Chapter 266

When Mimi and I finished up in the art store we headed back to the Ruby Vixen and spent the rest of the day with Bella drawing on the roof. It was interesting to see how different their tastes in art were. Bella was most intrigued by color and gravitated to the colored chalk we had purchased, while Mimi was much more invested in the technical drawing skills I used for cartography. It was nice to spend some time with both of them while working on our new mutual hobby. I had invited Morrigan and Torien as well, but both of them were still busy training their new succubus powers. Understandable.

I looked over some of the drawing exercises I had given Mimi to practice. Her skill with perspective drawing and rotating forms was a bit frustratingly good. I couldn't help but be a little jealous. She had a strong intuitive sense of three-dimensional space and didn't have any trouble at all with some of the most technical parts of drawing. Her issues had more to do with fine motor control, an honestly much easier problem to fix. Mimi had an excellent memory, something approaching photographic even, but that only seemed to frustrate her more when she struggled to draw the lines as neatly or as straight as they appeared in her mind's eye.

Snap! Mimi pouted while looking down at the quill she had snapped in half, the third one since we had started. She glanced at Bella. "Why can't I practice with the chalk?" she asked.

I patted her shoulder. "Because doing it in ink is harder. It doesn't need to be perfect, Mimi. You're already improving."

She sulked. "But you said that the clockworks need high amounts of accuracy. This is taking forever."

I laughed. "Mimi, no one learns to draw in a day. I'm actually really impressed with where you are already. Your lines aren't too straight yet, but that will improve with time. Your grasp of form is so good that it more than makes up for it. I suspect you may already be better at that than I am..." I admitted.

"You don't get to complain, Mimi! Mine looks way worse than anything you're doing!" Bella said with a huff. She had gotten quite frustrated too. I think she bottled it up last time when we compared the two landscapes we drew together, but this time she was trying to compete with Mimi as well, which was frankly unfair.

"Why are all these pens so fragile?..." she said before sticking the broken quill in her mouth and swallowing it. The sight was a bit creepy even if I knew it wouldn't hurt her.

"I think it's good practice for you, Mimi. You probably need to learn how to better control your strength if you keep breaking those quills..." I told her.

Mimi didn't respond, her ears just wilted on her head.

I clapped. "I think we need a change of pace. Let's do something different for a while. How about this, Mimi, why don't you draw something for us... like that bird over there! Visualize the form but only draw the silhouette if you can."

Mimi frowned but she pulled out another quill and began to draw on a fresh sheet of paper.

I then turned to Bella. "Alright, when she finishes that, I want you to color it using your chalk. For now, just observe the bird and try to imagine the colors you want to break it into. For now, just pay attention to the light and the shadows and how that affects the color."

"Okay..." Bella responded glumly before staring at the bird on the nearby roof. Luckily for us, the bird was mostly standing still, just looking down at the people below on the street.

"Will the chalk show up on the paper okay?" Bella asked.

"It's not ideal but the paper is a bit more tan than white, so it should show up well enough," I replied.

I looked over at Mimi, who was very focused on her task. She had already stopped looking at the bird and was primarily focused on the edges of her linework.

"Simplify it, Mimi. It doesn't need to be an exact copy. Try to get the shape of it using larger sweeping lines. Don't fixate on the details."

"But..." Mimi was conflicted but quickly gave up and started focusing on the longest lines of the image rather than the small, minute details. It gave the drawing a fascinating look though. I could see that the more intricate linework in one spot accidentally created a lot of contrast in the initial part of her drawing, which happened to be right where the head was, thankfully. It was an accident that would improve the image. When she finished she handed the paper to me.

I looked down at it carefully. "We need to let this dry a little. This paper isn't bad for ink, but we don't want it to smear when Bella gets started."

"You really want me to draw over Mimi's drawing? I don't want to mess it up..." Bella said hesitantly.

"Mimi, how do you feel about this drawing?" I asked.

"I don't like it," Mimi replied, verging on annoyed.

I laughed and turned to Bella. "See, she doesn't like it anyway. Just try and give it a shot. Let her lines help guide your colors."

When I was pretty sure the ink was dry, I placed the sheet of paper in front of Bella. "Remember, this is chalk. You can blend the colors a little but you can't really put the chalk down in coats. Start with the darkest colors and work your way up. It should be easier to blend the lighter colors if you put them on top."

"Okay, I'll try." Bella glanced at Mimi before taking a breath and working on the shadows of the image first. While Bella wasn't quite as intuitively gifted at drawing, she did have a good sense of color and what looked nice together. I didn't need to spend a ton of time explaining color theory to her. She seemed to have a good grasp of the idea of it already. It was helpful because Mimi has trouble distinguishing values from each other. It made me wonder if this was an experience thing or if she literally couldn't see the difference between some shades because of a difference in her vision. I decided not to delve down that rabbit hole for now but it bears some experimentation later.

As Bella worked, Mimi became more interested in the drawing and a lot of her pent-up frustration eased. Bella's application of the chalk was a bit messy, but next to Mimi's clear black outline, it gave the image a pretty interesting contrast. Bella had chosen pastel colors which made the shadows more muted, but it gave the drawing a light, airy feel to it. Once she had put down the primary colors, she switched to a brush to mix them. You couldn't go crazy with blending using chalk but you could still get some interesting looking stuff from it. Bella and I had continued to draw together occasionally since I first bought the chalk for the two of us, so Bella had an idea of what she was trying to do.

Eventually Bella finished and pushed it over to Mimi to look at. Mimi's eyes had gone wide and she was intently staring at the drawing. It was a little cute to see her so fascinated by it. The mixture of mediums gave the drawing an intriguing look. Most of the pose had been decided by Mimi and whether on purpose or by accident, the bird ended up in a very regal pose. Bella's color choice made the drawing come alive and contrasted well with how flat the pose may have looked otherwise. Bella wasn't confident in drawing so she left the details simple. Most of the image was expressed in simple light and shadow. There are parts where both of the two could improve, but I think the drawing came out well, especially since neither of them had tried to do something like this before. The final result looked like more than the sum of its parts.

Mimi just continued to stare at it in silence for almost an entire minute before Bella decided to hesitantly ask her about it.

"So... Do you like it?" She asked.

Mimi blinked and looked up from it with a huge smile. "I love it... I didn't think my ugly lines could turn into something so pretty... Thank you, Bella."

Bella smiled and sighed in relief. "I don't think your lines are ugly. I know they're not as good as you want them to be yet, but I thought they were great."

"Now it's time for the most important part! Signing your names," I said.

Mimi dipped her pen in ink and carefully wrote out her name near the corner. It was the first time I had seen her attempt to write in ink since we found out she was overthinking her reading and writing, but after her drawing practice her lines were neat, if a little basic. She didn't have much of a signature yet. I'll talk about that with her later. Bella followed up but decided to sign her name in the chalk, which made it clear who was responsible for each part.

"Now what?" Mimi asked me.

I smiled. "That's it, but I can do one more thing if you'd like. I can use some ritual magic that will protect the picture from smudging over time. You'll still need to treat the image carefully, but you won't have to worry about anything rubbing it away."

"Okay! Do it!" Mimi said enthusiastically.

"Alright, give me a second." I began to cast some magic I had been working on for a while. I hadn't been able to find any proper fixative for charcoal anywhere and that's what most of my art had been done in so far. After drawing that image for Morrigan and Torien in ink, I've been working on something that could protect any art I draw using mediums that are more prone to being smudged away, like charcoal and chalk. I had tested it on some of my other work, so I was confident that it could be used here.

A thin sheet of magic spread from my fingers over the drawing. I carefully applied a perfectly clear waxy substance that would dry and harden into something somewhat like lamination. I had no idea where the people had found a dungeon with something like this in it, but after a lot of tweaking and experiments, I had been able to come up with this ritual magic. I'm sure people might argue that my time could have been better spent doing something more worthwhile, but preserving artwork like this was important to me. The waxy substance quickly hardened like a clear resin and the magic settled enough for it to be 'dry,' so to speak. I ran my finger over one edge of the drawing to test it, and it felt perfectly smooth as it should be.

"There, finished," I said, presenting the paper to Mimi.

"I love it... It's beautiful." Mimi smiled and turned to Bella. "This was something we made together..."

Bella stood up and wiped the chalk from her fingers with a towel before coming over to give Mimi a hug. The two of them working together on something like this turned out to be a lot more meaningful to Mimi than I had expected. I thought it would be a fun way to take advantage of each other's strengths, but I was caught off guard by how touched Mimi ended up feeling from this. She certainly had some uncommon weak spots.

I considered looking for a frame to protect their first collaborative drawing, but I don't think those exist here yet. Frames probably existed, but likely not the kind that had glass to protect their art. I just had to hope that Mimi's spatial magic and the 'lamination? fixative?' ritual would keep the picture safe.

"You hold onto it, Mimi. Make sure to keep it safe when you're not looking at it," I told her.

She nodded. "I will! I'll treasure it!"

I patted Mimi on the shoulder. "You'll get better as you practice your technical drawing. It'll just take a little time. You're already learning really quickly. In the meantime, you should do more work like this, either on your own or with Bella. Doing little projects like this will keep you interested in drawing. Maybe you should even show Bella a thing or two?"

"Sure! Let's do more stuff like this together, Bella!"

Bella giggled. "Sure, dear. I had fun doing it. It was a bit stressful though... I didn't want to mess up your lines."

Mimi looked away from Bella's face and stared at the picture again. "I can't believe you turned something I didn't like at all into something so pretty. Even if I did like them, I think I would still like this more because we worked together on it." Mimi shook her head. "We should do more stuff like this. Even if you could mess up my lines, it would be worth it to try."

"Okay, let's work on art together again sometime... Lilith might need to show me how to do that preservation ritual though. I don't know her light scribing spell, so I'm a little scared to see how intricate the actual ritual circle is."

I scratched the base of my horn. "I think I can figure something out. But for now, let's go back inside. The sun's going down."