Art Project
3
Practice, Practice, Practice
THE DAY I WAS DREADING finally came. Professor Leitner called on me in Lib Arts seminar.
“Arthur, what are the principles of good communication?” he asked. I panicked. Be clear. Be concise. Leave room to respond. I had them written down somewhere in my sketchbook and if I could find them, I could read them to him, but my heart was beating in my throat.
“Professor Leitner, if I may…” Kendra started. She was sitting right beside me.
“No, Kendra. I understand your concern, but this one is not for you,” he said. “Take a deep breath, Arthur. I’m not a mean guy and I’m not trying to force you to say something that you can’t. Can you answer a yes or no question for me?”
“Yes,” I croaked.
“Very good! Arthur not only answered the question, but demonstrated the response,” he said. The class laughed. “Arthur, are you stupid?” The class gasped. I clenched my fists.
“No!” I almost shouted it.
“I didn’t think so. You see, class, we talked about three basic principles last week, but they are not all there is to good communication. A good piece of advice is not to make judgments based on partial information. Or, as an old proverb states, it is better to hold your tongue and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and prove it.” Kendra lowered her head and blushed furiously. “Are you willing to answer more yes or no questions, Arthur?” I could do this. I started to nod and then opened my mouth.
“Yes.”
“Great. Leonard, within the context of our school environment, please ask Arthur a question that he can answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’.”
“Me?” the kid squeaked. He sat over to my right. After the second week, Professor Leitner had rearranged the chairs so we sat in a semi-circle. I thought the expression on Leonard’s face must have been the same as mine when I was asked a question. Though he was heavier than me by quite a bit, he had that same panic on his face that I felt. I quickly sketched him as he struggled to come up with a suitable question. “What is your…” he started and then stopped himself. “That’s not yes or no. Um… Was this university your first choice in colleges to attend?” he got out.
“Yes,” I said. That wasn’t so bad.
“Florie. Your turn.”
“Oh. Um… Arthur, is… um… Kendra your girlfriend?” My eyes must have popped as wide open as I saw Kendra’s. Florie blushed.
“No,” I squeaked. I practically scribbled my sketch of her and wrote next to it, “My girlfriend?”
“Susan, I’d like you to ask a reasonable follow-up question to Florie’s. Remember, we are not attempting to embarrass anyone.”
Susan thought carefully for a minute and I sketched her biting her lip. Then I sketched her tummy. There was a gap of about eight inches where her shirt stopped and her pants began. She always dressed sexily.
“Art, one of our professors read a paper and rumor has it that you were the author. I’m going to ask a question directly from it. Is it true that you have two girlfriends?” Well, that was my own fault. I never thought Professor Denham would read that to other classes or that anyone would think it was me.
“Yes,” I whispered. She didn’t give the professor time to ask someone else.
“Do they know about each other?”
“Yes,” I said. Kendra giggled. “We live together.” Uh-oh. I wondered if I’d broken the rules. I said more than just yes or no. Prof Leitner didn’t mention it.
“Jonathan,” he said.
“Um… Do you have a sketch of everyone in this class in your book?”
I looked around and quickly leafed through the pages. I looked at him and quickly sketched his interested face before I answered.
“Yes, I do now,” the class laughed.
Everyone in the class got to ask me a question, and it wasn’t too bad. I hardly noticed that I was regularly adding a few words after my yes or no answer.
“Kendra,” Prof Leitner said. She was the last one.
“Arthur,” she almost whispered. Our classmates leaned forward. “Will you paint my portrait sometime?”
“I’d love to, Kendra,” I said.
“He was the star of class today,” Kendra said when we met Morgan and Annette for lunch. “I was so scared for you, Arthur. I know that had to be stressful and then when Prof Leitner shut me up, I was just plain embarrassed. I know I talk too much. I can’t help it! You really knocked it out of the park.”
“What happened?” Annette asked.
“He asked me questions,” I said.
“And you did okay?” Morgan said. She was practically squirming in her seat, she was so excited.
“Yeah.”
“It was really cool,” Kendra said. “After everyone in class had asked a yes or no question, Prof Leitner talked about the process of meeting a person on their own grounds as an effective means of communication. Even though everyone asked simple yes or no questions, Arthur’s answers evolved into whole sentences. When I asked my question, he didn’t even say yes or no.”
“Sure, I did,” I objected.
“No. You said, ‘I’d love to, Kendra.’ That made me feel like an absolute queen!”
“So, what is it that you’d love to do to Kendra?” Annette giggled. “Do we need a bigger bed?”
“No!” Kendra squeaked. She really did have a habit of blushing. Almost anything could cause it.
“Paint her,” I said. “Her portrait. Portrait of a Scary Girl.”
We all lost it and started laughing. I was beginning to breathe more easily now. School wasn’t quite as scary with a friend. I sometimes even talked to her. When she shut up.
My drawing class had progressed to where we were drawing things instead of shapes. The last assignment before the change was to draw a design that had no background. It’s harder than it sounds. We had to create black and white shapes in such a way that you couldn’t tell if the white was the foreground or the background. Then our first still life—just a vase without even any flowers in it—we had to draw without looking at the paper and without lifting our pencil. The instructor had us do it with each hand and then turned the vase upside down and made us do it again. We drew that damned vase all week, including drawing it upside down while we looked at it right side up. On Thursday, we were allowed to choose our own perspective and actually draw the vase as we saw it. All the drawings were good. Much better than at the beginning of the week.
“When you repeat an action over and over again, it is called practice. With perfect practice comes perfection. This is true of athletes and artists. A figure skater does not take the ice and leap into a triple axel without having practiced a simple Waltz jump from one foot to the other and building up the body’s memory of how a takeoff feels and how a landing feels. Each step is repeated again and again. The same is true of your art,” Dr. Robinson said as we hung our first of the week art and our end of the week art. There was a big difference.
“Repeated action, in the context of art, takes you further and further into the subject. There is a substance produced by the body called myelin. It is a white fatty substance that forms an insulating layer around the axon of some nerve cells. This layer is an insulation from surrounding electrical impulses that allows the connection from the thought to action to move much more rapidly and accurately. In other words, the more you practice each individual element of your art, the better you will become at it. Over the years ahead, you will do this with nature, drawing a single leaf in a landscape or the reflection of the moon in a teardrop. When you begin drawing life figures, you will fill pages with just fingers, chins, eyebrows, nipples, or what have you. Practice increases your talent.”
I guess lovemaking is like that, too. The first time Annette and I made love, we only really knew how the parts fit together and what we did to ourselves that felt good. Of course, it was exciting. Taking her clothes off was like opening a new box of paints or placing a fresh white canvas on the easel. Even thinking about it was enough to send shivers down my spine and directly into the base of my penis. And when we added Morgan to our loving bed, things became even more exciting. But like Dad told me, newness and excitement won’t carry us through the hard times. I started to notice little things as we made love more frequently.
And we practiced a lot!
I’m not a great lover, but I am observant. Ms. Clayborn said that was what made me a good artist. I observe things and remember. Like I noticed that when Annette and I are making out, there comes a point when I’m lightly sucking and tonguing her right nipple that she becomes desperate to have me inside her. If either Morgan or I happen to be playing with her clit or fingering her pussy at the time, the desperation is not so intense. But if we’ve just been making out and getting progressively more passionate and I dip my head to that nipple, Annette claws at me to pull me on top of her and into her. As soon as my cock opens the folds of her sex and she begins pulling at my hips to get me inside, she lets out a deep sigh like all her dreams have just come true. I was learning the exact correct time to lick her right nipple.
It was funny, but the left nipple didn’t have the same effect. She liked it, there was no question about that. When I bent to take her left nipple in my mouth, she cooed and held my head to her, petting my hair and pushing her breast to me. But she didn’t grab me and try to get me inside her right away if it was her left nipple I was paying attention to.
I wondered what there was about her right nipple that seemed to connect so directly to her pussy. Maybe it was the myelin that was built up through practice. I needed to investigate.
“May I draw you tonight, my Lady?” I asked. We’d been studying with Fay in the studio. I had my next Writing Roundtable paper drafted and was ready to do something creative.
“I have another fifty pages of this novel to read. Can I do it while you draw?”
“As long as your right breast is exposed.”
“You want to draw my right breast? Is there something wrong with the left?” she giggled.
“It’s a… uh… assignment. Sort of.”
“Can I sit in bed?”
“Perfect.”
“Hey, is there room for me? I like looking at my Lady’s right breast!” Fay said. We all headed for bed and, of course, exposing Annette’s right breast meant we all got naked. That was fine with me, but I was really going to focus on this. Annette sat in the middle, leaning against the headboard and Fay got on her left. That worked perfectly for me and I brought my sketchbook to start drawing.
I like looking at her breasts. I’m eighteen. I kind of like looking at any girl’s breasts, but especially Annette and Morgan. Annette held her book in her left hand and just reached across occasionally to turn the pages. Morgan had a book she was reading, too. I started out just looking at her breasts, my eyes flicking back and forth between them. I’d noticed a long time ago that they weren’t identical. Nobody’s are. But trying to consciously see the differences was a challenge.
There was a spot on the outer edge of her right nipple that was darker than the rest. I couldn’t see a matching spot on the other side. It wasn’t perfectly round. I started by just drawing the shape of that spot and shading it in. I shifted my head a little and drew it from a slightly different angle. I drew it a dozen times. It was just a little spot on the edge of her nipple, but by the time I was done, I knew its exact shape and color. I realized as I shifted positions that part of what created the unique shape was that her nipple was just a little flat on that edge. The left nipple was almost perfectly round.
A nipple isn’t a perfectly smooth protrusion from the areola. Annette’s nipples didn’t get as hard as Morgan’s, but they were always standing up. I’d never seen her when they were collapsed flush with the rest of her breast. There was a fine pattern of little grooves or wrinkles in the nipple. While I watched and drew, I saw the nipple swell a little and the wrinkles smooth slightly. They were always present, though. The pictures of her nipples that I drew were about ten times life size so I could see and capture the little grooves. And the little white bump. Just inside the bottom edge of the nipple, there was a tiny perfectly round dot that was the same color as her milky breast rather than the rosy brown of the rest of the nipple. As far as I could tell, except for the little flat spot on the outside edge, her nipple was otherwise perfectly round.
I shifted to the side a little and could see that the pattern of wrinkles was on the side of the nipple as well as the top. And the top wasn’t the same distance from her areola as the bottom. It stuck out a little farther at the bottom and sloped back at the top. As the nipple swelled a little, I could see the wrinkles expand like the bellows of a miniature accordion. I tried to capture the tautness at the bottom compared to the relaxation at the top. It was such a tiny thing and I was drawing it a couple inches across, trying to maintain the proportions exactly as an enlargement.
I tried to shift around so I could see the inside edge of her nipple without disturbing her reading. It was smoother and rounder than the outside edge with just a single sliver-moon shaped wrinkle where it joined the areola. This was so cool.
And speaking of the areola, it wasn’t perfectly smooth like the skin of her pretty breast that surrounded it. There were little wrinkles here, too, but they faded and smoothed farther from the nipple until they were completely gone where the darkness of the areola faded into the creamy skin of her breast. There was a definite edge to the areola, but it was defined as much by a ring of slightly raised bumps as by the change in color. In fact, that was the second irregular ring of bumps. There was another about halfway between the swell of the nipple and the outside edge of the areola. I had to count several times, but finally decided there were eleven of the little bumps.
I’d filled several pages of sketches of her nipple and areola when Annette put down her book. I’d noticed that she was breathing more deeply by the swell and relax of her breast. I thought at first that she might be falling asleep.
“Pen,” she whispered hoarsely, “make love to me. Please? I can feel your eyes on my nipple. Every time you shift and look at me with that intensity, there is a little jolt of electricity that goes straight from my nipple to my clit. Pen, please. I’ve made a wet spot on the bed. I need you in me. Please,” she begged.
I couldn’t resist my lover’s call as she slid down from her seated position and held out her arms. Fay had also set her book aside and kissed our lover’s shoulder as she stroked along her torso to her hip. I dropped my sketchbook and pencil and lowered my mouth to the beautiful breast I had been drawing. Annette stiffened and gasped, pulling at my rapidly stiffening cock to get me in position.
“Please. Please. Please,” she whimpered. She was, indeed, as wet as she’d professed and she pulled me easily inside her. She whined as I invaded her vagina and pulled my face to hers to kiss as she stiffened with an orgasm and called out. “Yes! Make love to me, Pen. Oh, my darling, fill me!”
I managed to keep most of my weight off her as I brought my left hand up to cup the object of my fascination and make the light little circular motions with the palm of my hand that she loved so much. Her pussy pulsed and grabbed at my cock as she cried out a second orgasm. I finally got my cock free enough that I could slide out and back in, feeling the constant rippling of her pussy coaxing me to my own climax.
“I love you, Annette. I love you, my Lady,” I whispered as I thrust into her repeatedly, losing myself to the sensations of her body joining with mine. This was it. I could not… would not hold back. The contractions began deep in my gut and I drove into her again as I felt the rush of my semen all the way from my balls to the tip of my cock. I felt it as it splashed back against me from her cervix. I felt it as we kissed, and cried, and moaned.
Perhaps, with practice, we would get it perfect.
“In the words of that old movie, ‘I’ll have what she had’,” Morgan laughed as we finally settled down and our breathing came in gulps of air. “What got into you?”
“Our lover,” Annette cried. “Oh, Fay, I don’t know how to describe it. I was reading, enjoying being close to you and feeling your skin against mine. And then I looked at him. He was studying my breast. I’ve never been looked at so intently. When I saw how fascinated he was with my little nipple, it was like sparks were flying between it and his eyes. I could feel them. And each one sent a jolt straight up inside me. Not just my clit, Fay… in me! I could feel it building in my ovaries and flowing with so much liquid into my vagina that I soaked the bed. It was so beautiful, I had to have him in me. I had to.”
Tears continued to stream from our beautiful lover’s eyes. And mine, I guess. I had to kiss her nipple again and her pussy clamped down so tightly that it forced my softening cock out of her with a sploosh of our mixed fluids.
“Well, if it wasn’t soaked before, it certainly is now,” Fay said. Annette started giggling through her tears. She kissed Fay and for a long time I simply looked down on my lovers with all the love in my heart pouring out over them.
Of course, we couldn’t leave Morgan unsatisfied. We rolled her between us and began the attentions together that we knew would bring her to a peak.
“Oooh! It’s wet!” Fay cried as she hit the spot where Annette had soaked the sheets.
“There’s no sense changing them until you’ve added your contribution,” Annette laughed. Fay didn’t last in that position for long, though. She pushed me onto my back and mounted me. I wondered where this renewed erection had come from. I was certain that after what Annette had done to me, I would be finished for the night, but Fay had no difficulty posting on me to two strong orgasms of her own before I thrust up in her and emptied myself again to her accompanying moans.
“You two were so hot… so intense… I know I had at least one orgasm while I watched you,” Fay said. “Maybe it was all just one long one. Tomorrow, my love, you have to draw me. Please?”
There was no question. Of course I would!
I couldn’t leave well enough alone, as Dad would say. It wasn’t enough that I spent half an hour examining and drawing Annette’s right nipple. When I woke up in the morning, I had to paint it. I’d dreamt about it all night, filling my mouth, centered in the palm of my hand, glanced at from across the room.
It wasn’t a terribly large canvas, just a 12x16 Arches watercolor block. I wasn’t really preparing this for an art exhibition. I didn’t think. I chose watercolors and didn’t bother to sketch, instead letting my hand relive the feel of her breast as I applied water and color.
I remember my earliest experiments painting breasts. I’d never actually seen one yet. All the drawings were profile because that was where I saw the most obvious difference when I looked at a girl. Looking at her straight on didn’t show as much shape. I always made them too high on a girl’s chest, too. It was like their tits grew out of their collarbones. I learned, eventually. And having Annette and Morgan to model for me whenever I wanted helped me see the unique shape and position of each breast I encountered. After my careful examination of Annette’s nipple last night, I was able to place it in the painting with her facing about three-quarters front. This view gave me both the angle to show her nipple erect and the subtle hollow her breast formed when it faded to her side under her arm. I used the water to transport the paint, applying just enough pigment to show the shadows and lowlights but leaving most of the page barely touched with paint.
“You know, that could be the theme for a whole series of paintings,” Morgan said. “I can’t wait for you to do mine. You should paint a picture in this position of every girl who models for you.”
“Am I really that beautiful?” Annette asked. “I look at that and I feel so loved.”
“Adored,” Morgan nodded. Annette kept backing up and approaching the painting from different angles. I pulled Fay back with me to give her room and kissed my sister deeply.
“It would be a suite of two,” I laughed. “The only girls who model for me are you two.”
“Mmm. I think Kendra will model for you. Soon, too.”
“She wants a portrait. She’s not going to undress for me to paint her.”
“Don’t be too sure of that,” Annette said, joining our embrace and kisses. “And don’t think we’re pushing you to have another lover, Pen. I think Kendra genuinely wants to model for you. I’m not saying neither of you will get turned on by it, but when she sees this, she’ll want to be part of the suite. If you exhibit three of them, every girl who sees one will want you to paint her right nip.”
It was Friday, so as soon as we were showered and dressed, the girls took off for their early classes. I looked at my sketchbook and leafed through all the sketches I’d done of Kendra. It seemed that she always wore that baggy hoodie sweatshirt, though it wasn’t apparently to hide her shape. I’d often seen it open in front and her nicely shaped breasts displayed beneath a T-shirt. I looked at the various sketches and started a composite drawing. All the sketches had been done in a hurry—five minutes at the most—and the detail was in her face. She was a quirky and animated model. Some of her expressions were just precious.
I was still drawing when Fay got home at noon. By the time Lady got back at dinner time, I’d spent two hours examining and drawing my sister’s right nipple. And another hour making love to her.
Comments
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
