Almighty painter

Chapter 607 Painting Characteristics
Except for the first poem in the collection, "Naming the Cat", and the penultimate poem at the end, "Cat's Name", these two poems are summary poems of the nature of outline and summary respectively.

Gu Weijing counted them.

In "Old Possum's Practical Cat Guide", from the opening "Gumby Cat · Old Jenny Dot", "Brave Cat · Grotag with Missing Ears"... to the ending "City Cat · Fat Bustoffer".

The poet Eliot wrote about a total of twelve cats with different personalities and lives.

In the middle section of the short poem, "The Terrible Battle between the Lion Dog and the Berwick Hound," there are two fighting dogs as an interlude.

The musical will be slightly different.

Anderson Weber based this collection of cats on classic fairy tale poems.

He linked all the narrative poems about cats together on stage and narrated them in the form of stories.

The musical version of Cats is set in a London garbage dump at night.

Like those enduring urban legends, cats are spirits of the night.

The daytime in the city belongs to humans and their dogs.

At night, cats come to make trouble.

When people living in the metropolis fall asleep under the moonlight.

The cats gathered together secretly.

It was decided to hold a conference on "new life".

Every cat that comes to the meeting must tell his or her own story in front of the stage.

At last.

After listening to all the cats' stories about the past.

Led by their leader, the wise old Jackley cat Dutronomie, everyone will vote for the cat whose story is the most touching.

As a result, she will have the opportunity to be sent to the Ninth Heaven to gain a new rebirth.

The contract did not require Gu Weijing to submit a certain number of drawings, but it did require him to design cute cartoon images for at least the seven classic cat protagonists that appear in the musical.

They are -

The white-bearded chieftain "Dutronom" who presided over this cat meeting.

The elderly lady's cat "Jenny Dot".

The evil criminal master cat "Macavity".

Gus, a theater cat suffering from gout.

The friendly uncle cat "Skimblethornx".

In this new round of global tour, in order to distinguish it from the original London West End version that audiences have seen in theaters or on the Internet, additional plot design and singing arrangement have been made for the Fat Cat, which is the big fat cat "Bustover" in the poem that Gu Weijing just read.

Except for these six cats who have their own independent singing parts.

The last one left is the most important.

She is the core heroine of the entire musical, the charming cat "Bella" who was finally voted in by the Cat Congress and successfully ascended to heaven.

The drawings created for "Bella" are equivalent to the cover paintings provided to the publishing house, and they are the highlight of the entire contract.

After several days of hard work.

Until last night.

Mr. Sloth has taken him through the entire collection of children's poetry and the original stage play in London's West End.

This process didn't take much time and progressed unexpectedly fast.

When Gu Weijing read the book "The Blazing World".

He had seen it till his head was pounding.

As a science lover, the Duchess of Newcastle wrote that book just to tear apart Hooke, the president of the Royal Society. So under the guise of a "time-traveling female dragon", the whole book is full of complex discussions about utopias, experimental philosophy, theological debates and metaphors to Julius Caesar.

It is a book that gets thicker the more you read it, and the more information you have at hand.

Cats is the complete opposite.

Fresh and unpretentious.

It is different from other philosophical fairy tales like "The Little Prince" which are written for you to read a second or third time after you grow up and have very profound contents.

It's not even like "One Thousand and One Nights" or "Grimm's Fairy Tales", which are actually very bloody and violent in nature, and are full of folk tales with social metaphors.

The purpose of the Grimm brothers collecting Germanic country fairy tales was to organize the social customary law traditions and conduct legal research. They were not written for children.

"cat".

Whether it's a poetry collection or a musical version.

Its narrative style is that of a very standard family-friendly children's fairy tale.

The main feature is the low threshold and no understanding cost.

The author hopes that elders can read it to their children as a bedtime story, and that kindergarten children can sit in the theater for a whole night without crying or making a fuss, and then go home happily, smiling, holding the action figures and cat dolls bought by their parents.

The threshold for understanding couldn’t be lower.

After Miss Elena spent an hour reading all the dozen short poems from beginning to end to Gu Weijing, and then spent another night watching the entire musical from beginning to end together on streaming media, the first and second acts of the musical were watched together.

Anna thought.

It's enough for Detective Cat to be familiar with the plot to this extent.

It's a waste of time to nitpick on words.

Detective Cat can now skip the part of reading the thick book and go directly to the next stage of "streamlining and reading it thinly".

“Paintings with low creation and appreciation thresholds are often the most difficult paintings. Round faces, pointy ears, stripes on the body, beards hanging down the sides of the face, these things can be drawn by top painters, ordinary painters can draw them, and even children who have just started school can draw similar things in their textbooks when they are bored.”

Before we ended the call last night.

Mr. Sloth said so.

"So why do these works, when put together, have such different appeal to the audience? There are two main factors. One is the technique, which determines to what extent the painter can restore what he sees in his heart onto paper. It determines whether the picture is detailed enough, whether each brushstroke is where it should be, and whether the color tone is neither too glaring nor too dull."

"Excellent techniques can provide a safety net for creators and give painters enough room for error. Techniques guarantee the lower limit of a painting. Even if there are no good ideas, or even the choice of painting ideas is not very good, the techniques can still be used to pull it back."

"As for your technique, I have nothing to worry about. The remaining key is whether it is vivid enough."

“Loveliness in terms of emotion and loveliness in terms of painting skills are two different concepts.”

“It is only meaningful to talk about techniques to project emotions onto paper when the painter has emotions to express.”

The agent continued.

"Take this contract for example. If these cute cats don't really live in the painter's heart during the painting process, then the cuteness of the painting technique is like a book on sand, even if it is not a painting on water. Once the wind blows, it will be forgotten in a blink of an eye. There are so many famous paintings about cats in the world, how can our works be remembered?"

“Perhaps for the commercial company behind the musical, as long as your drawings are realistic enough and look cute, and can attract customers to buy two big dolls at the souvenir shop next to the ticket counter before or after the show, and give them home as gifts for their girlfriends or children, then they have met their requirements.”

“But since we want to achieve something at the Singapore Biennale, we have to hold ourselves to higher standards in the face of fierce competition and challenges.”

"So—I'll leave you a little homework."

Mr. Sloth tapped the blackboard. "Before you start painting, please think of a characteristic for each cat. Take a poem of several hundred words, and reduce it to the core few words. These words are the core selling point of the painting, the most attractive characteristics, and what you want to convey to every viewer who sees the painting."

“It doesn’t have to be too complicated, but it has to be intuitive enough, and it has to have some characteristics that can ‘come alive’ in them. Cats is a stage play in which actors play cats, so the best works—”

“It needs to have the agility of a cat on the outside and the spirit of a human on the inside.”

Mr. Sloth concluded.

"Although time is tight, I think if you can spend some time to prepare these cats in your mind, let them sing, jump, chase and play on the stage of your mind. Then, when you really start to paint, it will be much more convenient and the effect will be much better if they run out of your mind instead of you drawing them."

Sharpening the knife pays off in the process of chopping wood.

If the process of drawing those illustrations for the publishing house during this period taught Gu Weijing any important life lesson, it was that when he was out of ideas for painting, he would never go wrong if he listened to Mr. Sloth.

"Come, look at this, help me think about it, do you think my drawing looks like it?"

Gu Weijing took out a sketchbook from the yoga mat.

He typed a simple sketch for each cat in the musical.

He wanted to ask little Loli Jasmine to help him check whether these simple drafts were accurate enough.

He opened the first page in his sketchbook.

It depicts an elderly cat, the patriarch of the Jackley cat family.

Dutronomie.

When Gu Weijing read the poem, he was always wondering what "Jackley Cat" was.

At first he thought it was some strange breed of domestic cat native to England, and after searching Google for pictures for a long time he still couldn't find a standard answer.

The result was that Mr. Sloth told him the omnipotent Tinker Bell, who seemed to know the standard answers to all literary questions.

It's actually a pun.

These poems were all written casually by T.S. Eliot to read at family gatherings to entertain his grandchildren.

Once, the poet found that his little niece, who was just starting to get teeth, could not pronounce the phrase "dear little cat" because of air leakage in her mouth.

In the mouth of a child with a lisp, these three words put together always sound a lot like "Jellicle."

A sudden idea occurred to him.

In the poem, he created a group of cats that do not exist in the real world, the Jellicle cats.

So its correct meaning should be a soft and cute little cat.

The Jackley cat drawn by Gu Weijing in the sketchbook seems a little too old.

When you are old enough to realize that its breed is actually a "soft and cute kitten breed".

It actually seems to have a comedic tone to it.

Skinny.

His long beard almost reached the ground.

The circle of long white fur on his chest, like a small scarf, looked like a goatee. He squatted on the ground, his eyes looking into the distance.

"It's a picture of an old cat."

Jasmine commented.

Little Budao was also attracted by the big sketch book.

He gave up thinking about the lines on his palm, crawled over using his hands and feet, and looked at the paper in front of him with curiosity.

"Kitten...cute." Budao touched the sketch paper with his palm.

This is a bit confusing.

Gu Weijing felt that he roughly understood what Budao was trying to express.

correct.

He tried to make the cat have both the grimness of an old cat and the cuteness of a kitten.

They sound like two completely opposite things.

But this is a fairy tale image designed for children.

Gu Weijing hopes that the moment people see this cat, they will feel that it is an old cat, a cat whose old age has lost its practical meaning, and a longevity elf among cats.

Instead of the photos of Jane Arnold's son, where Amy was so old that she could no longer jump onto Tony's head, an old cat that made people want to cry and could die at any time.

The patriarch cat in "Old Possum's Practical Cat Guide" was originally a similar image in the poet's writing.

The poem says that it is the oldest resident in the cat kingdom.

No one knows how old he was.

As early as "before Queen Victoria ascended the throne, the wise Dutronomie had already become the patriarch of the Jackley family."

The cats spontaneously love and respect him.

When he sat on the main road in the market, dogs and herdsmen would spontaneously drive the mooing bulls and bleating sheep out of the market.

Villagers would even respectfully post "Road Closed" signs at intersections, fearing that passing cars and trucks delivering goods would disturb his nap.

"Nothing in the world is more important than this!"

This Jackley cat is too old.

He is not so old that people feel he will die at any time, but he is so old that people feel he may live forever.

Mr. Sloth said.

In order to win the award, every cat he draws should have the agility of a cat and the spirit of a human.

So what is the spirit of man?

When Gu Weijing read the poem entitled "Old Dutronomia", he thought of Mr. Cao Xuan.

Back to Basics.

Rejuvenation.

When Cao Xuan was a child, many of the elders and painters around him were still living in the Qing Dynasty, and had witnessed the last glimmer of light of two thousand years of feudal history.

Throughout his life, he witnessed the tremendous changes in the ancient Eastern country.

From being stale and backward to being full of vitality.

When old man Cao Xuan was almost a hundred years old, he no longer looked like an old man. He was still energetic and full of vigor, but his words and actions began to become a little childish.

It's like living a second life.

The old one has taken on the innocent childishness.

Mr. Cao possesses the temperament of both a centenarian and an innocent child.

(End of this chapter)