Chapter 33: Performing

Ariel wanted permanent paint when I showed her my design. I didn’t think that was a great idea. Her entire body would be covered, including face and hair. We finally agreed that from her neck down I would use the acrylic paint but above it would be watercolor. I promised she would still look like my sex doll.

I was thankful she was willing to do the acrylic. And thankful she was a small girl. It was going to take us days to finish this project. I thought how in my initial interview the professors had said they would teach me to slow down. I guess this was my first lesson. Ariel had also agreed to ‘perform’ in my Literature and the Arts class. I told Merck when he asked that not all my models would be willing to come to his class naked, but a couple of unique girls would transform for the class.

“Anytime. Not only is your artwork stimulating to look at, it is giving me an opportunity to connect different aspects of the literature to its influence on the art world today. You’ve really captured something with this body art. Have you figured out a way to exploit it? Not that I think art should be exploited commercially, but artists need to make a living. And the artwork needs to survive. That’s the biggest problem with performance art. It is fleeting. Once the performance is gone, so is the artwork.”

“We are doing videos. I’m working with Kelly on how to make the videos truly salable. We plan to open a YouTube channel over the holiday. We just don’t have time to do the setup while we’re doing classwork.”

“I understand you hold down a part time job as well?” Merck asked.

“Yes. And I’m completing a certification course as well. Thankfully, that should be over by the end of summer. It’s normally just two semesters, but I’m dragging it out over four because I can’t do that and the work at the U as well.”

“What kind of certification?”

“I’m working toward becoming a butcher.”

Merck just stared at me. He started to say something two or three times, but finally just shook his head and left.

I never thought cutting meat would give me so much satisfaction.

“I just can’t stand the thought of drawing a bowl of fruit,” Mary complained. “I mean, I understand why food and table settings are the most common subjects for a still life. It’s stuff everyone has around. And I like the wine bottle and glass for their reflections, but can’t we figure out something more original than a bunch of fruit and cheese on a cutting board? Something more relevant to life as we know it?”

When Mary got wound up, there was no one more passionate. That wasn’t only in bed, but in our drawing, as well. We were staring at our first attempt at a still life composition. I agreed that we’d set something up that was attractive. It was a cutting board with a few slices of cheese, cold cuts, and a glass of wine. Boring. We’d even sketched it out from different angles and it was a good composition. Caravaggio could have assembled the exact same still life in 1600.

“This isn’t us,” I agreed. “It should say something about our world. You got that on the midterm with the objects from Kelly’s Kat House. I even got it with the bloody meat and stewpot. They were things that were relevant to where we live.”

“Vases of flowers and bowls of fruit were everyday objects to classic artists. What are our everyday objects?”

We started a tour through the house and snapped pictures on our cell phones of things we saw. A stack of books. My car keys. The makeup tables the girls had put in one bedroom. The bed with a pile of pillows. Our mis-matched dinnerware. A pile of laundry being sorted. The spice rack in the kitchen. A laptop. A camera.

Something dawned on me and I turned and snapped a picture of Mary.

“Hey, we aren’t supposed to do portraiture,” she laughed. I showed her the picture.

“The one thing none of us are ever without,” I said. “Our cell phones.”

“Yes! A story. We need a story to tie it together. Cell phone. Makeup. A mirror. Glass of wine. We can do this!”

“They convinced me to work Saturday and Sunday through the holiday,” Kelly said. “The store is a zoo but I don’t feel like I can just walk away. Besides, that means that I still get an employee discount through the holiday. This one is pretty!” She held up a cute and very brief, lacy set of bra and panties. I’d never shopped for girls’ underwear before and when she held it up in front of her, I blushed.

“Um ... I’d love to see you in that,” I squeaked. “But it won’t do for the project. I need enough surface area that I can paint it.”

“Yeah, I know. But plain white bras and granny panties are so boring!”

“They won’t be when I finish painting them on you.”

“Oh! That sends chills down my spine. Maybe we could do that as another performance. Instead of painting the underwear, you paint me. Paint a really pretty bra and panties right on my bare skin. Maybe a garter belt and hose, too. Wouldn’t that be fun?” Kelly giggled. I imagined it in my mind. I wondered if she’d turn off the cameras before I fucked the paint off her.

“I wish I could exhibit you in the gallery. I’d make that my project. Is there anything like this that isn’t bulky and padded?” I asked, holding up a plain white bra that looked like a bulletproof vest.

“Over here. I think this is what you want. They are really made for girls like me with not much chest who don’t want to wear a bra in the first place.” She showed me a lightweight nylon bra that all but disappeared against her skin.

“I think that works. I’m going to have to do something to stiffen it into your shape, but I think I know how to do that. Panties?” She showed me a plain, nylon pair of panties.

“These are a classic brief,” she said in her best sales clerk voice. “The waist is above the navel and provides just a little support for the lower tummy while it snugly conforms to a woman’s intimate curves.”

“I’ll buy it,” I laughed. “Better get two sets in case I mess one up.”

“Can you see my pussy in this position?” Ariel asked.

“Not yet. We’re just working on the cover of the book right now. Believe me, your pussy will be a featured attraction when we open the book. Can you hold that?”

“Yeah. It’s not difficult. But you’ll paint the sex doll part, too, won’t you?”

Ariel really wanted me to get to painting the sex part. It was funny that she turned out to be the horniest of all my girlfriends. I don’t think she ever had a day without someone’s tongue or my cock in her pussy. And she dove between the other girls’ legs with wild abandon. Mary agreed with the other four that Ariel was the best pussy-licker ever.

This part of the project let me apply a lot of paint very quickly with the airbrush. The shade of ‘leather’ I’d chosen was just slightly browner and darker than Ariel’s skin tone. I’d carefully put plastic wrap around her neck so I wouldn’t get any acrylic spray above her shoulders. It would also make a good clean edge for the book. Of course, the spray was just the base coat. After her break, I touched up edges when she folded back into her little ball. Then I started adding texture and the indentation of the spine of the book where it joins the cover. The gold letters I applied to her back, right down the spine, might have been a little more explicit than the Colonna book, but I felt that ‘Sex Dreams’ captured the spirit of the work and I could fit that on Ariel’s back. It took the rest of the day to stipple the texture and do the lettering. I still needed to do the front view of the book, the edges of the pages on her lower legs. I thought I might be able to do that before doing the sex doll on the inside of the book, but first, I had to fuck Ariel.

It was no chore.

Getting Kelly’s new outfit prepared for painting was a chore. The problem was that the nylon underwear was limp and even when I put acrylic paint on a test patch it didn’t stiffen enough to support itself. It fit her sexy form perfectly, but once it was off, it just collapsed. Not sexy at all.

We ended up painting polyurethane on the bra and panties while she was wearing them. Well, that had its own problems because I didn’t want to cement the garments to her body and didn’t want her sensitive skin affected by the strong chemical either. Plastic wrap and a well-ventilated area came to the rescue. At the risk of being seen by the boys next door, I opened the two windows in my studio and put the box fans we’d used this summer in them. This was going to blow some of our precious heat right out into the freezing night, but there was nothing I could do about that.

I rubbed Vaseline onto Kelly before wrapping the plastic around her so it would seal down like a second skin. It was Kelly’s shape I wanted. I didn’t want a bunch of wrinkles and textures disguising it. She put the bra and panties on over this and I painted them with polyurethane. We both wore face masks to keep from inhaling too much of the toxic fumes.

The hardening of the underwear all had to be done at once, so Kelly had the longest posing session of any of my projects. She had to keep her legs spread, as well, so I could paint her crotch. The one thing I’d decided that made it more tolerable was that I would only be doing the front, not the entire piece. We realized pretty quickly that if I did the whole thing, she wouldn’t be able to get it off without breaking it.

It took two hours working as quickly as I could to get the bra and panties coated and set hard enough that we could remove them. It was a good thing we’d used Vaseline and plastic wrap. The wrap had mostly solidified into the poly.

“Are we satisfied?” Mary asked. With the girls’ approval, we’d moved one of the small makeup tables down to the studio. On the table were an assortment of makeup, an old cell phone that still turned on but had a shattered screen, a glass of wine, and my car keys. We’d positioned the table and ourselves so that we had completely different perspectives on the composition and so that the mirror reflected something different in the background. Not only was my perspective from the left but it was also from my full height, so I was looking down at the composition. Mary was working from the right and almost straight on at the table. We’d debated a long time about what to show on the cell phone and decided that it was much better to show a text message than a photo.