VICTORIA — No matter where she’s going, Layne Smith is armed for art.
“My teacher instilled in me very early on,” Layne says, opening her bag to reveal a collection of pens and paper, “I need to have drawing supplies and be drawing wherever I go.”
While she regularly fills sketchbooks full of the people she happens upon, this is the story behind the day Layne drew something different.
“I opened the gate,” Layne begins show her morning routine at the convenience store she works at. “And I keep it open because I carry a big bin.”
And because Layne is also studying to be a storyboard artist for film and TV productions, she agrees to illustrate the action, beginning with that bin.
“And then boom!” Layne shows the next drawing. “There was a dog!”
A dog who Layne had never seen before, whose owner was nowhere in sight, who followed Layne to the store’s front door and blocked her from entering.
“And it kind of put itself right between myself and the door,” Layne says, flipping through her sketchbook showing each moment of the morning.
Then a regular customer stopped by to help.
“We checked the tag [on the dog],” Layne says. “And there was nothing.”
So the regular watched the pup while Layne opened the store, before another customer took the pup for a walk while Layne called animal control.
“They sent someone down pretty quick, and he was amazing,” Layne shows an illustration of a man bending down and petting the dog. “And he loved on it before picking it up.”
But then — after returning to her regular work routine — Layne started feeling for the lost dog’s owner.
“What are they going to do when they wake up and their dog is gone?” Layne wondered. “How is the owner going to find their animal.”
So Layne scrambled to produce a lost-dog poster, but seeing as she’d forgotten to take a photo of the pup, turned to her pens.
“I did a drawing!” Layne laughs.
She created a full-colour portrait of the pup and wrote details on where it was lost and how to find it, before posting the original art on the bulletin board outside the store and sharing a picture of it on social media.
“It was pretty positive,” Layne says of the reaction to her drawing. “Which was nice.”
Some people called it the “best poster ever” and an animal rescue organization praised it as “absolutely enchanting and brilliant” before eventually revealing that the dog and their owner had been reunited.
“It‘s always good to see what we as a community can do to be kind to one another,” Layne says.
But it’s even better when a real-life story concludes like a feel-good movie.
“It’s the best thing I could possibly wish for,” Layne smiles while finishing the final illustration of the story, which shows the animal’s owner embracing the dog, who’s wagging its tail. “A good happy ending!”
