Almighty painter

Chapter 123 Contract (Xie Meng)

(Thanks again to Alstonke for his great leader)
"You should have received a draft request from the Scholastic Group, right? Is it a draft contract or a formal contract?"

Anna thought for a while, and asked a question that concerned her most.

When a painter signs a contract with an agent, there will be a complicated and professional legal contract, so naturally it cannot be handled with just a few words.

But now,

With a simple agreement.

She can already officially intervene in the work of Detective Cat as an agent.

It was difficult for Anna to ask questions before, because large film companies or publishing houses generally have confidentiality restrictions on ongoing draft projects in order to prevent the film lines or novel plots from being leaked in advance.

It is not easy for outsiders to intervene.

But even the strictest confidentiality agreement will not restrict painters from sharing their work with their agents.

The agent agent is the closest partner in the painter's career, and in many cases is one.

"Contract for trial draft. They asked me to draw an illustration inspired by the first section of Chapter 8 of "The Little Prince."

"Are you finished?"

"Well, but the sample draft has not been officially sent to the mailbox of the project assistant."

"Still insist on painting with a knife?"

Anna confirmed again.

"Yes, painting with knives is very suitable for the temperament of the theme of fairy tales."

"Then before you officially submit, please send me a copy of the sample draft. Drawing with a knife is a very difficult method of drawing. I am now your agent, and I need to test the performance of your picture first to decide what to do. Do you want to change the painting method?"

Anna reminded earnestly: "Be 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 Cat.

On the contrary,

Instead, she hopes to "kill" Detective Cat's prestige.

Many painters have wasted too much time and energy on inappropriate paths.

In his early years, Van Gogh hoped to become an expert in sketching, Manet compromised with the traditional academic school in order to obtain the official recognition of France, and even Picasso spent a lot of time studying pottery and sculpture... All of these were mistakes in Anna's opinion unscrupulous behavior on the road.

Painting with a knife is even more unorthodox.

At least...it's a rough, rough trail.

"The difficulty of painting with a knife lies in the fine control. The best at this point may be Boggs, a professor at the Brooke Art Institute in the United States, who is especially good at depicting the weather. It is said that he can complete a painting within an hour while collecting wind in the wild. A mature, small-scale illustration of a snow scene, thanks to the mastery of control he's honed over half his life at the painter's knife..."

Anna is going to recommend to Detective Cat some of the works of mature knife painters in her impression, hoping to give this big African sister a general impression of a real knife painter.

Art is most afraid of working behind closed doors.

Many painters do not have access to the trend of modern artists, and feel that they are great after practicing half a bottle of water.

This point is especially evident in the painters in some small places.

The Scholastic Group is known as the temple of illustrators, and they will not lower their requirements just because of your ingenuity in painting.

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 painting with a knife. Even if you are new to painting, if you play for two or three months, it will not be a big problem if the painting looks bluffing.

but,

Publishers are willing to pay more than $[-] for a set of illustrations. Naturally, the requirement is not just to look bluffing.

Can the color have better expressive power, whether the surface of the paint is dirty, whether the level of the knife is uniform, whether the strokes seem stagnant...

This depends not only on the artist's own efforts, but also on her talent.

In short, the oil painting knife is easy to learn, but without a lot of practice, there is no way to paint well.

Even with a lot of practice, whether you can draw well depends on fate.

This is the cruelty of art.

Anna doesn't expect Detective Cat to have the level of those well-known knife painting artists in her mouth, but she wants to get a formal contract by relying on knife painting.

Regardless of Osborn's help.

She estimated that Detective Cat must have at least [-] to [-]% of the skills of those half-life artists who have been soaked in unique skills in her mouth, to be safe.

It's not that the Scholastic Group has high requirements, but rather unpopular painting categories such as chalk painting and printing and pasting painting.

There are only a few leading painters in an industry, and if they fail to reach high places, it will be nothing but nothing.

In fact, she hopes that the painting style of Detective Cat can be built on the cornerstone of traditional popular painting.

Detective Cat was originally very good at drawing colored pencil drawings. Even if he didn't change to oil painting, it would be an excellent choice to switch to watercolor painting.

The drawing method of high-end water-soluble colored pencils has a natural similarity with watercolor painting, and many watercolor painters have the experience of practicing colored pencils.

Whether you want to win awards or participate in art exhibitions in the future, it will be easier than being "obsessed with obsession" in the field of painting with knives.

As the phone vibrated, a reminder of a new message came from the inbox.

Detective Cat has sent his illustrations.

Anna was still typing, but she just slightly raised her eyelids to sweep, and the movement of her fingertips stopped.

Full HD illustrations processed by art scanners can be hundreds of megabytes in size.

Although the chat software WhatsApp has no file specification restrictions on the photos sent.However, for such a large file, only the thumbnail is loaded before it is downloaded.

Anna still couldn't see the details of the illustration.

But with only one thumbnail, she immediately keenly noticed the specialness of this illustration sent by Detective Cat.

Rose-colored flowers are blooming on the golden planet, and the boundless universe is like a veil covering the sky in the picture. A round of fiery stars rises in the east, and the golden sun is like flying gravel from the veil of the universe. Slowly reveal.

Everything in the picture is as beautiful as a psychedelic and magnificent dream in childhood.

Anna blinked her eyes, lost for a moment.

She took a light breath, stretched out her finger, and tapped the screen.

The network construction in Austria is relatively average, and the signal in the art gallery 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 kept typing on the phone with her fingertips, like a pianist playing a fixed chord.

An illustration, even if it is just a vague shadow, is enough for an art critic like Anna to easily judge the artist's level.

Good cannot become bad, and bad cannot become good.

It's like an exam, with exactly the same subject matter, 80 points for excellent paintings and 30 points for bad graffiti, the final picture performance is very poor.

But Anna couldn't tell the level of this painting.

beautiful.

Pretty, almost perfect,
It was so beautiful that she couldn't judge how good a painting 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, the mobile phone finally downloaded the illustration sent by Ms. Detective Cat to the local.

The picture is automatically enlarged.

"Unbelievable."

Such a thought came to her mind.

From the moment she was born, Anna has seen countless famous paintings.

Aestheticism, Romanticism, Modernism, Classicalism, Renaissance... She even had a close contact with medieval painters in the Vatican Museum's vault in the bottom floor of the Vatican Museum accompanied by a cardinal. The inventor of oil painting, Jan van Eyck, has a few surviving tempera paintings, which are the early prototypes of modern oil painting.

In a sense, it is even more precious than Da Vinci's original handwriting.

What kind of oil painting she had never seen before.

But Anna seldom sees the level of this Detective Cat work.

Stunning.

This is Anna's first impression.

Under a magnifying glass or a high-resolution electronic atlas, the oil paint will show something between the surface of the moon and cheese eaten by ants.

These are traces of different shades swept by the miscellaneous bristles of the brush on the surface of the paint, and they are also part of the texture of the painting.

hard to prevent.

Even the picture processed by the oil painting knife is not smooth.

Regardless of the flat pressing method or the side pressing method, when the blade squeezes the paint, it can avoid the wrinkles and cracks of the paint due to different forces, as if being swept by a fine steel wool ball.

But Detective Cat gave Anna a clean impression.

This picture is really too clean.

It’s not that there are no uneven traces of paint. This is impossible. An oil painting that is completely as smooth as a mirror is not an advantage, and it will also lack sufficient layering.

However, in addition to the necessary layers of paint texture in this painting, Anna did not find any unnecessary scratches on the paint left by the blade of the oil painting knife for the time being.

One of the core problems in painting with a knife is that unlike using a pen, when the hard metal knife surface rubs against the surface of the paint, different knife marks are interlaced, and messy knife marks protrude easily.

This messy trace will make the picture look chaotic and dull.

The painting of Detective Cat is very beautifully handled.

Even the protruding ridge-like or linear knife marks that are deliberately reserved to increase the sense of layering in the picture are neat and unified.

The whole picture is very relaxed, round and natural.

She stretched out her thumb and forefinger, zoomed in on the picture, and carefully appreciated the illustration from beginning to end. Even though it was enlarged several times, there were very few irregular knife marks on the paint.

"Is this the dispersion produced by pressing?"

Anna noticed that the pigments in the picture are very expressive and distinctive, the shallow pigments and dark pigments are regularly mixed and intertwined, full of mystery and dreaminess.

The more she looked, the more surprised she became.

The expression of this color is really too bold.

It seems that different pigments are used as thin threads to weave a gorgeous spider web by hand.

The strong charming colors and hazy color difference add a fairytale feeling to the whole painting.

"Mr. Sloth, do you have any suggestions for my illustrations?"

Detective Cat sent an inquiry.

Anna looked at the message she had just entered, shook her head, and canceled all the messages that had just been edited halfway.

Witness such a high-caliber masterpiece.

She didn't think that among those knife painters she mentioned just now, anyone could draw better than Detective Cat, and she didn't feel that she was qualified to point fingers at Detective Cat's works.

"Really good."

Anna 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 felt a little sad.

She gently moved the pictures on the screen with her fingertips, staring at the fresh paint that hadn't completely solidified, she held her breath slightly, and there was pity in her cold eyes.

she can't imagine,
How much hardship does a painter have to endure, how much time is spent in the studio day after day, to be able to master the way of using oil painting knives to such an extent.

Anna felt extremely honored that such a painter was willing to entrust her career in her own hands.

"I will make a contract soon. There is one thing I hope to explain to you in advance."

Anna thought for a while, and said something nervously.

"I will find a suitable contract for you and provide you with career advice. However, due to some personal reasons, I wish to be your manager anonymously as Mr. Sloth. Please do not delve into my real identity too much. This request I don't know if you are willing to agree?"

In the whirlpool of public opinion.

It is inconvenient for her to directly sign a contract with the other party as Miss Yi Lianna.

It is not difficult to deal with this in the contract. 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 pay the most attention to privacy protection.

but,

Anonymous buyers and illustrators known only by pseudonyms are common.

Anonymous brokers are rarer.Unless it is a smuggling broker engaged in the sale of black art in the underground art black market.

"Can't I know your real identity?"

Sure enough, the tone of Detective Cat on the opposite side seemed 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 confidential intermediary. The accounting firm will also handle the schedule sharing and tax returns."

"I assure you that there will be no problems with the contract. If you are worried, you can consult a lawyer."

Yangon, Gu's Book Gallery.

Gu Weijing was holding the mobile phone. When he saw Mr. Sloth's request, he hesitated for a moment and nodded.

Although he didn't know why Mr. Sloth wanted to be so secretive, but the other party was very well connected in the art circle, and he was indeed very kind to him.

This is enough.

Who doesn't have a little secret?

Isn't his identity as an online illustrator also a secret?

Nowadays, the grass-roots team on Fiverr is no longer suitable for him. From drafting to finance, he needs a more formal professional agent to handle.

"Ok."

Gu Weijing thought for a while and said, "Well, let's make a gentleman's agreement, we won't ask you about your identity, and you won't ask me about mine. I'm just a detective cat, and you're just Mr. Sloth. Okay?"

(The next chapter is in the early hours of the morning. I don’t know what time it will be after finishing writing. Go to bed early.)
(End of this chapter)