Free Alice-Miranda In New York 5 by Jacqueline Harvey

Alice-Miranda. Sorry, I forgot that you weren’t here last week. I’d like you tointerpret the piece, so it doesn’t need to look exactly the same,’ the teacher replied.
    â€˜Which is just as well,’ Lucinda whispered to Alice-Miranda, ‘because last week I tried to draw a Renoir painting of a mother and her children and they ended up with heads like frogs.’
    Alice-Miranda giggled.
    â€˜All right then, girls, let’s go. We’ll meet back here at 12.45 pm.’
    Lucinda and Alice-Miranda walked behind Ava and Quincy as the group followed Mr Underwood through a range of exhibits to their destination.
    â€˜I hope I do better than last week,’ said Ava. ‘I chose a still life because I thought that would be easy. I mean, how hard is it to draw a bowl of fruit?’ She thumbed through her sketchbook and showed her drawing to Quincy.
    â€˜Very?’ Quincy wrinkled her nose.
    â€˜Thanks for the encouragement.’ Ava rolled her eyes.
    â€˜It’s not that bad. Well, except maybe that bit that looks like a bottom,’ Quincy giggled.
    â€˜It’s meant to be a peach,’ Ava protested.
    Alice-Miranda was awestruck as she took in her surroundings. A large group of tourists, betrayed bytheir cameras and bumbags, was moving, swarm-like, through a piazza brimming with ancient Greek statues. A grey-haired woman in a smart white pants-suit was talking loudly about the various antiquities. Her comments were greeted with many ‘oohs and ahhs’ and the almost continual snapping of photographs.
    â€˜Make the most of that now,’ she said, nodding at one rotund fellow with his camera slung around his neck, ‘because there are lots of places where it will just have to go away.’
    He smiled enthusiastically and clearly hadn’t understood a thing she had said.
    When the class reached their destination, Alice-Miranda found a suite of smaller galleries playing host to the style of paintings that adorned the walls of her home, Highton Hall. Grand Old Masters’ portraits of people, some alone, some with their families, others on horseback. There were later landscapes too; a gorgeous Monet and another Turner painting of Venice with the most subtle light dancing on the water between the buildings.
    Alice-Miranda and Lucinda stayed together for the first few minutes before the girls’ natural curiosity split them up. The class was scatteredthroughout the galleries, each student searching for her favourite work. Alice-Miranda found herself lingering in front of several paintings, trying to work out which she liked the most.
    Fifteen minutes later she found herself completely drawn to a painting by Edgar Degas called The Dance Class . Alice-Miranda unfolded her stool, sat down in front of it and opened her sketchbook, wondering how she would capture the movement, the characters, the feeling of the dance class and all those beautiful white tutus.
    Before long she was engrossed in her task and doing a much better job of it than she had expected to. Her perspective was good and she found drawing people relatively easy, although achieving just the right expressions on their faces was tricky. Her dancers seemed a little cheekier than Mr Degas’s.
    Behind her, a tall man with a thick head of salt-and-pepper coloured hair watched. He observed the Degas and then the small child in front of him as she carefully sketched what she saw. He was impressed with her light touch and the texture she achieved with her pencils.
    She added a little dog that wasn’t in the original painting. He smiled.
    Alice-Miranda held her work out in frontof her.
    The man spoke. ‘That’s very good.’
    â€˜Oh.’ Alice-Miranda spun around. ‘Do you think so? I know I haven’t got the faces quite right. That man there –’ she pointed at her sketch – ‘looks quite cross, but I think in the real painting he just seems aloof. And this girl