Valentine’s Day is for idiots.
Or more precisely, it’s a lot more work than it should be if you’re an idiot. I always take on too many commissions at this time of year, wanting to help women feel beautiful and my bank account feel fatter after whatever terrible things I did to it over the holidays.
I won’t regret the trip to Tahiti, though. Skinny-dipping in waters the color of joy was absolutely worth it.
I push back on my chair in the glass-encased sunroom that serves as my studio, rolling over to the easel I use as a pin-up board. Lori is lovely, even if she doesn’t quite know it yet. She’s got curves she probably thinks are overly abundant, but there’s a reason artists through the centuries have painted and drawn and sculpted well-endowed women. My charcoals love curves.
It would be easy to make hers generic, flowing and attractive and interchangeable with a dozen other sexy naked ladies. But I don’t do this to be generic. When Lori looks at this, I want her to see herself. Unmistakably and undeniably. There’s far too much denial in the world already, and a whole lot of it comes from curvy women of a certain age.
I tilt my head, surveying the pictures she sent me one more time. There’s one that keeps pulling my eye. It isn’t the best photo. She’s blurry and off center, caught in the act of slipping out of the silk robe she’s wearing in several of the other images she sent. They’re classy, carefully sexy and discreet, just like she’s hoping my drawing of her will be.
I could kiss the photographer for taking it, and Lori for sending it. Her inner self knows the single, blurry moment of embarrassed daring caught something real.
I study the image more closely. Without touching. I’ve already been playing with my charcoals for an hour, and not the pencils that keep my fingers at least a little bit clean. Lori needs the dirty kind, the ones where my hands feel deep into who she is and come out looking like they belong to a miner.
They’re not quite miner-dirty yet, but it won’t take much longer.
I take a swig from my water bottle, which is well used to being covered in black fingerprints. I put mint in the water this morning, an act of rebellion against the blah-gray rainy skies outside. I love where I live, but I admit to a little bit of yearning for the warm turquoise waters of Tahiti, especially as the calendar turns to February.
Which is as it should be. My art is better when I yearn a little.
I swing back to my drawing paper, mind decided. Lori might think she wants a portrait of herself in a silk robe, revealing little bits of sexy—something nice and safe to show her friends after a glass of wine or two—but that’s not what my charcoals think, and they get to be the boss. If she hates it, I’ll refund her money.
I’ve had to do that exactly twice in the thirteen years I’ve been doing this. My charcoals are smart cookies.
I turn my head and sniff, but all I smell is the distinctive dust of my work. No elves have mysteriously snuck into my studio and left cookies for me to nibble on. Probably because they think it isn’t healthy to eat cookies with charcoal fingerprints on them. Which is a sad state of affairs. I’ll go scrounging later. Someone always takes pity on a poor starving artist and feeds me. Maybe I’ll stop by Bee’s house and pick up an installment payment on the portrait I did for her last summer. Most clients pay me in actual money, but a year’s worth of fried chicken was a way better deal, particularly when Bee is the kind of model I would happily draw for free. She’s short, stout, and almost as sexy as her fried chicken.
I grin and start laying down some of the starting lines and shading for Lori. I move quickly, a speed drawing, almost. I want to catch the blur of that moment where movement teased aside the silk of who she wants to look like and let me see who she actually is. Or who she might be if she lets herself get brave enough, which is the whole point of the portraits I do for Beautiful Lines. I’m not a modest artist. I want people to look at what I do and let it change how they see themselves.
Lori’s a good candidate. Two years out of a messy divorce and landed in with a couple of besties who convinced her to do this. I’m hoping one of them was on the other end of the camera lens. Someone who knows enough to capture that kind of truth is a good friend to have.
I smile at the paper in front of me. I can see her now, the bare bones at least, and that’s all I’m doing for this morning. I’ll do a second session after lunch and cookies and dropping off some more cardstock for Xander, because apparently there are actual tourists buying things in February, and he’s run out of everything Daley Handmade and even sold two of my sketches, which is pretty fancy.
I don’t price them cheap. Sexy should never be sold for less than it’s worth.