Detroit: Become Human Painter Novels & Stories

he announced, “is titled Urban Decay. I want you to go out into the city. Find the places most people avoid. The rotting piers, the abandoned lots, the alleys where the streetlights don’t reach. Draw what you see. But more than that—draw what you feel when you’re standing there. The beauty in the broken. The violence in the silence. No romanticizing. No I*******m filters. Raw. Honest. Due in three weeks.” My stomach flipped in a good way. This I could do. This I wanted to do. After class I lingered by his desk, sketchbook clutched to my chest. “Professor Laurent? Any suggestions for where to start?” He beamed at me like I’d asked the perfect question. “There’s a stretch along the East River,

Four large paintings hung on the main wall, each one lit perfectly so it seemed to breathe on its own. Her eyes moved across them slowly… and then she saw something that caught her attention immediately. Paintings. And one of the paintings was hers. It was a piece she had finished months ago — a woman standing by a window, half in shadow, half in light. The brushwork showed all the quiet pain and hope she had felt when she painted it. Seeing it here, among the other strong works, made her chest tighten. “Quentin…” she whispered. He stood close behind her, tall and steady. “They selected four paintings this year. Yours was one of them.”

I suppose it comes with being Alpha, but I'd like to at least see his face before I close my eyes. "Look at this!" I gasp, noticing a man painting in the middle of the french quarter, a giant canvas. Rushing away from Hardin, I make my way through the people to get a closer look. It's almost like he's pouring random colours onto the canvas and swiping his brush through it all, but even I know it's a technique. The dark paints make the light colours seem brighter, a silhouette of a person hanging between both sides. "Do you think an artist paints about themselves, or someone else?" I wonder.