Color - Atelier for two (Patreon)

Jess was always a very lonely girl. She lived in a small town of her life, away from the chaos and noise of the big city. Since childhood her only passion was art. She started painting in grammar school and for many years she refined her craft, dreaming of one day having an exhibition in one of the city’s many museums.

Unfortunately, one doesn’t go from practice to stardom in the art world. She grew, graduated from school, moved to the city, and started looking for a job, but there weren’t many places hiring a painter. Most art positions were for digital design, and so she began to learn the craft of digital art.

It immediately captivated her. She learned so many techniques that she couldn’t apply to paint on canvas. She first began making money by taking commissions for digital drawings. She became well known in online art communities. 

But something was missing. While you could create just about anything in a digital space, you didn’t feel the sensation of a brush on canvas. You couldn’t play with the way the paint smeared and dried. It just felt… somehow sterile.

And even then she felt unsatisfied. Any time she painted on canvas, she missed how much she could experiment in digital space. Any time she used her tablet, she missed getting messy with paint and brushes. She switched back and forth from one art style to the other, always feeling somewhat unsatisfied. That is until she turned 23 when her mutation changed her life forever.

It was an experience she would never forget. One day, when she got out of the shower, she started feeling an awful pain shoot through her body. Her vision blurred ad faded in and out. Her entire body shook and shivered. She felt nauseous as she staggered to her mirror, sweating. She felt her insides move and shift around. She moaned bringing her hands to her head. 

Then suddenly, CRRRACK, she felt her shoulders lurch forward. Her bones were moving, breaking, splitting underneath her skin. CRUUUUNCH, her shoulders continued to grow, her skin ripping as if some bizarre mitosis was taking place, slurping and reforming into a completely different set. She flexed her arms and could feel them rip and peel apart, splitting down to the elbow, and hand, and then every finger until she had two arms. 

But the ripping didn’t stop there. She felt, a strange sensation, like she was trapped inside her own skin. She pulled forward and pushed back at the same time, screaming. It felt like she was coming out of a cocoon, as her torso began to rip in half, pulling apart from itself. She felt another pair of breasts rip from her back. Her neck CRRRRACKED as it started to split from the bottom up, and one voice started to become two, are her head bulged in strange ways as it too started ripping apart, new eyes, ears, nose, and mouth forming and peeling apart into a new head. 

As Jess’s vision faded back in, she finally saw it. She saw herself, through new eyes, her second torso, second head, a whole second her that was still her! She felt over her new bodies, feeling the strange third breast on each one, catching her breath as she slowly became aware of her new mutant existence.

It was tough at  first. She had to special order her three cup bras, which was easily her largest clothing expense. She counted it as a small blessing that normal pants and shirts fit her two torsos and one set of hips. She didn’t really have to adjust to a new life like most mutants. She still had the one mind controlling  both torsos. She could eat the same things, sit the same ways, go to the same places without relearning how to walk or talk. It’s just that she felt like everyone was staring at her.

But any doubts she had about her mutation faded the second she sat down to draw. She sat at her workstation, her paints on one side, her tablet on the other, and without a second thought picked both up.

“It’s… it’s so simple…” she said when before she started laughing to herself. “it’s so simple! Just do both at once!” It felt so good, to envision a drawing, and form it through both the clean strokes of a digital interface and the rough organic tracks of a paint smear. Every time she would get an idea for a new creation she would make two, one digital, one physical. 

“I can’t believe how much this simplifies my life.” She said lying eyes on her first double work of art. “It looks like this mutation isn’t so bad after all… though I’m still now sure I have a use for these” she said looking at her extra breasts “…yet”