Dahlia's whole life is flipped upside down when her eccentric aunt enrolls her in a prestigious university in England. She is forced to make friends with a rather eclectic group of people and adapt to her new lifestyle all while trying to find the a...
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The "Stories in Stone" project for art class occupied a large percentage of my brain, and it was getting on my last nerve. By Monday, I still hadn't come up with an idea for it- I didn't know what story I wanted to tell. All of my ideas seemed completely unoriginal, plain, or boring.
I sat in the art studio in my usual spot, across the table from Zayn. The point of my blue pen rested against a page in my sketchbook that was full of crossed out ideas and meaningless doodles. I was fully uninspired, and every ounce of creativity I once possessed had been extracted from my entire being, none left anywhere- it was even stolen from the more closed off sections of my brain.
Propping my elbow on the table, I let my arm support the weight of my head, the heel of my left hand under the left side of my jaw. I clicked the pen with my right thumb, watching Zayn work.
His hands were coated in grey, and he stared with intensity and purpose at the mound of clay he was shaping. I could tell that so much thought and precision was being put into his sculpture- a ruler and a protractor sat at the edge of his workspace, and he had a scaled down rendering of his future creation sketched on a page that he glanced at periodically.
"What're you making?" I asked, forcing him to look up from his work.
A headband held his dark hair away from his face, but one strand escaped to tickle the area above his eyebrow. He tossed his head back, trying to make the strand cooperate because he couldn't use his dirty hands, not wanting to get clay on his forehead. "So, you know Michelangelo's Pietà?"
I nodded, able to visualize the statue depicting the Virgin Mary holding the lifeless body of Jesus.
"Well, I drew inspiration from that because it reminded me of the kind of... tableau we were in when Niall fell from the chandelier."
"Wait, so you're sculpting the five of us?"
"Yeah," he shrugged. "It's kind of a comedic take on it- very different from the whole Mary and Jesus story."
"You're not making it life-sized, right?" There was no way he'd finish the project in time if he did that- sculpting one life-sized person was hard enough, and I could only imagine how challenging it would be to make five.
"Absolutely not," he laughed. "I'll keep it slightly above the minimum size requirements. I'm not doing facial features either. I'll do the basic bone structure of the face, but I'm not going to waste my time on, like, eyelashes and pupils and stuff like that. I think it would be cooler and more modern if it's minimalistic."
I admired the way Zayn always had a set plan for his art- there was always a unique vision in his head, and he could execute it so well, like I'd learned when he painted the fruit bowl in inverted colors.
"I would ask you what you're going to make, but based on the scribbling and the cartoon frog drawn in your sketchbook, and the fact that you won't quit clicking that pen, I'll assume you haven't gotten very far." He focused on smoothing a bump on the gentle sloping planes of grey that would form his masterpiece.
