Bellamy blinked, unsure what the other man meant by the question. "Looking at your eyes?" he clarified, with an obvious look of confusion on his face. "Yeah. For now, anyway."

That was the only way that Bell could make sense of the question, because he couldn't possibly be asking if he was done with the whole painting. Portraits didn't just finish themselves after twenty minutes, and though he'd been able to get some of the base shades on before Alistair Darrow had arrived, he was still far from finished.

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Alistair had meant overall. He didn't know how long doing a portrait took. But at least he could now look away from the mans eyes. His heart rate wasn't calming though. He was quiet for a moment before speaking up once more. "About how much longer? You'll lose the suns spot soon," he observed, a tiny bit hopefully. Not even Bellamy Echelon could will the sun to stay in a specific spot in the sky.

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Bell had been focusing on his canvas while Darrow was quiet, so when he spoke again it seemed like quite the interruption to Bellamy. He glanced over at him somewhat quizzically, but only for a moment before he returned his attention to the canvas. He was rounding out the edge of Alistair Darrow's left eye, the edge that the light reflected off of, and he wanted to get the shape of it down while he still had it fresh in his mind.

"The sun's mostly for your hair," he commented in an offhand way. It was the curls that caught the light in a way that couldn't be replicated in a cloudy moment. The shade of his skin and the subtle shadows on his features weren't changed in a material enough way that he couldn't keep going with his sketch, unless the sun moved dramatically. He didn't expect that would happen, though. The portrait was already starting to have the right sort of look, though it need a hundred little details before Bellamy could ever consider calling it finished.

"Do you have somewhere you need to be?" he asked. It was clear that Darrow wanted to hurry him along, but utterly unclear to Bellamy why that should be the case. It wasn't as though posing for a portrait was hard labor, or anything.

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Oh. Alistair didn't know how to respond to that. He had been so hopeful that Mister Echelon would pack up once the sun moved away from that spot he had been so picky about before. He tried his best not to sigh but it slipped out anyway. "Well, I am hungry. I haven't had supper yet," Alistair said. Did Echelon even eat or was he fueled by artful fervor and sustained by his paint fumes alone? He had to eat sometime.

"I don't think I was made to be an artists model. I can't sit still for hours." He sounded almost apologetic about it without meaning to.

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Bell continued working as Darrow explained. He hadn't missed the man's sigh, but since it really hadn't occurred to Bellamy that he was asking much he wasn't sure how to interpret it. It wasn't as though this was difficult work he'd enlisted Alistair to partake in. It was an opportunity to be immortalized in oils and canvas. Who wouldn't want that?

"I think you're made for artwork," Bellamy pointed out. Obviously. He'd gone to moderate lengths to paint him, hadn't he? "And it doesn't matter that you fidget sometimes. Even professional models do. I'm used to it." At that moment the cloud moved away and the sun lit up Darrow's hair again. Bellamy straightened his shoulders and set to work on the curls on his canvas, entirely dropping the conversational thread for a few minutes as he put down layers of brown, yellow, and gold.

"I'll buy you dinner when we're finished, if you like," he offered casually, once he'd remembered that they were still talking about something.

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"If you say so," Alistair muttered when Echelon made his rebuttal. Well, at least he wasn't going to ruin anything with his fidgeting. He felt a little more free to at least move his fingers and such. He should have brought a book or something, he thought. Well, if an artist ever accosted him to do this sort of thing again, he would bring one. Not that he actually thought that would happen.

"That would be nice," Alistair agreed when Echelon offered to buy him dinner. Without much to do, he found himself gazing at the artist himself. There was something very... well, something... about the intent way that Bellamy Echelon looked at the canvas as he worked on it. Had anyone ever thought of painting him? Surely, yes.

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   Bellamy Echelon

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Bellamy was so caught up with his artwork that by the time Darrow said that would be nice he'd almost forgotten what it was he'd offered. Dinner; presumably they'd have to go to one of the pubs here in Hogsmeade because Bellamy didn't think the town had much to offer in the way of either fancy sit-down restaurants or street food. So dinner at a pub. How delightfully Scottish. Bell didn't normally think of the words delightful and Scottish in the same sentence (not anymore, anyway; the novelty of the area had worn thin nine months or so after they'd moved here permanently). With Alistair Darrow accompanying him, though, the scene took on a new tone in his mind. It would be sort of charming to see him in his natural habitat, so to speak.

"Grand, then we'll do that," Bell said with a nod. Having a whole dinner to stare at Darrow was going to be helpful for the portrait, too; he'd have a chance to observe his features from different angles and commit them to memory, which meant the only part he really needed to finish out here while they still had the sun was the rest of his curls.

"Give me... ten more minutes," he decided, surveying the canvas. "Then we'll go."

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