Since one of Sasha’s sketch pads sat on the table, he picked it up,
took one of her pencils. He drew quickly.
The structure, to Riley’s eye, looked more like a barn
than Bran’s house, but it made the point. So did the curved lines,
the squiggles to represent garden paths, shrubs, trees, the cliff wall.
And as far as she could tell, he had everything in its place,
and nearly to scale.
Island of Glass
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Do you ever draw? Most of us don't, and the reason we usually leave drawing to the artists is because we're not very good at it. Who wants to do something they're bad at?
But maybe we should rethink this assumption, especially since drawing has so many benefits, artist or not.
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But it was the drawing on his worktable, one he'd anchored with an empty beer bottle and a chunk of quartz, that grabbed her attention.
He'd taken their grid, their site survey, their map and had created the settlement with paper and colored pencils.
There was no road now, no old farmhouse across it. The field was wider, the trees ranging along the creek, spreading shadows and shade.
Around the projected borders of the cemetery he'd drawn a low wall of rock. There were huts, grouped together to the west. More rocks and stone tools collected in the knapping area. Beyond, the field was green with what might have been early summer grain.
But it was the people who made the sketch live. Men, women, children going about their daily lives. A small hunting party walking into the trees, an old man sitting outside a hut, and a young girl who offered him a shallow bowl. A woman with a baby nursing at her breast, the men in the knapping area making tools and weapons.
There was a group of children sitting on the ground playing a game with pebbles and sticks. One, a young boy who looked to be about eight, had his head thrown back and was laughing up at the sky.
There was a sense of order and community. Of tribe, Callie noticed. And most of all, of the humanity Jake was able to see in a broken spear point or a shattered clay pot.
Birthright