How To Draw One Piece Novels & Stories

"That's not nothing, Clara. That's a whole sentence about who you are." I started sketching. She watched, quiet, leaning forward slightly. Forty minutes later I had three rough silhouettes on the page, nothing finished, just shapes, and Clara was staring at the middle one like it had said her name out loud. "That one," she said. "I haven't even drawn the sleeves yet." "I don't care. That one." I looked at the sketch. Clean shoulder line, no lace, a single seam running down the back that did all the work the embellishment usually tried and failed to do.

A way of enjoying my solitude. The pencil scratched softly against the paper as I shaded the angles of his cheekbones, the dark fall of his hair, the slight furrow in his brow. I wasn’t as good as I used to be. My lines were shaky, the proportions slightly off, and it took me quite a few attempts to get his nose right. But as the drawing took shape, something inside me unclenched. I stared at the rough sketch of Elijah Lockwood. It still needed perfecting, but given that it had been years since I had last drawn something that was not charts, I felt pretty impressed with myself.

He sat on the edge of the bed and picked it up. The drawing had taken shape over two weeks without him fully realizing it. A woman by the water. The line of her back, the way the wind moved through her hair, the angle of her face half-turned toward something just beyond the edge of the page. He'd drawn the posture from memory. The ease of her. The quiet confidence. But the face he'd left blank. He uncapped the pencil.