Daisy very softly curled her fingers around his little hand, sending calm, healing thoughts from herself to him. Almost immediately the finger stopped bleeding. “Well, will you look at that?! It’s healed already!”
“It is?” he asked, looking at his hand where it still rested on hers.
“It is. You must have some superpowers or something,” Daisy said.
Carson actually gave her a little smile.
“So, this is my new art studio. Do you like art?”
He shrugged.
“Would you like to see all the things I have here?”
“Okay,” he said, actually taking a step with her, without pulling his hand free from her.
“Are you hungry? We have lots of food. If you see something you want to eat, just help yourself.”
“Okay.”
They walked around the front room of her studio, Carson curiously taking in everything she pointed out. But she knewshe’d won him over when he saw the pastels and went straight for them. “Do you like pastels?”
“I don’t know. I never used them before.”
“They’re kind of like watercolors, but dry ones. You have to use special tools to blend them at their edges. Some people just use their fingers to do that with. They’re fun, but take practice. People that work with them are very gifted.”
“Could I try?” he asked, looking up at her.
“Of course. You want to try now?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Okay. Let’s see if we can get you set up.” She took him over to the sketch books of all sizes and let him choose one. Then she took both Carson and the sketch book into the kids’ room and took a blank page out of it and showed him how to attach it to a table top easel. “I like these easels for pastels because they hold your page on an angle, but not straight up and down. Pastels make a lot of dust so if your page is vertical, the dust will fall and mess up the bottom of your page. So, it’s better if your page is kind of lying down, but on an angle. Understand?”
Carson nodded.
“Now, these are your pastels. You have three or four shades of every color, even of the black, grays, whites and browns.”
“I like the colors. They feel good.”
Daisy grinned. She often made decisions based on how things ‘felt’, so she fully understood what he meant. Colors had a certain feeling to them. “They do. They make me feel calm, too.”
“I can breathe better when I look at them.”
“They help you relax,” Daisy said.
“Is that what they’re doing?”
“I think so.”
“So, let me show you a few things first, okay?”
Carson nodded.
Daisy chose a yellow, a green, and a blue pastel. She made lines of each color, then picked up the blending tool, thought better of it and put it back down, then used her finger to blend in the edges of the pastels to make it look like the colors faded from one to the other without a separation between them. “See how that worked?”
Carson looked up at her wide-eyed. “That’s cool.”
“It is. You want a fresh sheet to start your own and you can practice on this one?”
