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Morgana turns around on the table and curls into a comfortable ball, ready to nap the next half hour away.
Yusuke frames him with his hands, squinting one eye closed. For some godforsaken reason. As if looking with one eye will make any difference.
Artists are so weird.
But, it seems, everyone gathered here to day to be weird.
“Alright,” Yusuke decides. “Let’s get started. As you can see, our model is very conveniently only two colors, so you should be able to depict his likeness with pencil alone.”
Haru holds up her pencil with a smile to show interest. None of the others seem to share her enthusiasm. Morgana suspects even Haru isn’t as excited as she’s showing.
“First, place your subject on paper. Very roughly. You want his image to dominate the page, but you want to leave enough margin around him that he doesn’t look squished.”
“Teach, teach,” Futaba calls, “can you show us?”
Yusuke blinks. “Ah, of course! One moment.”
The moment in question lasts three and a half minutes. Morgana is half-asleep.
Yusuke returns with the large sketchbook they all know and love on him, and what at first looks like a pencil. He puts it to paper and it’s not pencil at all. It’s charcoal.
“Here, just a rough circle,” Yusuke narrates as he demonstrates. He holds his sketchbook up so his friends can look over his shoulder as he places Morgana’s napping form on the paper. “Our model is very convenient like that.”
Morgana yawns. “You know, you keep talking about me as if I can’t hear you.”
“I… apologize? Oh. Ah, of course, you are not used to modeling. I should have been more considerate. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. Seeing you as a model means seeing your form before your personhood – you’re becoming the subject of art.”
“You did kinda volunteer for it,” Makoto points out.
“And you look sooo cute!” Haru adds.
“Yeah, yeah,” Morgana grumbles good-naturedly under his breath. Honestly, hearing the word personhood in regards to himself does more to placate him than anything the others could say.
He lets them get back to their silly drawing class and he himself gets back to his nap. Yusuke only said they’d need him to stay put for half an hour, but Morgana is so comfy, he could sit here forever.
He’s proven right when Akira wakes him with a gentle shake. Morgana looks at the clock on the wall, and it’s been an hour.
“Alright, alright,” he yawns. He stands and stretches. “Let’s see it. Did you make me handsome?”
“You’re always handsome, Mona!” Ann coos, making him blush internally. “We could never draw you as handsome as you are!”
“Speak for yourself, I think I caught his likeness very well,” Yusuke says. He turns his sketchbook around to show his work to Morgana, prompting everyone else to do the same.
It’s… Yeah, it’s what Morgana would have expected of them all. Ann and Ryuji are hopeless, with Makoto only slightly better than them. Haru is square in the middle; she seems to have taken Yusuke’s instructions about rough sketching at heart, resulting in a million outlines that only vaguely culminate to a Morgana-looking shape. Akira has done a pretty good job, surprisingly or unsurprisingly. Morgana doesn’t know enough about art to really judge it, but he’s done some lights and shadows that look good. On the other hand, Futaba has gone the complete opposite way, drawing him kind of cartoonishly. Unlike Ryuji and Ann, though, hers actually looks good, like she knows what to pay attention to and what to ignore.
And, of course, Yusuke has done an excellent job. His only fault is being a showoff, and an unfair one at that: he used different materials. Not just the charcoal – there’s color on his piece. Morgana himself might be black-and-white, but the table he laid on has been painted brown, and in the back is the beige of the wall. There’s even a tiny stroke of yellow on Morgana’s neck, where his collar just barely showed from where Yusuke was sitting.
“Wow, these look great!” Morgana compliments. “You all did better than I thought you would!”
“Hey, did you think we’d suck?” Ryuji frowns.
“You do suck,” Morgana informs him, “Just not as much as I had feared you would.”
“Nonsense, everyone did a wonderful job,” Yusuke intervenes. “It is only natural that everyone is on a different level. If we were all the same, it would be pretty boring.”
“Hm. That’s true,” Morgana concedes. “What’s next?”
“Next, please give us a pose that is not a circle. You’ll only need to hold this one for ten minutes, so you can do something slightly dynamic if you want.”
Morgana thinks for a moment while everyone gets situated with new paper. He decides to stand on all four of his beautiful legs to show them off, turning his head to Ann and Akira’s direction because honestly they’re the easiest to look at.
“Perfect, that’s amazing, hold that right there,” Yusuke says. Frantic sketching sounds come from him.
“My tail might move, is that okay?”
“That’s fine. When a part of our model won’t stay still, like hair in the wind, or in this case, a cat’s tail, we simply choose one moment to capture. Just look for a moment that repeats and try to remember it, so you’ll catch it when it happens. If all else fails, just sketch an approximation and fill in the details in motion.”
“You’re a pretty good teacher, Yusuke,” Morgana compliments.
“Thank you. You’re a pretty good model.”
“You have to stop showing off, though. No colors this time.”
“I won’t have time for colors. Well. Maybe just one…”
“No colors, or everyone gets a color. It’s only fair.”
“Got it,” Makoto nods. She turns and digs in her bag. “I have two yellow highlighters. We can share.”
“Oh, for his collar! Good thinking, Mako-chan!”
“Black and white and yellow… Yes, these are the colors of Morgana,” Yusuke nods.
“I can see his eyes more than his collar,” Ann says. “You got a blue, Makoto?”
“I do. Here you go.”
“Great. Come on, Akira, we can share.”
Morgana suddenly feels… bashful. His friends are really paying this much attention to him? No, not him, his form. His handsome form. Yes. When he thinks of it that way, it’s not that embarrassing. He can stand proud and show off.
His tail flickers happily.