.

Down in the cramped, crumbly velvet footwell between his shins and the row in front, Pamela Marmont was currently conducting what her single, flickering neurone undoubtedly thought was a masterclass in oral eroticism. To Rafe, it felt less like a conscious performance and more like being clumsily gnawed at by a blind vulture—soft, repetitive, and entirely lacking in basic motor skills.

She was on her knees, her frilled white eyelet skirt hiked up around her hips, pooling over her thighs like a blood-stinted bandage. Her tiny, spindly hands were braced against his quads, her fingernails—gelled a ridiculous, gaudy shade of bubblegum pink—digging into his dark denim with every clumsy, enthusiastic lurch of her head.

"Rafey," she’d whimpered into his ear before lowering herself, her breath sweet and frozen with the artificial blue raspberry slushie she’d pleaded with him to buy her at the concession stand. "I’m bored. My brain is itchy. Can I... do the thing?"

Rafe hadn't answered right away. He'd just stared down at the pretty little crown of her head, marvelling at the total absence of cognitive activity beneath her skull. It was a beautiful, hollow birdcage. She didn't have thoughts; she had impulses, and her entire existence had narrowed down to the mammalian urge to consume.

Consequently, the "thing" was currently a loud, agonisingly wet, and entirely uncoordinated vacuum. Pamela didn't possess a single calculating bone in her body, which meant her technique was entirely motivated by a sort of manic, sugar-induced greed—less of a performance and more of a desperate consumption. She didn't just accommodate him; she tried to inhale him, her jawbone softening open with that slow, marionette slackness he found both gravely provocative and anatomically hazardous. It was like watching a python try to navigate a prey item too large for its own soft skull; there was no elegance to it, just the pure, biological persistence of a creature operating entirely on a delayed nervous system. Those plush lips—wet with a cheap gloss that tasted like artificial strawberries—clamped around his hard shaft with a tight, desperate friction, straining to accommodate his girth. She sucked him with a desperate sort of suction, her tongue flattening against the underside of his glans, her throat working in tight, rhythmic spasms that felt close to a death grip.

It was pure, unadulterated gluttony. Rafe tilted his head back against the headrest, tracking her through slitted eyelids as her throat stretched impossibly wide to take him in. The slick, sliding friction of her saliva coated the entire length of his shaft in heavy, unsparing strokes, turning his skin into a lightning rod of raw nerve endings.

Every few strokes, he could feel the occasional, uncoordinated scrape of her teeth against the highly sensitised skin of his cock—a careless blunder that would have gotten anyone else callously backhanded across the rows of empty seats. He knew exactly how many foot-pounds of force it took to shatter a jaw like hers—how easily the delicate hinge would snap under his heel. From Pamela, however, the localised sting of pain was an addictive irritant, causing his pulse to spike with a predatory heat that boiled his blood to liquid kindling.

Whenever she bottomed out completely to the hilt, her small nose burying into the coarse hair of his lower abdomen, the heavy silver "doll" necklace she wore let out a pleasing, crystalline tinkle-tinkle against his brass belt buckle. The dainty, festive rhythm was a humiliatingly pathetic accompaniment for a man whose hands were intimately acquainted with the precise mechanics of asphyxiation and the exact poundage of pressure required to collapse a human trachea.

But Rafe was well past the point of pride.

"F-fuck, Pup," he growled, the low, gravelly vibration rattling deep in his chest as his fingers dug into the cheap upholstery. His head slammed back against the sticky polyurethane padding as a particularly deep, wet spasm of her throat nearly unseated his composure entirely. His eyes unfocused, staring blindly up at the textured acoustic tiling of the ceiling as his hips twitched with a hard, involuntary lurch.

He reached down, his heavy, calloused hand rooting directly into the back of her head with a zero-tolerance grip. He wound his fingers directly into the sour-sweet silk of her bleached-blonde hair, winding the fine strands tightly around his palm like a makeshift noose until her scalp went taut and her face was pinned immovably against his groin. There was zero gentleness left in him. He clamped his wide palm over the crown of her head, his knuckles locking white as he forced her down to the hilt, establishing a rhythmic, punishing depth that her throat had no choice but to accept. Every thrust was calculated to crowd her throat, reducing her to nothing but a wet, choking receptacle for his pleasure.

He craved the choke of it. He loved the thick, muffledly desperate gurgle that tore from her throat whenever he lunged his hips upward, driving his girth past her natural limits and forcing her to swallow down a depth she wasn't built for. He held her there, letting her gag on him until her tiny, frail frame began to tremble violently under his palms in a blind panic of pleasure and asphyxiation.

She gagged—a beautiful, wet, desperate sound that hummed directly against his skin—and her eyes, when she managed to look up through a curtain of thick fringe, were wide, watery, and entirely blown-out by pleasure. Her pupils were dilated to the edge of the iris, completely emptied of whatever residual thought she’d started with. She was a perfect little dumpster for his worst impulses. A biological shock absorber. She wasn't a person to him; she was an organic sleeve designed to accommodate his friction, a soft, breakable creature he could choke out in the shadows of the back row while some overpaid Hollywood actress wept about a wedding on the silver screen above them.

He felt the tension coil tight in his lower abdomen—a hot, vicious spike of pressure that turned his spine to iron and forced a low, involuntary hitch from his lungs. The friction of her throat was becoming too tight, too hot, and he was right on the precipice—his hard cock throbbing in the wet, suffocating clamp of her mouth, his practised restraint melting away into pure, unadulterated friction.

He drove himself into her one last, punishing time, his fingers grasping her skull so ruthlessly her nose mashed flat against his pubic bone. He locked her face trapped immovably against him, pinning her helpless against his hips as he came, a low, splintered hiss tearing from his throat. The hot, heavy rushes of his release pumped deep into her, flooding the back of her throat and forcing her to swallow down his climax in desperate, reflexive gulps—a beautifully pathetic display of her brain stem prioritising basic survival over her ruined dignity—while the raw, wet heat of her choking response rode out the very last of his release.

Pamela took it all like a greedy little gutter cat, her throat convulsing in heavy, pathetic swallows that milked him dry. Her tiny hands squeezed his quads, her fingers bunching up the fabric of his jeans as she fought for oxygen, operating entirely on pure, sugar-fuelled reflex. She didn't let a drop waste.

He watched her throat work with a cold, detached fascination, tracking the involuntary contractions of her oesophagus. It was beautiful how quickly the human animal surrendered its pride when the brainstem was starved of oxygen. She wasn't thinking about love or dignity; she was just a pocket of meat trying not to suffocate on him.

She collapsed against him for a long beat, her face pinned flat against his unzipped denim as she panted heavily against his damp skin. The humid, blue-raspberry scent of her breath puffed over his exposed thighs, mixing with the sharp tang of sex and cheap strawberry gloss. He didn't move his hand from her hair, simply tracking the rhythmic, exhausted rise and fall of her shoulders like a predator waiting for its prey to stop twitching.

The blankety, suffocating silence of the back row didn't even have a chance to settle before it was punctured by a strangled little gasp.

"Rafey."

Rafe didn't look down right away. He remained slouched in the faux-leather seat, one arm thrown lazily across the backrest, his chest still heaving with the residual tremors of his release. He was waiting for his pulse to settle back into its usual, icy baseline—forcing the animal warmth out of his system.

"What?" he muttered, his voice a flat, gravelly baritone.

"Rafey."

Her voice sounded entirely wrong. The sugary, pouty whine was completely gone, replaced by a tight, reedy note of rising panic.

Rafe finally glanced down, a cynical headache already blooming behind his eyes. "What are you doing? Get up," he grunted, planting a heavy palm against her shoulder to shove her out of his lap like an inconvenient coat.

She didn't budge. "I can't!" she whimpered, a genuine sob beginning to bubble in her throat as she gave a pathetic, uncoordinated tug that made her wince. "My hair... it’s in the zipper, Rafey! It’s all... it's stuck in the teeth!"

Rafe froze, a prominent vein in his neck instantly throbbing in perfect, agonising rhythm with the theatre's subwoofers. He leaned forward, squinting through the murky, shifting light of the silver screen to inspect the damage between his thighs.

It was an absolute disaster. In his ruthless haste to slam her head down, combined with her frantic, sugar-fuelled bobbing, a thick, messy hunk of her ruined, lemon-scented hair—along with one of those godforsaken pink silk ribbons—had been forced-fed into the heavy metal tracks of his fly. It was a complete bird's nest of fine, bleached strands jammed inextricably into the industrial-strength zipper. She was quite literally locked to his crotch by her own vanity.

Rafe closed his eyes, letting his head loll back against the seat until his neck creaked. Of course. It was almost poetic. God had a perverse sense of humour; apparently, the only appropriate penance for a man with his particular body count was to be physically shackled to a creature with the spatial awareness of a goldfish.

"You’ve got to be kidding me," he snarled, fingers dipping into the mess to investigate.

He tugged—just a little, an impatient, testing jerk.

"OW! Stop! Stop it, you're scalping me!" she shrieked, her voice cutting through the dialogue on screen like a siren.

Three rows down, a couple turned to stare, their faces pale ovals in the dim light. Rafe went utterly rigid, his blood turning to liquid nitrogen as the casual, anonymous darkness of the theatre demisted.

Rafe’s face went dead cold. He reached down and clamped his hand over her jaw, his thumb sinking deep into the soft flesh of her cheek, ruthlessly pinning her lips together before she could draw another breath.

"Quiet," he hissed, his pupils burgeoning with a petrifying, unfathomable fury as he leaned down until his breath scorched her ear. "Do you want everyone to see you like this? On your knees, covered in my spit, attached to my dick like a fucking keychain?"

Pamela’s eyes instantly flooded with fat, glittering tears. She gave a pathetic, trembling shake of her head that only served to drag the roots of her hair tighter into the metal teeth. She was completely immobilised across his lap, one hand hovering uselessly in the air like a broken wing, the other anchoring her to the plastic armrest with white-knuckled tenacity.

"Jesus Christ," he muttered, the curse bleeding out of him as a heavy, exhausted sigh. He rubbed his free hand over his face, feeling the sudden, grinding weight of the situation settling into his temples.

Pamela's lower lip immediately started trembling, the thick coat of strawberry gloss catching a stray glint of blue light from the silver screen. "Don't say that," she whispered, her voice cracking as a tear finally spilt over.

"Pamela." His voice dropped an octave, dripping with a terrifyingly calm, dangerous patience.

"It wasn't on purpose," she whimpered, her chest heaving against his knees as she looked up at him through a tangled web of blonde fringe.

"No shit." He didn't soften his gaze for a second. "If I thought you did this on purpose, we’d be having a very different conversation right now."

A heavy, watery sniffle echoed from the dark cavern of his lap. "I think I'm stuck forever."

"You are not stuck forever," he sighed, his voice flat, sounding less like a comforting boyfriend and more like a tired hostage negotiator dealing with a particularly dim-witted captor.

"I think I am," she insisted, another fat tear splashing directly onto his thigh. Her small frame slumped in total defeat, completely resigning herself to her new life as an attachment to his jeans.

"You literally are not." Rafe closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose as the dialogue from the movie slurred overhead. "It is a zipper, Pamela. Not a blood pact. We are getting you off."

"What if they have to call firefighters?"

Rafe stared down at her. Then he stared a little longer, the silence stretching out between them as he genuinely wondered if the pink erasers she’d been chewing on earlier last week had finally dissolved and reached her brain stem. He rubbed his free hand hard down his face, his rough palm scraping heavily against the stubble of his jaw.

"Why," he asked, each word dropping like a lead weight, "would they call firefighters?"

"To cut me loose."

"Cut you loose from what?"

"You." She looked up through her sticky lashes, her voice dropping into a horrified, tragic whisper.

The elderly couple three rows down craned their necks again, their grey, hunched silhouettes cutting sharply against the flickering blue light of the screen. Rafe’s jaw locked with a sickening click. His hand snapped down, clamping his fingers right back over her jawline and squeezing until her cheeks caved and her lips puckered into a helpless fish face.

"Stop talking," he hissed, his voice dropping into that quiet, lethal register that usually made grown men back slowly out of rooms.

"Wha- if- ey- ooze- eh- awes- ob- ipe?" she mumbled miserably through his tight grip, her eyes huge, glassy, and entirely unbothered by his lethal tone.

"They are not using the Jaws of Life."

"Wha- ib—"

"No one is cutting my fucking pants off, Pamela." He leaned in closer, his knuckles turning white against her jaw. "And if a single paramedic walks through that door, I am using you as a human shield."

She looked genuinely crestfallen, her shoulders slumping as much as her tethered head allowed. "Oh."

Rafe let go of her face, his hand descending into the dark knot between them to grip the metal pull of the zipper. The absolute microsecond his knuckles brushed the cold steel, she squeaked like a stepped-on chew toy, her whole body flinching.

"Be careful," she breathed, her eyes darting frantically between his fingers and his eyes.

"I am being careful." He didn't look at her, his focus locked entirely on trying to navigate the tangled bird's nest without ripping a chunk out of her scalp—or worse, out of himself.

"You don't look careful."

"How do I look?"

"Mad."

"I am mad." He gave the metal pull a tiny, experimental nudge, his voice dropping into a dangerous, low hum. "I am profoundly mad, Pamela. Now stop moving your mouth before I catch your lip in it too."

Another watery sniffle. He leaned deeper into the gloom, squinting until his vision blurred. It was worse than he thought; the cheap satin ribbon hadn't just snagged—it had been compressed into a solid plastic wad inside the tracks, while several dozen strands of her fine, blonde hair were wrapped around the slider mechanism like an industrial winch. It wasn't just a jam; it was a complete mechanical deadlock.

Rafe braced his thumb against the fabric, gritting his teeth as he tried tugging the slider downward—just a single millimetre—to see if there was any slack in the teeth.

A catastrophic mistake.

Pamela made a sharp, whistling sound like a wounded rabbit, her entire body jerking violently against his knees. "OW!" she gasped, her hands flying up to frantically claw at his thighs.

"Quit moving," he grunted, using his forearms to pin her shoulders down as she shifted uncomfortably against his shins.

"I can't help it! My neck is bending backward!"

"Then let it snap," he hissed, maintaining the brutal pressure on her collarbones to kill her leverage. "You're making it worse."

"You're hurting me!"

"You're attached to my pants."

"That's not my fault!"

"How is it not your fault?" Rafe’s voice finally fractured, his careful composure dissolving into a furious, venomous whisper. "You’re the one who treats my crotch like an all-you-can-eat buffet!"

"I don't know!" she wailed softly, the sound cracking into a high, pathetic squeak as she buried her face directly into the coarse denim of his thigh, thoroughly giving up on logic.

For one horrible second, she looked genuinely close to sobbing. Not her usual, dramatic, "give-me-attention" Pamela tears that she used like currency. Real ones. The kind that made her eyes look like swollen marbles, flooded her mascara into grey streaks, and turned the tip of her little button nose a bright, pathetic pink. She was leaking from every available orifice, a completely uncalibrated engine drowning in its own overflow.

Rafe exhaled sharply through his nose, a hot, irritated blast of air as his knuckles turned white against his denim. "Quit crying."

"I'm not crying," she lied, her voice hitching on a tiny, breathless hiccup that vibrated directly against his kneecap.

"You literally are."

"I'm trying not to!" She blinked rapidly, which only succeeded in dislodging two massive, trembling drops that rolled straight down her cheeks and soaked into his jeans. "It just... it really hurts, Rafey."

Something in his chest twisted, an abrupt, unpleasantly tight sensation that made him want to cough. It was an annoying, foreign glitch in his system. He absolutely hated when she looked like that—like someone had taken a baseball bat to a pedigree puppy. His serial killer instincts, usually so neat, quiet, and detached, always got completely derailed by her sheer, unadulterated vulnerability. He could strangle a grown man in a sleazy motel room without his heart rate passing sixty, but watching Pamela look at him through a smear of cheap mascara like he was the one actively breaking her heart made him want to punch a hole straight through the drywall.

"Listen to me," he muttered, his hand sliding up from the jammed metal to cup the back of her neck. His large palm was heavy, but his thumb moved with an unforeseen, soothing rhythm over the warm skin right beneath the dainty silver chain of her necklace. "I have to clear the track. It’s going to tear some hair out. There’s no other way."

"Can't you just... untangle it?" she whispered, her chest heaving as a massive tear finally overflowed, tracking a clean path through her liquid foundation.

"No. It’s jammed, Pammy. And it’s going to hurt," he whispered back, his voice shedding every ounce of its previous impatience as his eyes narrowed into a cold, sadistic focus. "If you make a sound—even a squeak—I am leaving you here for the minimum-wage usher to find with a broom stuffed down your throat."

Rafe reached down with his left hand, pinning the metal tab of the zipper between his thumb and forefinger, while his right hand anchored her neck steady so she wouldn't whiplash herself. He clamped his fingers around the base of her skull, unconsciously measuring the fragile alignment of her vertebrae. She was so remarkably easy to break; it was almost a design flaw on God's part to make a structural baseline so soft. He didn't wait for her consent. He didn't have the stomach or the patience for a countdown, and hesitation just meant giving her a wider window to lose her nerve and make noise. Locking his wrist, he gripped the metal tab and gave a sharp, brutally violent yank upward to clear the mechanism.

The sound of tearing hair was sickeningly audible—a series of tiny, wet pops that flittered straight through his fingertips.

Pamela let out a loud, high-pitched wail that would have alerted the entire theatre if Rafe hadn't instantly clamped his palm completely over her mouth, ruthlessly muffling the rest of the sound into a pathetic, wet grunt. She collapsed forward into his lap, her tiny frame racking with violent, whimpering sobs that she could only expel against his skin. Her forehead pressed hard against his stomach, her hot, hyperventilating breaths soaking straight through his shirt as she trembled under his heavy hand.

A patch of blonde hair the size of a silver dollar was left hopelessly tangled in the metal teeth of his fly, clumped along with the shredded, grease-stained remnants of her pink ribbon.

"Shh, shh," Rafe cooed. His voice was flat, entirely devoid of real human warmth, but weighted with a dark, deeply satisfied possession. He kept one hand firmly over her mouth, using his free hand to smooth down the rest of her dishevelled hair, deliberately covering the raw, angry red spot near her temple where the exposed scalp was bleeding tiny, pinpoint drops of dark, oxygenated waste. "Look at you. Such a messy little thing. Always breaking yourself against me."

She squirmed weakly against his palm, her wet lashes fluttering like trapped moths against his skin, her hot, panicked breath blooming against his fingertips. She was a ruin of smeared mascara, pathetic sniffles, and his own dried fluids—looking less like a girl and more like a piece of fine, expensive silk that had been dragged carelessly through a gravel pit.

"I... I want..." she hiccuped against his hand, her voice a broken, wet splinter when he finally parted his fingers just enough to let her speak.

"I know what you want," Rafe whispered. He leaned his face down, burying his nose into the curve of her neck until his lips brushed the hot shell of her ear. The overwhelming scent of blue raspberry ICEE, cheap sugar, and salt-streaked skin was dizzying his senses. "You want the world. You want more pink ribbons. You want that Swarovski-encrusted diary you whimpered over in the window downtown. I’ll buy it for you. I’ll buy you the whole goddamn store, Pup. But only if you’re a good, quiet girl for the rest of the credits."

He didn't let her get up. He preferred her right where she was—broken, purely compliant, and pinned beneath the firm anchor of his thighs. With a casual, practised flick of his wrist, he adjusted his jeans, finally freeing the jammed mechanism from the wreckage of her ribbon. Then, he held his hand out in front of her pathetically pouty face. His thumb was still slick, glistening wetly with the panting remnants of her mouth.

"Here," he commanded flatly.

Pamela blinked up at him through the hazy blur of her tears, her chest giving one last, trembling hiccup against his thighs. She looked down at his damp thumb, then up at the cold, unblinking blue of his eyes. With the total, lobotomised submission of a well-trained pet, she opened her swollen mouth and took his thumb inside, her lips closing tightly around his knuckle.

She began to suckle on it, her heavy eyes fluttering shut as her mind completely abdicated the labour of thinking, slipping away from the theatre entirely and reverting back to that white-noise, pipelines-and-wind-chimes comfort.

He could feel the pathetic, rhythmic suction of her mouth, a mindless, primitive reflex. He had reduced her to this. He had taken a loud, demanding, high-maintenance girl and degraded her down into a quiet, functioning appendage of his own body. She didn't exist anymore; there was only his hand and the wet, compliant space she provided for it.

Rafe leaned back into the worn backing of his seat, his bulky arm draped over her slumped shoulders, his thumb anchored deep and immovable in her mouth like a bit between the teeth of a broken filly. On the screen, the main characters were finally kissing in the rain to a swelling, orchestral score, but Rafe didn't care about the fiction. He just watched the calm, hypnotic mist of the projector light across Pamela’s damp, pink face, listening to the tiny, contented tinkle of her silver necklace—like the bell on a sleeping lapcat—every time her chest rose and fell.

The house lights didn't top up gradually; they shuttered back on with a jarring, fluorescent hum that promptly dissolved the anonymous safety of the back row.

Rafe didn't give her a moment to adjust. He ruthlessly hooked his fingers under her armpit and hauled her upward, yanking her straight out of her cotton-candy and carousel-music limbo like salvage being dredged from a swamp. Pamela stumbled, her knees knocking together beneath her eyelet skirt, her small palms instantly flying up to shelter her eyes from the blinding glare. She was an absolute wreck in the white light—her nose a raw, inflamed pink, her cheeks tracked with ash-coloured smears of dissolved mascara, and the bald, raw patch at her temple already crusting over with a dull, sticky glaze of coagulating plasma. Rafe catalogued the damage with a critical, dispassionate eye, calculating how many days of isolation it would take before she was presentable enough to be seen in public with him again.

"Shoes on," Rafe commanded, his voice already restored to its crisp, civilian baseline. He didn't look at her as he zipped his fly with a smooth, indifferent click, checking his reflection briefly in the dark glass of an empty poster frame to ensure her frantic, trembling fingers hadn’t left a smudge of tear-salt or spit along his jawline.

Pamela sniffled, a small, pathetic sound as she blindly kicked her feet into her discarded plastic jellies. She looked completely hollowed out, her lower lip tucked inward as she automatically reached for the hem of his shirt like a panicked toddler navigating a crowded supermarket.

He let her hold on, but only because her compliance kept her quiet—a leash was fine, so long as the dog didn't pull. There was a cruel, quiet satisfaction in seeing her crawl right back under his shadow for protection, as if her small, broken mind had already forgotten who had kept her on the floor in the first place. As they walked down the sloped, sticky carpet of the aisle, past the elderly couple who deliberately averted their eyes with horrified, tight-lipped discretion, Rafe effortlessly slipped his hands into his pockets. He felt a faint, mocking amusement at their squeamishness; people were so desperately soft, always opting to look at the ceiling rather than acknowledge the ugly mechanics of domestic training. He was entirely purged of the animal heat from twenty minutes ago, his pulse already hovering at a cool, comfortable sixty beats per minute.

They stepped through the swinging double doors and into the bright, cavernous lobby, where the humid stench of synthetic butter hit them like a wall.

"Rafey," she whispered, her voice a raw, reedy rasp against his elbow as she squinted up at the glowing menu boards above the concession stand. "Can we... can we get the diary now? The one with the crystal gem thingies?"

Rafe didn't slow his stride, steering her toward the glass exit doors with a firm, implacable pressure against the small of her back. He looked down at her—at the lopped hair, the swollen face, the absolute, transactional submission radiating from her small frame—and felt a familiar, cold swell of satisfied ownership. She was so remarkably easy to break, and even easier to patch back together with cheap, shiny trinkets.

"If you stay in the car while I run my errands, Pup," he murmured smoothly, throwing his weight against the brass-rimmed push bars to let the suffocating, humid afternoon air swallow them whole. "I'll buy you two."

[corrodedbisexual]

The alchemy behind the sorcery

I got a lot of comments about that fake scene Steddie gifset and figured I might as well make a tutorial of it. Or at least a behind-the-scenes explanation of what I did because a tutorial requires an actual technical understanding of everything whereas half of my coloring process is usually throwing layers at the picture to see what sticks. Still maybe it will be helpful to gif makers trying to bring together differently colored source material to make it look like it's the same scene. It's doable. Anyways here we go.

So this is the uncolored base. Blue and orange are literally opposites of the color wheel. We're off to a fantastic hair-pulling start. There's no way this can work, right? Maybe just make it all black&white. Nah, too easy, we're here to SUFFER and ENJOY IT.

Step one. I've already preached about Divide before. It's amazing. Use it. Find the shade that is your worst offender you need to get rid of, just by using eyedropper somewhere on the lighter parts of the image. Fill a blank layer, set to Divide. Fiddle with hue/saturation/brightness of it until you get something that doesn't overdarken or overbrighten the image, just removes that intense color filter.

Step two. Standard Exposure & Levels correction. +0.36 exposure used on Eddie bc he's darker, none on Steve, the Levels are like this.

Step three. Fun with Curves begins. You can technically do everything in a single Curves layer but I like to use one just to brighten things up and leave it so I don't mess it up and create a second one for more radical color changes.

Second Curves layer. The goal is for the image colors to meet somewhere in the middle. So Eddie needs less blues and more reds, Steve the other way around, more blues, less reds and greens.

Have both images open side by side on your screen and work in small increments of change on them in turn so you can save the result often.

Proper techniques to using Curves actually exist. I've read the tutorials and proceeded to never use them, I just poke and prod at the graph until "ooooh this looks nice". Sorry if this is unhelpful but it's kinda more like art in fine-tuning the colors.

There we go. Already better. The colors look mostly normal, it's a neutral base now, time to just make them match.

I still didn't like the blues/cyans being so bright on Eddie's background so I just desaturated both by about the same amount.

Channel Mixer for Steve. I very vaguely understand how it works, don't even ask, but I needed to bring a bit more red to Steve's face bc it still looked green-ish and this is how I usually solve that problem. (Why am I even making a tutorial? I am not qualified for this, I'm just vibing 80% of the time.)

Selective Color is useful in all kinds of ways but one thing I always use for giffing is adding like 2-3% more black to blacks. It just makes those darkest tones pop without darkening anything else and the end result is more crisp.

Biggest issue with Steve was the too light background, so I had to paint some darkness around him. Low brush hardness so it blends nicely, it's fine if it overlaps with the character, if there isn't too much movement at low opacity it won't be noticeable, but if he was moving around it would be much more difficult (I'd have to adjust the position of it frame by frame).

Eddie still needed a slight shift from blue to green hues and slapping on a beige Soft Light layer at very low opacity was the quickest solution.

Last step! Color Burn. If it wasn't obvious already I love my single-color fill layers and blending modes. Highly recommend playing with them and seeing what they all do because they slap.

Very light shades, mostly on Steve (blue) to really darken those shadows further and make it look like the Upside Down, and then just a tiny bit of green on Eddie bc it made the background tones match better.

Aaaand that's a wrap. Usual sharpening etc. on top (I always have all the layers in a smart object so that's super quick) and we're done.

[agathah]

Do you have any speedpaints or info on what app/brushes you use? I love your style and would love to study it! (Also to prove I’m not like, a scammer or something, here’s some of the work I’ve tried to do when studying your style and other artists as well!) I’m mostly just looking for rendering/shading techniques. Best wishes!

Hii! Thank you for showing me your work, you've got some pretty nice stuff!

I'll give you a summary on the program/brushes and a timelapse of my latest drawing.

The program I use is Krita, which is a completely free and professional program. It looks scary and tricky when you first open it, that's why most people give up before actually understanding the basic tools. But I promise it's not difficult, and you can do everything other payed programs offer.

About the brushes: this may be surprising (or not) but I use pretty basic and simple brushes. I'm a believer that no good brush can fix lack of technique, and this is self criticism haha so if I want a certain effect, I tend to replicate it manually with basic brushes. I'm not saying I don't ever use different brushes tho, I just focus on three main ones, and I'm gonna show you:

This first one I mostly use for sketching, because it's not as sharp and it helps me create stains and shapes.

This second one is basically a hard version of the first, and I use it to both add the base colors and render them.

And the third one is the game changer. It's a blender, and it helps giving a textured oil painting effect. I use two versions of it, the first simulates brush strokes and the one beside it is perfect for soft rendering, it makes everything looks ethereal and smooth. They're both from Rad_pack, and it's probably the best brush pack I've ever got.

Also, you may notice that I love giving my drawings a traditional painting look, and most of the times I use some brushes from the packs: Memileo Impasto Brushes and ML Oil Paint Brush v1.1

And these are all the packs I have downloaded. Some of them are the standard from Krita. I don't use all of them, but they're all awesome.

And lastly, a timelapse/speedpaint! I have more timelapses on my instagram, but if you guys want me to start posting timelapses here too, just let me know

Anyway, hope this was helpful! 😁

[purblind-dragon]

Oil on linen panel, 15x12in (38x30cm)

Still trying to get the hang of this oil painting stuff. Some say watercolor is harder, but having done both, idk, I find oil to be next-level. Different paints drying at different rates. Some colors drying glossy, others matte (and does one "oil out" or not if that happens?). Fat over lean. Mediums, solvents, what primer to use for your surface. Color mixing: I got away in watercolor with layering individual colors to get the hues and values I wanted, but in oil you can't do this; you have to mix everything bang on from the start.

The hardest part, imo, is that you can't hide your brushwork. OK, well, you can: you can blend everything out or paint with the tiniest brush known to man and achieve a hyperrealistic look, but I was going for a kind of brushy, John Singer Sargent-like look, which turns out to involve laying each brushstroke down over paint that is still wet (working "wet-in-wet" as painters call it) and not correcting the stroke afterwards.

Detail of facial area showing brushwork.

At most, you can soften some edges (going over the mark gently with a clean brush), and knowing which edges to do that for and which to leave alone is Its Own Thing. (Edge control is one of the biggest things separating really good from not-so-good realist work: the latter tends to leave everything sharp or to over-soften everything.) Trying to do more than that, however, will unavoidably make things worse, so if you get the stroke wrong, you have to scrape off what you did and try again. And when you're working into paint that's still wet, you have to know exactly how much paint to put on your brush, and what angle to hold your brush at when applying the next layer: otherwise it just won't take.

Now I understand why even a genius like Sargent spent four years training under the best portrait painter in Paris to master this style.

****

Process pics + yapping:

STAGE ONE. The outlines of the head were roughly sketched in charcoal, then an abstract background was laid in using terre verte (a green natural earth pigment, the light green color) and viridian mixed with a touch of transparent red oxide (the dark green color), applied with a large flat brush. The background was done first to aid in accurate judging of the tones and values of the face, which is difficult to near impossible on a white canvas.

Some artists will paint a light wash of color over the entire canvas to begin, also in order to make the judging of colors/values easier. But since I was aiming to do this work alla prima, painting fresh layers on top of still-wet paint, I didn't want to contend with layering warm flesh tones over green. (An old Italian technique called verdaccio exists where an artist paints a portrait entirely in shades of green, establishing the correct values or contrasts between light and dark, before painting over the image in its final colors. This is supposed to lend the flesh tones greater vibrancy, especially if bits of the underpainting are left to show through. However, these artists would always have allowed the green underpainting to dry thoroughly before proceeding.)

STAGE TWO. A base of flesh pink (venetian red tinted with lead white) was laid over part of the face. The eye and nose area were then defined, and the tonality of other areas of skin varied with pinks, reds, and yellows.

A lot of portraitists would have done a first pass over all the major features, instead of completely finishing one area before moving on to the next. I have always found it natural to do the latter and to start with the eye region specifically: it serves as an anchor for the rest of the face, and if done properly, there will instantly be life, a human presence, in the canvas. That's a shot of confidence and a great source of motivation to continue.

STAGE THREE. When painting a subject with facial hair, as a rule, I first layer other colors underneath the area bordering on or to be covered by hair. Where Novak's hair is showing under his cap, too, I painted flesh tones beyond where the hairline would have begun. If I were to try to guess exactly where the skin ended and the hair began and painted up to there, I would get a hard boundary or even a tiny gap of white between skin and hair, which looks bad. Even in thick facial hair you can also have slivers of skin (or some other color) showing through: so layering is a must.

Note the red on the jawline: in the source photo, there was a strong reflection of red/orange light from the shirt Novak was wearing. After the hair is layered in, the secondary lighting will look natural.

STAGE FOUR. The facial hair was laid in over the mouth, chin and jawline. The hair in front of the ear and at the back of the head was painted, and the form of the neck at the nape further modeled with shading.

STAGE FIVE. The cap and shirt were painted. At this point, with all areas of the canvas worked to more or less a finished state (only the ear remained to be done), some flaws in the face and neck became noticeable. Some were small details, but the biggest issue was that the face and neck were too pale compared to the source photo, especially after the very intense orange/red of the shirt was incorporated.

Fortunately, I determined that repainting the whole face/neck would not be necessary. I did repaint the neck, because there were a couple of spots of wrong-colored facial hair that needed to be eliminated, but on the face I darkened the nose, eye socket, and cheek area, and that was enough to get the whole thing looking half a notch darker.

This took 14 hours over two days; I was hoping to finish it in one day (to paint alla prima is literally to "do it in one go"), but some areas, the cap and the shirt particularly, really threw me for a loop. (They look drop dead simple, but they're not! Or rather, painting something so simple-looking, and having the result look simple-looking, is anything but simple ... at least for an oil noob like me.)

But it's OK, I'm improving! My first head took four days, my second one (the one before this one) three ... so I guess my next one ought to be one day's work??

📸 @purblind-dragon | IW 2026 first Thursday practice | Sony RX10-IV