Welcome to Gaia! ::

For once Roman was out of his apartment. He had holed himself up in the place for the last two months working on a few deadlines. It would seem he'd underestimated how long one of his projects was going to take and overbooked himself. But, he never missed a deadline. He wasn't about to now.

Still, the art block hit harder than a Mac truck. Every sketch he did on his projects, the line work, it all looked wrong. Instead of letting himself sink further into his panic depression, he talked himself into taking the steps to clear his head.

Step one had been a shower. Then he shaved down his beard back to manageable stubble, basically, and changed his clothes. He got dressed in jeans, a sweater, and his zip up hoodie, took his work bag and wandered down to one of his favorite local cafes. After eating a salad with chicken, he took his coffee and settled outside at one of the tables. Roman often came here to work when he was in the mood. The street was right there, and the park just across the way. He people watched.

Slowly Roman started sketching out some of the people. Sometimes it was more gestures in poses, and sometimes it was a more detailed sketch. It depended on how long his subjects stayed still, or what he thought would be fun.

He was glad it wasn't freezing cold today. It made sketching without a glove easier. After about fifteen minutes of sketching, Roman stretched his arms out over his head and grabbed his coffee with one hand, the pen getting stuck behind his ear with the other. The sip had him frowning though. It was cold enough to make his coffee he'd just gotten be luke warm already.

Ah well. He could finish it. It'd give him time for people to shuffle around and maybe someone new to walk in that'd make him want to draw.

He found his eyes following a woman who happened to wander inside. As she propped her feet up, Roman settled back in his own chair and went back to sketching. Hopefully he could do this discreetly so she didn't notice. Who did that, honestly? It was refreshing, and at least she didn't do it when it was crowded and people were looking for seats.

She was wearing some interesting colors that worked together, and he wished he would have grabbed his digital tablet instead of a sketchbook. Oh well. He jotted down the notes of the colors and looked pleased with himself.

He could scan this in and finish it when he got home, maybe use it more as reference though.

Those vibrant eyes would just look at his sketch book for a long amount of time, before glancing back up at this woman to study her more. She was moving, but that was the nature of real life sketching. It was more quickly jotting gestures rather than small details.

He hoped he wouldn't get caught staring too hard.

When Roman finally realized he was caught, the man mentally sighed and a small frown came to his lips. He wasn't quite done, but ah well. She wasn't actually a model he was paying, so that was fine.

When she came over, he made no attempt to hide his work.

"No ma'am. I'm just a freelance artist." He tipped his tablet toward her to show her. It was a sketch, but it was her general posture and shapes. There may have even been a hand study on her the way she was holding her phone. He had been in the middle of sketching out her shoes at that angle when she had come over, so it was the most unfinished thing on the screen. Roman even moved the canvas around with his fingers to show her everything.

"Sorry if I made you uncomfortable. I ...tend to just sketch people outside." To prove his point, he flipped to a new layer to show off an old guy walking his dog, bundled up in a large coat and scarf. There was a child's face with her hair in pigtails, blowing in the wind.

"I was going to upload them to my social medias though!"

To the compliment, Roman dimpled up with a smile, rather boyishly. Then the question made him shake his head.

"Hardly at all. The best part of these exercises is that I get such a short frame of time. So I don't focus on small details. Just enough to make it interesting."

With a few motions of fingers on his tablet, he showed her some of his other sketches from a different time. "This one I was waiting at the bus station." There was a messy sketch of a boy in a bunch of layers and a sucker in his mouth, cheeks shaded in to show how flushed he was from the cold. There were the beginnings of an older woman, hand on her rocker, seeming happy to just be sitting down. Another layer showed a playground, several children on the swings, all messy and loose.

"I never finish them, and that's part of the beauty. Just helps remind me not everything I do needs to be work quality." He grinned again and shrugged. "Oh, God, I didn't introduce myself, did I? I'm Roman Castle." Not a well-known name unless you were a comic fan, honestly. A no one outside of that.