012 Insanity

...the patient in question was admitted for post-traumatic stress and a family history of schizoid behaviors...

For the 100 Themes Challenge, the first prompt I selected deliberately. I always knew that when I got to this one, I would be rendering one of the Liddells, as all of them have some sort of disorder. That being said, I went with Alistair III specifically because of an incident that occurred over this past weekend, since he is the character I most personally relate to. Without getting into too many details (since I am recovering and somewhat stable at the moment) I had a very, very bad anxiety attack and severe mental breakdown that lasted a few days, and working on this render, expressing how I felt through the character's image, helped me regain some of my own sanity. That's the reason I made this wallpaper-sized; it's my current backdrop.

Lighting was fun for this, though I did get some artifacts in the initial render. More fun, however, are the mirror shards in this scene; I don't mind that you can't see most of them. The ones that are visible add a nice fractured effect, which is exactly what it feels like when I'm stuck in one of my panic loops (a trait I gave to Alistair III as a character). It also works well with him in particular, as his magical fallout, when he gets upset, tends to make glass and other fragile objects shatter. I had to do a little post-work to clean up the artifacts and fix an awkward shadow edge, but otherwise this is the render as is.

Set up in DAZ|Studio and rendered in LuxRender via Reality. Minor postwork in Photoshop (artifact removal and shadow clean up).

More Faeborn related art here.