Fukushima-senpai’s full name was Madoka Fukushima.
The previous year, she had achieved an impressive result by winning the Silver Award at the Tokyo Youth Art Competition.
There were even rumors that she would become the next president of the art club.
Kitagijuku had long maintained a cooperative relationship with Musashino Art University, and serving as president of Kitagijuku’s art club could provide an advantage when applying there.
That was precisely why so many students liked to gather around Madoka and flatter her.
Seeing her now holding a phone and seriously taking photographs of the sketch, the group of girls beside her couldn’t help feeling puzzled.
They exchanged curious glances, then crowded around Tsukasa Higashino’s easel to see what had caught her attention.
And then—
“Ah!”
“This…”
The girls’ faces immediately turned red.
Whatever they had seen, it had clearly taken them by surprise.
After a while, Madoka lowered the phone and turned toward Ryoka.
“Ryoka, does that boy you mentioned like you?”
“Huh?!”
Ryoka Konoe had been standing quietly to the side, too nervous to say a word.
The instant she heard her name, she jerked her head up with a completely bewildered expression.
Seeing the obvious What are you talking about?
written across Ryoka’s face, Madoka didn’t bother explaining.
She simply stepped aside and gestured for Ryoka to come over and look for herself.
Ryoka lowered her head and hesitantly approached.
Then she glanced at the drawing.
Her mouth fell open.
“A-Awahwahwah…”
Her cherry-pink lips trembled violently, and her lowered face turned completely red.
She still carried her usual gloomy air, but compared with a moment ago, her expression had become much more lively.
What Tsukasa had left on the paper was a sketch.
More specifically, it was a profile sketch of Ryoka herself, completely absorbed in her painting.
The ends of her hair curled inward.
Her large, watery eyes were opened wide, one hand clutching a paintbrush while her brows pressed downward in hesitation, as though she couldn’t decide what to do next.
Three parts timidity.
Two parts cautious uncertainty.
Five parts earnest concentration.
With only a handful of lines and details, Tsukasa had captured Ryoka’s gloomy, timid, yet deeply serious nature with astonishing precision.
“It looks so much like her…”
Madoka spoke first.
But almost immediately, she frowned.
“No…
something’s different.
It looks like her, but at the same time, it doesn’t…”
She rubbed her eyes, looked back and forth between the real Ryoka and the girl in the sketch several times, and became even more confused.
It looked like Ryoka.
And yet it didn’t.
What was going on?
Just as everyone’s thoughts began tying themselves into knots, a voice came from behind them.
“That’s what you call artistic interpretation.”
At some point, Ryoko Okano, the faculty adviser for the art club, had appeared behind the group of girls.
She nodded in acknowledgment, then stepped closer and asked, “Which teacher came in and drew this?”
She naturally assumed it was a demonstration sketch left behind by one of the school’s art instructors.
It really was excellent.
More importantly, it possessed a strong artistic quality.
Still, Ryoko couldn’t remember any teacher at Kitagijuku whose sketching ability was quite this impressive.
Well, never mind that for now.
Before any of the students could answer, Ryoko began using the drawing as an example.
“Everyone, take a good look.
This is an excellent model of a proper sketch.
The subject is clearly Konoe-san, but the person in the drawing differs subtly from the real Konoe-san.”
Ryoko pointed toward the face in the sketch.
“Look carefully at the eyebrows and the eyes.
Can you see the slight differences?”
Everyone leaned closer.
And just as Ryoko had said, the differences became obvious once they knew what to look for.
In the sketch, Ryoka’s thin eyebrows were pressed much lower than they normally were, emphasizing an almost painfully meek and timid expression.
Her large, flickering eyes also carried a faint sense of distress.
But the real Ryoka wasn’t quite like that.
She was certainly gloomy and painfully shy, but her eyebrows never drooped that severely.
Her gaze was usually more innocent and absentminded than sorrowful.
She didn’t normally give people the impression that she was suffering.
Looking even more closely, they could see that the shape of Ryoka’s face in the sketch also differed slightly from her real features.
“This is what we mean by artistic interpretation in painting,” Ryoko explained.
She felt that she could use this single sketch to teach them quite a lot.
“Just as writing uses metaphors, personification, and other rhetorical devices, painting also requires its own forms of expression.
This drawing is based on Konoe-san, but the person on the page isn’t an exact reproduction of her.”
Ryoko raised one finger.
“That’s because the artist didn’t rigidly copy the real Konoe-san line by line.
What he drew was the Konoe-san that existed in his own mind—the impression she left on him.”
That was one of the most important reasons a master’s work could look so much more compelling than an ordinary artist’s depiction of the exact same subject.
Simply reproducing a subject accurately wasn’t enough.
What mattered even more was capturing the impression the subject left on you and expressing that impression through the work.
Ryoko then turned toward Madoka.
“Fukushima-san, you have a bad habit of copying things too literally.
Painting isn’t just about making something look like the reference.”
“Uu…”
Ryoka, who had been listening quietly from the side, instinctively opened her mouth.
Because she had heard those exact same words from Tsukasa only a short while ago.
Could Tsukasa’s painting ability already be comparable to a teacher’s?
That thought quietly appeared in her head.
But in the very next moment, Ryoka heard Ryoko Okano sigh in admiration.
“This is exceptionally good.
I couldn’t draw this well myself.
Which teacher made it?”
Ryoko had never been the sort of person who pretended to be humble about things she could do.
Likewise, when something was beyond her ability, she wouldn’t stubbornly pretend otherwise.
Ryoka knew that very well.
And that was precisely why the last part shocked her the most.
Polished enough to be printed and published.
I couldn’t draw this well myself.
Ryoka swallowed hard.
Tsukasa Higashino…
Was he really that incredible?
His sketch was already good enough to be professionally printed?
For Ryoka, simply becoming competent at gouache was already one of her biggest goals.
The next step beyond that was learning oil painting.
But professional publication?
That was so far beyond her current understanding that she had never even dared imagine it.
For a while, Ryoka stood there in a daze, unable to say a single word.
Eventually, Madoka’s voice broke the silence.
“Ryoka said it was drawn by Higashino-kun, the boy who joined the club today.”
Truthfully, Madoka’s feelings were complicated.
Until now, she had always been the most highly praised student in the art club.
Then Tsukasa Higashino suddenly appeared out of nowhere.
Naturally, it was difficult for her to accept emotionally.
But she didn’t say anything childish like, “Oh, this really isn’t that impressive.”
She had studied art seriously for years.
One glance was enough for her to understand the difference between her own ability and that of this Tsukasa Higashino she hadn’t even met yet.
It was like comparing a tiny electric scooter to a massive truck.
If the truck came rolling straight at her, those two little wheels of hers probably wouldn’t survive.
“Oh, I see…
Wait.”
Ryoko Okano initially responded with a casual nod.
Then the name finally registered.
“Tsukasa Higashino?
This is a student’s work?”
“Higashino-kun drew it in about thirty minutes,” Ryoka added.
“Thirty minutes…?”
For once, Ryoko didn’t know what to say.
Only moments ago, she had confidently assumed that the sketch must have been drawn by a teacher.
Reality, however, had turned out to be even more absurd than her assumption.
This was actually the work of Tsukasa Higashino, a student who had only joined the art club that very day.
Still—
“It really is an excellent drawing.”
Ryoko nodded, sounding almost as though she were sighing in admiration, yet she stubbornly maintained her original judgment.
There was nothing else she could do.
Good was good.
People who studied art seriously tended to be rather straightforward about things like that.