(Thanks again to Alstonke for being the leader)
"You should have received a request for a manuscript from Scholastic Group, right? Is it a trial contract or a formal contract?"
Ana thought for a while and asked the question she was most concerned about.
When a painter signs a contract with an agent, there will be a complex and professional legal contract, which naturally cannot be handled with just a few words.
But now,
There is a simple agreement.
She can already officially intervene in the work of Detective Cat as an agent.
It was difficult for Anna to ask before because large film companies or publishing houses generally have confidentiality restrictions on ongoing contracted projects in order to prevent movie lines or plots from being leaked in advance.
It’s not easy for outsiders to interfere.
But even the strictest confidentiality agreement will not restrict the painter from sharing his work with his agent.
The agent is the painter's closest partner in his career, and in many cases is one and the same.
"Prototype contract. They asked me to draw an illustration inspired by the first section of Chapter 8 of The Little Prince."
"Have you finished painting?"
"Yes, but the sample manuscript has not been officially sent to the project assistant's email address."
"Still insist on drawing with knives?"
Anna confirmed again.
"Yes, the knife painting is very suitable for the fairy tale theme."
"Then before you formally submit it, send me a sample. Knife painting is a difficult painting method. I am your agent now. I want to test the performance of your painting first to decide this Do you need to change the painting method?"
Anna reminded seriously: "Make it clear in advance, I will not relax my request easily."
She was right.
Anna will never relax her standards because of her preference for detective cats.
On the contrary,
Instead, she hopes to "kill" the detective cat's majesty.
Many painters waste too much time and energy on inappropriate paths.
Van Gogh once hoped to become a sketching expert in his early years, Manet compromised with the traditional academic school in order to gain official recognition from France, and even Picasso spent a lot of time studying pottery and sculpture... This is all a mistake in Anna's opinion Behavior that is not doing one's job properly on the road.
Painting with a knife is even more unethical.
At the very least...it's a tough, rocky trail.
"The difficulty in drawing knife paintings lies in fine control. The one who is better at this is probably Boggs, a professor at the Brooke Academy of Art in the United States. He is especially good at depicting weather. It is said that he can complete a painting within an hour while collecting scenery in the wild. Mature, small-scale snowscapes, thanks to the excellent control he has honed over half his life on the oil painting knife..."
Anna is going to recommend some works by mature knife painting artists in her impression to Detective Cat, hoping to give this African big sister a rough impression of the real knife painting masters.
Art is most afraid of working behind closed doors.
Many painters are not exposed to the trends of modern artists, and they feel that they are great after practicing half a bottle of water.
This is particularly evident among painters in some small places.
The Scholastic Group is known as the temple of illustrators and will not lower its requirements just because your drawing methods are unique.
Without mature artistic skills,
It is very difficult for a trial draft to pass the review of the art department.
It is not difficult to get started with knife painting. Even if you are new to painting, after two or three months of playing, it will not be a big problem for your paintings to look intimidating.
but,
The publishing house is willing to pay more than 100,000 US dollars for a set of illustrations, so it naturally requires more than just looking bluffing.
Whether the color can have good expressive power, whether the surface of the paint is dirty, whether the layers of the knife are uniform, whether the brushstrokes look stagnant...
This depends not only on the artist's own efforts, but also on her talent.
In short, it is easy to get started with the oil painting knife, but without a lot of practice, there is no way to draw well.
Even if you practice a lot, whether you can draw well or not depends on your fate.
This is the cruelty of art.
Anna doesn't expect Detective Cat to be as good as the famous knife-painting artists she calls her, but she does want to get a formal contract through knife-painting.
Without considering Osborne's help.
She estimated that Detective Cat must have at least 30% to 40% of the skills of artists who have spent half their lives immersed in unique skills, as she said, to be safe.
It’s not that the Scholastic Group has high requirements, but rather unpopular painting categories such as chalk painting and printed paste painting.
There are only a few painters at the top of an industry. If they can't reach a high point, they will end up in vain.
In her heart, she actually hopes that the painting style of Detective Cat can be based on the cornerstone of traditional popular painting methods.
Detective Cat is originally very good at drawing with colored pencils. Even if he does not switch to oil painting, switching to watercolor painting is an excellent choice.
The high-end water-soluble colored pencil painting method has natural similarities with watercolor painting, and many watercolor painters have experience practicing colored pencils.
No matter whether you want to win a prize or participate in an art exhibition in the future, it will be easier than being "obsessed" in the field of knife painting.
As your phone vibrated, a notification of a new message appeared in your inbox.
Detective Cat has sent in his own illustrations.
Ana was still typing, she just raised her eyelids slightly and glanced, then her fingertips stopped.
The complete high-definition illustrations processed by the art scanner are hundreds of megabytes in size.
Although the chat software WhatsApp has no file size restrictions on the photos sent. However, for such large files, only thumbnails are loaded before downloading.
Anna still couldn't see the details of the illustration clearly.
But with just one thumbnail, she was immediately keenly aware of the specialness of this illustration sent by Detective Cat.
Rose-colored flowers bloom on the golden planet. The boundless universe is like a clear veil covering the sky of the picture. There is a fiery red star rising in the east. The golden sunlight is like flying gravel from the veil of the universe. Slowly revealed.
Everything in the picture is as beautiful as a psychedelic and magnificent dream in childhood.
Anna blinked and was lost for a moment.
She took a gentle breath, stretched out her finger, and tapped the screen.
The network construction in Austria is relatively average, and the signal in the art museum is even worse. A white loading circle keeps rotating on the screen.
Anna frowned.
She knew that this would not help the download speed, but she still tapped her fingertips on the phone repeatedly, like a pianist playing a fixed chord.
An illustration, even just a vague shadow, is enough for an art critic like Anna to easily judge the artist's level.
Good things cannot become bad, and bad things cannot become good.
It's like an exam, with exactly the same subject matter, 80 points for excellent paintings and 30 points for poor graffiti, and the final picture is very different in terms of expressiveness.
But Anna couldn't tell the level of this painting.
beautiful.
Beautiful and almost perfect,
It was so beautiful that she couldn't tell how good a painting it was just from the first impression of the thumbnail.
Just when Anna was hesitating whether to go back to the car and use the WIFI in the car, her phone finally downloaded the illustrations sent by Ms. Detective Cat to the local computer.
The picture is automatically enlarged.
"Incredible."
An idea came to her mind.
From the moment she was born, Anna saw countless famous paintings.
Aesthetic, romantic, modern, classical, Renaissance... She even had close contact with medieval painters in the vault on the ground floor of the Vatican Museum, accompanied by a cardinal. There are several surviving tempera paintings by the inventor of oil painting, Jan van Eyck, which are the early prototypes of modern oil painting.
In a sense, it is more precious than Da Vinci's original handwriting.
What kind of oil painting has she never seen?
But it is rare for Anna to see someone as good as this detective cat work.
Stunning.
This is Anna's first impression.
Under a magnifying glass or a high-resolution electronic atlas, oil paint will appear to look something like the surface of the moon and cheese that has been chewed by ants.
These are the traces of varying shades left by the hairs of the brush on the surface of the paint, and they are also part of the texture of the painting.
Hard to avoid.
Even the picture treated with the oil painting knife is not smooth.
Whether it is the flat pressing method or the side pressing method, by squeezing the paint with the blade, it can avoid the wrinkles and cracks of the paint caused by different forces, like being swept by a fine steel ball.
But Detective Cat gave Anna a clean impression.
This picture is so clean.
This is not to say that there are no uneven traces of paint. This is impossible. An oil painting that is as flat as a mirror is not an advantage and will also lack sufficient layering.
However, in addition to the necessary paint layers and texture of this painting, Anna could not find any unnecessary scratches left on the paint by the blade of the oil painting knife.
One of the core issues in handling paint with a knife is that using a knife is not like using a pen. When the hard metal knife surface scrapes the surface of the paint, different knife marks are interlaced, and messy knife mark protrusions can easily appear.
Such messy traces will make the picture look chaotic and dull.
The painting of Detective Cat is very beautifully done.
Even the ridge-like or linear knife marks that are specially reserved to increase the layering of the picture are very neat and unified.
The whole picture is very relaxed, round and natural.
She stretched out her thumb and index finger to enlarge the picture and carefully admired the illustration from beginning to end. Even if it was enlarged several times, there were very few irregular knife marks on the paint.
"Is this dispersion caused by pressing out?"
Anna noticed that the paint in the painting was very expressive and distinctive. The light paint and the dark paint were regularly mixed and intertwined, full of mystery and dreaminess.
The more she looked, the more surprised she became.
This way of expressing color is really bold.
It seems that the hand uses different pigments as thin threads to weave a gorgeous spider web.
The strong charming colors and hazy chromatic aberrations add a fairy-tale feel to the whole painting.
"Mr. Sloth, do you have any suggestions about my illustrations?"
Detective Cat sent in a query.
Ana looked at the message she had not finished typing, shook her head, and canceled all the messages she had just edited in half.
Witness such a high-level masterpiece.
She didn't feel that any of the artists she just mentioned could draw better than Detective Cat, nor did she feel that she was qualified to point fingers at Detective Cat's works.
"Really good."
Ana hesitated, bit her lip and typed.
"...Ms. Detective Cat, I am very grateful that you are willing to choose me as your agent."
Looking at the illustrations sent by Detective Cat, Anna even felt a little sad.
She moved the pictures on the screen gently with her fingertips, staring at the paint that was still fresh enough to have not completely solidified in the pictures, holding her breath slightly, with pity in her cold eyes.
She couldn't imagine,
How much hardship does a painter have to endure and how much time does he spend in the studio day after day before he can become so proficient in using an oil painting knife?
Anna felt particularly honored that such a painter was willing to entrust her career into his own hands.
"I will make a contract soon. There is something I hope to explain to you in advance."
Ana thought for a while and said something anxiously.
"I will find a suitable contract for you and provide career advice. However, due to some personal reasons, I hope to be your agent anonymously as Mr. Sloth. Please do not delve too much into my real identity. This request I wonder if you are willing to agree?"
Already in the vortex of public opinion.
It is not convenient for her to directly sign a contract with the other party as Miss Elena.
This contract processing is not difficult. The reason why it is always easy to be targeted by money laundering gangs is because art trading has always been one of the industries that pays most attention to protecting privacy.
but,
Anonymous buyers and illustrators known only by pseudonyms are common.
But anonymous agents are relatively rare. Unless they are smuggling brokers engaged in the sale and purchase of black art in the underground art black market.
"Can't I know your true identity?"
Sure enough, the tone of the detective cat opposite seemed a little suspicious.
"It's hard for me to explain to you. Because of my own... family reasons, we can sign the contract through a professional accounting firm as a confidentiality intermediary. The accounting firm will also handle the division of the schedule, tax filing, etc."
"I assure you that there will be no problems with the contract. If you are worried, you can ask a lawyer to take a look."
Yangon, Gu's Book Gallery.
Gu Weijing was holding his mobile phone. When he saw Mr. Sloth's request, he just hesitated for a moment and nodded.
Although he didn't know why Mr. Sloth was so mysterious, he was very well-connected in the art circle and was indeed very kind to him.
This is enough.
Who doesn’t have a little secret?
His identity as an online illustrator is also a secret.
Nowadays, the grass-roots style of drafting on Fiverr is no longer suitable for him. From drafting to finance, he needs a more formal professional agent to handle everything.
"All right."
Gu Weijing thought for a while and said: "Let's make a gentleman's agreement not to ask about your identity, and you don't ask about mine. I'm just the detective cat, and you're just Mr. Sloth. Okay?"
(The next chapter is in the early morning. I don’t know what time it is when I finish writing it. Go to bed early.)
(End of chapter)
