Logs:Attention to Detail

Attention to Detail
Dramatis Personae Dallen, Roscoe
In Absentia Abigail	2024-12-01 "I feel kind of like I'm drawing a generic blue jay and not that blue jay specifically."
Location <XAV> Gardens - Xs Grounds
From indoor gardens to outdoor, though without the protective greenhouse glass the back gardens do not last all year round. Still, the gardens out here are well-tended and well-worth spending time in, as well. The paths wending through the beds of flowers and herbs and vegetables spread out through the school's back grounds, tended by students as a credit class. Benches offer seating and a small pond is home to koi and turtles, as well as a few frogs. At the far back edges of the garden, a droning buzzing marks a few stacked white boxes as beehives. It's a bright, cold day, the temperature hovering just above freezing. The student body has largely returned, but there aren't a lot of people out on the grounds. The winds are blustery high overhead, but the garden provides some shelter, at least. Dallen doesn't seem like she's here for the shelter, though. She's wearing a blue peachskin coat over a pink blouse with a lacy petal hem, gray a-line skirt, and black kneehigh boots, sitting on a bench with a sketch pad in her lap and a pencil twirling restlessly in one hand. Her eyes are not on her sketch, though, but trained up at the top of a trellis where a blue jay is squabbling noisily with a squirrel over some disputed prize. There's been some noise in the garden, rodentish rustling and birdly flapping indicative of the wildlife getting into gear for the winter, but there's strangely little warning before, from almost out of sight, "Aren't you cold?" Dallen is probably entirely visible to Roscoe regardless, but he can only really be seen through a gap in the hedges of an adjoining nook, though he's helpfully dressed very visibly in a puffy orange coat, the hood of his pale yellow sweatshirt pulled up over a black beanie so that not much of his face can be clearly picked out, save for the very bright and toothy smile he offers after a moment, tilting his head back to gawp at this epic blue-jay-squirrel showdown. He crashes into the hedge before he fixes his frame of vision enough to come tromping into her peaceful clearing -- "'chu drawing?" he asks, with (polite?) (nosy?) interest. Dallen jumps at the sound of Roscoe's voice, though she's clearly startled and not scared. She turns her wide-eyed stare from the animals to her former roommate. "No," she replies, though even as she does so she's frowning in thought. "A little. But it's a nice cold. Aren't you cold?" This might sound mocking from someone else, Dallen turns the question around very sincerely, with the exact same tone that she uses for "I'm fine, how are you?" and the like. She reflexively starts to cover her drawing, but then withdraws her hands and turns the pad around to show the somewhat rudimentary beginnings of a bird. "Blue jay," she clarifies, pointing at the top of the trellis. "That one." "Naw, I'm never cold," surely this is not true, the hand that darts out of his pocket to tug his hood back, so his face is more visible, is red and a little chapped and he sticks it back in its pocket very quickly. Covering the drawing would do no good anyway, but Roscoe quite pointedly looks away from it, though once she turns it around he looks back with a swiftness that suggests that it was still very much in his peripheral view. Tilts his head back at the bird-squirrel battle, slouches against the hedge. "Cool," he says. "Is it hard when it's moving so much? Sometimes I wish I had like, a pause button. Instant replay. Mental screenshot." His face scrunches up under the beanie, then smooths out again. "I wish I could draw, too," he adds. Dallen looks slightly skeptical, but nods. "I don't know if I will know how to dress warm enough when it's January. With skirts." She smooths the hem of her skirt. "It's hard. I'm not very good, and I usually draw from pictures, but now I'm trying to draw from life. But." She looks down at her drawing, face scrunched with exaggerated displeasure. "I feel kind of like I'm drawing a generic blue jay and not that blue jay specifically." She rolls the pencil between her hands, then stops the motion, startled by Roscoe's addition. "You can't draw?" Roscoe tilts his head owlishly at Dallen, his face scrunching up again -- "Are Mormon girls not allowed to wear pants?" he says, baffled. He looks from the drawing back up to the blue jay on the trellis, with a thoughtful, considering squint. "I mean, the blue jay just looks like a generic blue jay to me," probably this was meant as reassurance, though his don't-know-don't-care tone is not terribly encouraging. He rolls his ankles, so he's standing on the edges of his shoes, and blows a short, slightly huffy raspberry. "I doodle," he shrugs. "But sometimes I wanna save a good view to remember, and --" shrug, again. "Or, like. To show someone else." "We're allowed to wear pants," Dallen says hastily, then reconsiders. "Yes. Allowed. I just like skirts better." She looks at the blue jay, too. It's helpfully holding still for a moment, having chased off the squirrel. "I'm trying to learn to tell the two who live here apart. It's hard, but I think this is the boy one." She flips back a few pages and shows Roscoe a shaky but completed sketch of a blue jay that looks pretty much exactly like a generic blue jay. "This is the girl one. I think." She nods seriously. "I started out just doodling, too. But I thought maybe it would be easier for you because you see more, but I guess that just means more to draw. Do drawings just all look bad to you because other people don't draw enough details?" Now Roscoe looks from the blue jay back to the drawing -- "Bet I could tell," he says thoughtfully, though then he adds, "...might have to do some weird Googling first." He doesn't seem too bothered by this prospect. At Dallen's question, he wrinkles his nose -- "Naw, nothing like that. It's just -- artsy. Like, super-impressionist. Like, if Van Gogh had cataracts." Dallen perks up at the suggestion Roscoe can easily distinguish the resident blue jays, and does not seem to question it in the least. "I have pictures of them I can send you. That will help more than the internet. Blue jays are sexually monomorphic." She says these three things as if they all follow logically. "I like impressionism. Do photographs look impressionist to you, too? Because they don't have as much detail as the original?" "Naw, Google got me," Roscoe is looking at the blue jay again, as he says this, with a concentrated squint. "I mean, even if they look the same on the outside, the girl has to have an egg... sac, or whatever, right?" His dubious grasp on bird anatomy notwithstanding, he sounds reasonably sure about this. He rolls his eyes with vaguely scoffy amusement -- "Uh-huh, like if Van Gogh didn't have cataracts," but then he shrugs. "I don't mind. You don't see me whining about all the space between the pixels on the TV. I just -- the first thing I ever really sat down and looked at was this," this change of subject might be abrupt but Roscoe makes the swerve quite casually, pulling one hand back out of his pocket to hold in front of his face, palm out toward Dallen. "I mean, first time I realized what I was looking at. I just watched my pulse for a while. My blood vessels. Dope view." He flexes each finger in turn, before he stuffs his hand back in his pocket and concludes, a little crabbily, "-- can't photograph that." "Shell gland," Dallen supplies immediately, and then blushes deeply, hugging her sketchbook and curling in on herself a little while trying to maintain her posture. "I should introduce you to our cousin who's transferring here. She sees blood too, I think. I can't see in there because there isn't enough light. I guess that's the same as most people." Despite having just shrunk from probably the thought of Roscoe seeing her insides -- which he could have done all along -- she's flipping to a fresh page in her sketch book and tracing her hand on the page. "You can show me. You don't have to be good at drawing." "How many of you people are there?" Roscoe does not even sound particularly surprised, though; he's giving her a buck-toothed grin, his head cocked cheerfully to one side. His voice is a little darkly proud and wryly amused at, "Most people can't see in there," but he rolls his feet flat and lopes over, plops down on the bench beside her. "I warned you I'm no good at this," he says. He's reaching for the pencil anyway. "I don't know," Dallen admits, abashed. "One of my sisters probably knows. I guess it also depends whether you're just counting first cousins, or ones who are named Allred, or the ones we're close to. It's nice to have such a big family." She passes pencil and pad to Roscoe, wide-eyed and eager. "It's okay. It'll just be like you have cataracts, too."