A Year on Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [82]
“How do you do that?”
She glanced up at him. “Do what?”
He jerked his head toward the pasture fence, where the deer was now plucking leaves off a scrubby vine. “You’re drawing him under the apple tree. He ain’t there anymore. But your picture looks just like he did when he was.”
“Oh.” It occurred to Lindsay that all of the sketches she had seen in Noah’s book had been of still objects—even the border collie, which had been drawn in profile on the hill overlooking the meadow. He drew what he saw, as most beginning artists did. His question showed insight and ambition, and she felt a smile of excitement start deep inside her—which she did not dare show, of course.
“When you’re drawing something that you can’t pose,” she explained without looking up from the careful shading she was working on around the deer’s eye, “something that you know is going to change or move, like an animal or a sunset or something like that, you make markers for positioning as quickly as you can. For the deer, I drew circles to indicate where his head was in relationship to his neck and where his eyes were on his head and where his hooves were and how long his body was before he moved. That way I made sure I had the proportions right. For everything else, you just kind of . . .” She shrugged. “Hold a picture of it in your head.”
He grunted. “Where’d you learn that?”
She replied very casually, and without looking up, “Art school.”
“You went to art school?”
Was that respect or skepticism she heard in his voice? She dared not turn around to find out. Instead, she picked up a stylus and carefully flicked several layers of charcoal from a point where iris met pupil on the deer’s eye, revealing a white spark of light underneath. “I did,” she replied.
“What’s that thing?”
She held the instrument up for him to examine, but he did not take it. “It’s called a stylus. You can use it to make marks or indentations in the paper for texture, or to remove color like I just did. See how that little spark of white makes his eyes look alive? Sometimes what you take away is more important than what you put in.” And when he gave nothing but a grunt in reply, she added, “Something else I learned in art school.”
He scooped up a handful of slivered wood kindling and tossed it into the wheelbarrow. “So how come I never seen you drawing before?”
She almost gave him the easy answer about how busy she was, how hard it was to keep up an old house like this, how few hours there were in the day, and how, after all, her studio wasn’t even ready to move into yet. Instead she put down her pencil and turned to look at him, squinting a little in the sun.
“I guess I was scared,” she said. And though he didn’t stop his work, he moved a little more slowly and made less clatter tossing the kindling into the wheelbarrow. There was about his shoulders an attitude of acute listening. “You see, all my life I’ve dreamed of being a working artist. One of the reasons we bought this house was so that I would have a place for a studio, and I could work at my art full-time. But . . . I don’t know, maybe this is something only an old person can understand, but sometimes you’re better off dreaming about something than actually doing it. What if no one wants to buy my paintings? What if nobody even wants to take art lessons from me? What if I’m not good enough?”
She shrugged, trying not to show the embarrassment she was beginning to feel. “It’s a lot easier not to try, than to try and fail, you know?”
He looked at her for a moment, eyes narrowed, and she thought that he did know, very well. He said, “This is the last load on your wood. You got my pay?”
“In the house.” She stood up, packing away the pencils and sketch pad, and he turned to push the wheelbarrow toward the shed. Then she had an idea.
“Hey,” she said.
He looked back.
“I’ve got a deal for you,” she said. “You finish raking the flower beds for me, and you can have this pencil set. I’ll throw in the sketch pad, too. It’s almost new.”
He looked from her to the two items in her hand, his eyes narrowed—though she