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[abrightboy]

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[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.

[abrightboy]

"Oh."

He stares at it a second.

"That... bit of shadow right there," he says. He shifts his weight just faintly. "The table looks wonky though."

[conning]

Neal ignores the last comment. "What about the shadow?"

He draws Malcolm's hand over to re-wet the brush before working on smoothing another bit of runny paint into invisibility.

[abrightboy]

“It… looks mostly not wonky,” Malcolm tells him distractedly, watching what his brush is doing in his hand but not by his hand.

[conning]

Neal lightens his grip a little so Malcolm can take more of a lead on correcting the next dribble. "Describe what you mean."

[abrightboy]

“I mean… it looks… right. Like. …Real, I guess. Not like the table. Something is wrong with the perspective or… the proportions or something,” he observes. “It doesn’t look right.”

[conning]

"Six of one, half a dozen of the other," Neal says, tone still even and calm. Painting relaxes him. It always has. "The proportions are what help establish the perspective."

He nudges the brush along, helping flesh one side of the table out with a little of the extra paint built up there.

[abrightboy]

“Did you paint something else because you knew you’d end up having to paint my painting of this?” Malcolm asks with a wry but not unhappy smile.

[conning]

He grins, again not answering the question. “What do you know about perspective in art? About how we visually construct space and distance?”

Malcolm smells nice, Neal thinks absently. Whatever soap he uses, whatever aftershave it is or the Admiral recreates for him, it’s nice. Earthy. Sharp underneath. It suits him.

[abrightboy]

“Um. I know geometry… oh, that is better,” he notes of Neal’s change to the shape of the table. “I remember an exercise in art class at school where we had to draw the horizon and then choose a point on the horizon and draw two lines coming from that point towards the near edge of the page at… particular… angles…..”

[conning]

Neal expounds on the visual theories behind that particular exercise. Viewpoints, horizons, vanishing lines, the illusion of scale. The idea of linear perspective in Western art and shifting perspective and metaphysical use of depicted space in Eastern traditions. He’s tangented off down a track about the idea of “host” and “guest” image focus in Chinese painting when he realizes… they’ve run out of image to paint.

“Nicely done.” He gently lets go and takes a step back, resisting the urge to keep his hands at Malcolm’s waist. “I was barely doing anything by the end.”