Chapter Text
Dave Strider is so over being short.
It's not that he's insecure. Striders don't get hung up on shit like that. He's never going to be able to change it, so he accepts it.
But when he can't even see over the easel provided for him in this shitty workshop, how the hell is he supposed to get anything done?
At first he had blanched at the idea of going to a public class for basic figure drawing. Surely he could have called any dame in his phonebook and had a model in five minutes, in the privacy of his tiny messy apartment. He could have drawn the way the empty chip bags crumpled under her bony knees, or the drape of a dirty shirt across her thigh. Yeah, real classy.
So now he's here, the ad for the class stuffed in his back pocket, tools out and ready to go, and he can't see the damn model. Of course he could just peek around the side of the easel, or ask for a different pad (he normally sketches on his lap anyway, it's just comfortable), but everyone else has got tall easels, and he's not gonna be a prick about it.
Looking around the room for maybe a taller stool or something, he settles on dragging his setup back a few feet and perching on the edge of a tallish table in the back of the room. Well, now he can see, but there's nowhere to prop his feet. Ugh. If his legs start swinging of their own accord while he's distracted he's gonna look like a kid. He's twenty-six, goddammit.
Finally ready, Dave looks over the top of the easel and gets a look at the model. Woah the guy is huge. Not like a no-neck bruiser sort, but pretty cut. The angles of the muscles in his chest cast their own thin little shadows, and his arms.... Dave feels the pull in his brain telling him to translate what he's seeing into something he can touch. Normally he wouldn't go for a literal translation, but he's kind of excited to see if he can capture all the lines that make up this guy's body. He's turned half-away, so faces aren't an issue yet. He's going to have to learn how do draw faces at some point if he wants to do this right. But for now he ignores the guy's head and it's five minutes at a time of hard muscle and spinal curves and hips disappearing into jeans.
After the class, Dave has a short stack of sketches that aren't half bad. It's an odd feeling, to be learning art all over again. It's not as if he's new to the idea, he's just always been more of an abstract kind of guy. But lately he's been itching for something different, and leaning more toward still-life and landscapes and, now, humans. Might as well have a full bag of tricks, right?
He decides he's going back to the class. It's held three times a week, and he'll be there every one of those days. But next time he's bringing his own damn pad.
***
Two days later and he's sitting on the floor in the front of the room, pad on his lap and ready to go. He's not sure if he's disappointed that the same guy is back to model again, because he does want some variety in his practice. Maybe he'll have to call up some girls after all.
This time he's not distracted by the equipment, so he watches and listens as the model takes off his shirt and chats with some guy a few feet away. Probably the coordinator of the workshop. While the muscle-bound guy is settling into position, Dave doodles the old man in his own style, overemphasising his curlicue moustache and pudgy hands.
This he knows. This he's used to. His own personal brand of shitty drawing feels so much more natural and he ends up doodling the model in his style for the first few poses as well. Then he switches tracks and starts really getting details in, seeing how accurate he can be. Starting with overall shape and working his way in to one feature per pose, trying his best to get the lighting and movement just right.
Halfway through the class the model takes his pants off, though he pouts a little at moustache man when he's asked to strip. Dave suddenly has so much more to focus on. He tries to capture the way the guy's shoulder blades stand out and the stretch of his neck when he leans his head back. One of the poses flaunts his ass and Dave can't help himself, he doodles it in his own style before trying it seriously. That one is gold.
The next pose is pretty simple: he sits cross-legged and leans forward to put his weight on his hands, pushing his shoulders together. Dave is more and more fascinated with the way his body moves and he dives right in, attempting to capture the way his clavicle folds itself into a v. It takes him a couple minutes of looking back and forth between his drawing and his subject to notice that the guy is looking at him, too.
Wow okay his eyes are really blue. And he wears glasses. Dave recognises the irony in the fact that he has been drawing this guy's body in intimate detail two days now and has hardly noticed anything about his face. He stops what he's doing with the collarbone and tries to sketch the tiny grin blue-eyes is aiming at him before time is up and he switches again. He can't quite get the chin right; he's gonna have to work on that.
Then he's facing to the side, and Dave ignores most of the body in order to get his profile. He's been doing deliberately shitty art for so long that he's totally intoxicated with the feeling of trapping something real on paper. Like a photograph, but made with his own hands.
***
Dave spends the weekend drawing real things. He fucks around with charcoal and pastels and ink, and his subjects range from roadkill to his own feet to the buildings he can see out his window. Of course he still needs a little abstraction in his life from time to time, he's not breaking up with his old stuff, he just needs a little more experience, really baby it's not you it's me.
Occasionally he'll look over his sketches from the workshop and pick apart details, making a list in his head of things he needs to focus on. Like faces. He has like two sketches of the guy's face. His noses suck so far. Google is amazing and he just types in "noses" in the image search and tries his luck with digital references. It's really not the same, but whatever. After an hour or so he's satisfied with his progress and he takes a nap.
Grocery shopping gets done and when he catches sight of his reflection in the glass door to the booze cooler he realises he could be using his own face for practice. Set up a mirror and do a self-portrait. Duh.
He ends up in the bathroom, resting the pad on the sink and trying not to spill the beer beside the faucet. It's a little difficult, because turning his face to any angle just makes it harder to see, and moving to look at the pad makes it impossible to find the same angle again. So he just looks as straight forward as he can, and memorises things before he looks down to draw them. It works about as well as the digital shit.
Giving up on drawing until the next workshop, he finishes the beer and grabs another, flipping through commercials and reality shows until it's late enough to sleep.