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[abrightboy]

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[conning]

“Art therapy isn’t the same thing as just painting.” Even if he does art therapeutically shhh shhh details.

He hesitates, then goes to set up a pair of canvases. “Did you ever have lessons?”

[abrightboy]

"Lessons? No. My mother suggested it for my anxiety. It didn't work," Malcolm tells him.

[conning]

“Maybe you didn’t have the right teacher. Or the right medium.”

He’s distracting himself with this, on some level he knows that, but he doesn’t really care. He guides Malcolm over to one of the canvases by the elbow with one hand. Past the easels, he’s set an upturned bowl on a table, so it looks just like a flat-topped dome. There’s nothing else there.

“We’re going to draw the bowl.”

[abrightboy]

Malcolm lets himself be led, looking at the bowl when it's pointed out.

"...We are?" A beat. "We are?"

[conning]

“We are. There isn’t a practicing artist in the world who can’t benefit from revisiting basics.”

He doesn’t notice he technically just referred to himself as an artist. Neal picks up a very light -leaded pencil and wraps Malcolm’s hand around it. “Shapes first, light first. Then we’ll look at paint.”

[abrightboy]

“There’s a lot of ‘we’ in what you just said. You know, I’m perfectly content to watch a master at work. I hang art in my apartment; I don’t paint murals on the walls,” Malcolm points out.

[conning]

Neal makes an amused noise. “I’m not a master.”

He’s remembering the conversation he had about teaching classes in here, now, and the thought appeals to him even more. “There was a warden talking about group art lessons on that network earlier. Come on. Be my test case.”

He guides Malcolm’s hand so the tip of the pencil rests lightly on the canvas. “Shapes and shading.”

[abrightboy]

Malcolm draws unsteadily and looks at Neal with a wince.

“Are you sure you don’t want a test case that’s less… art-deficient?”

[conning]

“You’re not deficient,” he says gently. “You’re inexperienced. The only way up is through.”

He steps in again, taking the pencil and showing Malcolm how to stage the sketch, how to capture the shapes of it and focus on the pieces to build the whole. How to mark the light sources and the way light reflects off the curve of the bowl. Somewhere in the middle of it all he starts handing the pencil back and forth with Malcolm, showing him part of what to do and having him finish the rest. “We’re painting over it, so it doesn’t have to have a huge amount of detail. That’s up to your preference. Interestingly, there are some artists whose underpainting layers are as complex as what they work over the top, but it’s not a requirement.”

[abrightboy]

Malcolm stares at the drawing.

“…We’re painting this?”

[conning]

Neal actually smiles at that. “Is that a problem?”

[abrightboy]

“There’s not very much to it. Is that the kind of thing you’re going to want to look at later?” Malcolm questions, tilting his head to examine it.

[conning]

“Don’t focus on the end product. Focus on the process.”

He raps on Malcolm’s canvas lightly. “Besides, the subject matter isn’t as important as the person holding the brush.”

[abrightboy]

“Now you sound like my mom’s art therapy facilitator,” Malcolm informs him, but there’s a hint of a smile around it.

He goes to dip his brush and hesitates.

“….Are you going to watch me the whole time?”

[conning]

“You were going to watch me.” It’s teasing, though. Neal has apparently forgotten how upset he was when they got to the gazebo. “But no, I can work on my own.”

[abrightboy]

Malcolm dips his brush in the paint, but watches Neal.

“Are you painting this thing too?”

[conning]

He shrugs. “I haven’t decided yet.”

Not entirely true. He’s not painting the bowl, which becomes evident fairly quickly. He hadn’t decided what he would paint until he started, but it ends up being the beginnings of a Degas, specifically the Dancer in Green.

[abrightboy]

Malcolm doesn’t notice. Once he starts, he focuses intently on his own work. The seventh time paint drips off of his canvas onto the floor, he looks down to see if it’s missing his boots.

[conning]

Neal hears the delicate splat and looks over just in time to see drip number eight. He blinks, cleans his own brush, and set his materials aside to go over and see what Malcolm is doing. The focus is strangely adorable.

And there is so much paint, oh god, so much. He bites his lip to try and hide a smile. “You’ve got the angle of the lighting down really well. But you can go a little easier on the layering.”

[abrightboy]

“I don’t know what that means,” Malcolm murmurs distractedly as he dabs at the top of the bowl with his paint-saturated brush, making it drip more rather than less.

[conning]

Neal steps in close and takes the brush gently, not out of Malcolm’s hand, just guiding him back over to his palette. He wipes a substantial amount of paint back into the little board. “You don’t need nearly that much at once. Less is more.”

Neal shifts behind Malcolm so they’re body-to-body, guiding the clean brush in Malcolm’s hand back to the canvas to collect more of the paint there and swipe a bit onto the palette, before taking what’s left back to the curve of the bowl. “Don’t pull more paint from your board for now,” he murmurs. “See if you can thin out what you have on the canvas already.”

[abrightboy]

Malcolm stills for a moment, because is this actually an art lesson or something else…? But then Neal talks about thinning out the paint on his canvas and he looks at it, then looks at Neal over his shoulder.

“But it’s drying.”

[conning]

“Here.”

Neal walks him through it, guiding Malcolm’s hands, fixed on the process and ignoring how good it feels to be close to someone. Pretending to ignore it. Filing the thought away for later. He keeps up a soft commentary the whole time.

[abrightboy]

Neal's help stops the active dripping, and in a bid to distract from the too comfortable warmth at his back, he notes "it's still a mess, though, right?"

There are streaks from dripping paint all over the canvas.

[conning]

He smooths one of the drips into the grain of the table the paint-bowl sits on, hand still guiding Malcolm’s.

“What’s your favorite part of it?” he counters.