Releasing on January 17th
The Prince and the Painter Part 1
Emily Carrington
Jason stared helplessly at a blank piece of paper after the teacher was done explaining their first lesson in androgyny. This class is too advanced for me. He could draw stick people. Hell, he could draw graphs full of figures and parabolas. He could even draw the mathematically correct plans for a simple architectural structure. But this… Forms and lines, shading and curves… He was lost.
Thank God it was only the first week of classes and he could quit this one and find another.
In the meantime, he was caught by the androgynous wo/man reclining on the block in the center of the room. Aaron — or Erin — wouldn’t be his first crush on a not-quite-male-or-female person, and surely s/he wouldn’t be the last. There was something beautiful, artful about an androgynous human being. In a way that had nothing to do with the androgyny of buildings and animals, people who could be either male or female, or maybe some alternative to these two opposites, were simply nature’s gift to the world.
Jason concentrated on one of the model’s eyes and drew that. The shape wasn’t exactly circular, but starting from a geometrically perfect arc helped him keep the basic curve. He made the pupil and iris before drawing the outside. It was far from perfect, but he thought he’d caught the slight upturn at the corner that seemed to reflect the model’s smile.
When Jason sat back, he realized he was sweating. Shaking his hair out of his eyes, he looked at his picture. It didn’t look exactly like the eye before him, but it did at least look like someone’s eye. Then he glanced at the clock and saw thirty minutes had passed. How was he possibly going to finish the rest of the drawing?
He cursed under his breath. That single eye took up most of the top half of the page.
On the platform, the model adjusted position, leaning on elbows that looked near as pointy as a protractor’s needle. In fact, all of the model’s features — face, arms, legs, chest — were narrow. They had a chin like a triangle and cheekbones like two half circles. That doesn’t sound flattering at all, but damn if s/he doesn’t look hot with those features.
Giving up on squeezing the rest of a face onto the first sheet, Jason put this one at the bottom of his stack. Then he tried drawing the angle of the elbow on the block and the shadow under it.
