Almighty painter

Chapter 611 Six Cats

Gu Weijing looked at Awang on the tree and nodded firmly.

Bingo!

This is the feeling you want.

It is hard to say whether Awang is the Napoleon Emperor of the criminal world.

Gu Weijing looked at the lump on the tree, and he dared to pat his chest and assure others that it must be the king of stealing in the eating world.

From the fundamentalist perspective of the poem "Old Possum's Practical Cat Book".

If you really want to pick out the details.

There are some slight differences in the image and temperament between Macavity and Awang.

The difference between varieties is simple.

Their hair is ginger yellow.

Awang is a very fat and round tabby cat, and Macavity is a very tall and thin orange cat (? ).

Awang has a round face, while Macavity has a triangular face with high brow bones and deep eye sockets.

All these details of the differences in appearance, as long as they were mentioned in the book or required in the contract, had already been adjusted according to the employer's needs when Gu Weijing was making the prototype.

But the final result of the drawing, this cat on paper, still looks cooler, more flamboyant, and more...cute than in the original poem.

after all.

Don't care about those secondary creations.

The prototype of this cat character is Professor Moriarty, who is portrayed as a gloomy and evil person in Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.

With criminal traits flowing in his blood, he is the embodiment of sin, evil and vicious. He killed several detectives and finally died together with Holmes at the waterfall.

The poem describes it as a demon in the form of a cat.

Macavity walked like a hissing snake and would sneak into other people's homes in the middle of the night to strangle their poodles.

The temperament is more low-key than flamboyant.

More vicious than cute.

Although Awang also likes to "bully men and women", beat dogs, cats, and old man Gu, he walks in a coquettish manner that makes him easy to be beaten.

But Gu Weijing felt.

up until now.

He had not yet observed that Awang had the intention of trying to sneak into the bedroom on the other side in the middle of the night and murder Lao Gu.

Sitting on someone and using your body weight to squeeze the shit out of their intestines doesn't count.

In the bone.

Awang just simply thinks it's extremely cool.

Gu Weijing’s adjustment plan was not to make any adjustments.

Because he was doing the stage design for the musical "Cats".

Rather than Eliot's original poem.

This kind of personality change, on the contrary, fits perfectly with the new version of "Cats" on this global tour, and the musical director who is responsible for the plot arrangement wants to convey a different stage effect.

For a large contract worth $72, it is the most basic courtesy and professional ethics to maintain communication with Party A.

After attending the awards ceremony in New York, Jane Arnold flew directly to the stage in London's West End.

Gu Weijing did not go to watch the rehearsal and performance of the new version of "Cats" in person like Jane Arnold did.

But we often hold short video conferences in the ZOOM conference room to discuss and communicate on the direction of art design.

The format is similar to the last time I recorded a podcast.

Sometimes it was just him and Mr. Sloth, and sometimes Jane Arnold and the project's art assistant would be there to do multi-party negotiations and follow up on related painting requests.

For a top musical like Cats, which has been on the air for nearly half a century, the specific content of the performance will be constantly adjusted based on feedback from critics and rotation of the cast.

"Cats" toured the United States for a record-breaking 16 years.

Its vitality is amazing.

Some musical actors who are short-lived have careers that are shorter than the duration of a major tour of Cats.

Those dancing girls who started out playing the role of young kittens may end up getting married, having kids, and becoming aunts or even grandmothers.

therefore.

The plot will also be adjusted differently according to different tours and different casts.

It not only innovates the plot, but also injects different vitality into the classic stage play.

Simultaneously.

It also allows audiences who have seen Cats to still have the enthusiasm to go to the theater again after a few years and maintain sufficient freshness.

The nature of this type of adaptation is similar to the fact that after some movies are released, an "extended director's cut" will be released a few years later to be re-released in theaters and to sell more fan-oriented collector's DVDs.

The space for secondary arrangement available to a big-budget musical is much larger than the editing space available to a theater director to reinterpret the plot when faced with a pile of already shot films in a warehouse.

As long as it can sell better at the box office.

Any character can undergo drastic changes.

The most typical change is reflected in the protagonist of the show, "Charming Cat" Bella.

The early 1980s.

In the original version of Cats in London's West End.

Bella is about the same age as the old lady's cat, Jenny Dot, both of them are gray-haired, wrinkled, and no longer youthful.

Later, this character began to take on the personal characteristics of the actor who played it.

Sometimes the director begins to try to use some more "beautiful" young actors to serve as the mainstay of the show.

Sometimes, in local versions in different countries, directors will use actors of different ethnicities and skin colors to play Bella.

At the same time, the character background of Charming Cat will be constantly reinterpreted.

She was no longer rejected by the community simply because she was old, wrinkled, and ugly.

The stage director would boldly give her some more trendy and rebellious reasons, such as leaving the cat family on her own initiative because of her pursuit of individuality.

It is said that.

There will even be a "rock version" of the glamour cat.

When communicating with the touring project team, the other party told him about Mr. Sloth.

This version of "Macavity" will also be different from the familiar villains on stage before.

The director hopes to replace the negative concept of "evil" with the positive concept of "cool".

"Cats" is a family-friendly stage play, not a dark fairy tale that satirizes society.

What family-friendly stage plays really need are villains with the attributes of being "cute and interesting" rather than those with the attributes of being "terrible and profound".

"You know what I'm saying? It's like the difference in temperament between Tom in Tom and Jerry and Joaquin Felix's Joker." During the video conference, the young stage director gestured, raised the corners of his mouth, and made a smiling face while telling them: "Market feedback shows that the previous version of 'Macavity' was a bit too scary - there was also a setting related to murdering pets, and we learned that some parents were worried that this would scare their children. We hope that everyone can have a pleasant evening after entering the theater."

(Note: The picture shows Macavity in the musical.)
"It needs to make people laugh, and if they are going to cry, then I hope every tear is from being moved while singing Memory, not from being scared by the kids."

Therefore, in the new version of "Cats", Macavity will change the traditional stereotype of having fluffy hair like a lion and a face painted like an old zombie with green face and fangs.

It's like becoming cool and popular with kids.

Then Awang’s feeling is very suitable.

Look how much Jasmine and Budao like it!

This drawing is also the one that Gu Weijing has drawn for all the characters in Cats. It is the one that he is most satisfied with.

This one is more in line with the feeling I want to express in my heart than the one of the old patriarch.

Do you try to first imagine an image and then make the cat come alive in your mind?

It's like looking for fish in a tree!

It's not necessary at all.

There was a big fat cat weighing more than twenty pounds, squatting on a branch not far away!
The second-to-last cat sketch on the sketch paper is "Gus the Theater Cat".

Gus is a middle-aged male cat.

He once worked with the greatest actors of the old times, but now no one cares about him. He is also suffering from gout. His once flexible body now hurts a lot when he moves. Because of nerve paralysis, even a simple wave of his claws will cause his fingertips to tremble slightly.

The Theatre Cat makes his living by playing in clubs, on the charity of friends and by picking up other people's bills.

Anyone who wanted to give him a tip or buy him a free glass of gin was welcome.

The Theatre Cat would then begin to reel off some funny memories of his past performances, from playing a tiger to imitating a ghost with a hoarse voice.

After Gu Weijing thought about it.

In the title of a section in the collection of poems "Theater Cat Gus", keywords such as "bleak", "melancholy" and "funny" are written.

He drew a very skinny British shorthair cat.

This drawing is a sketch, but it is not drawn in pencil.

When drawing Gus, Gu Weijing used a liner pen instead.

He used the pen sketching technique of "painting black and leaving white" to contrast the bright parts of the objects with ink lines against a dark background.

The advantage of this painting method is that it can create a three-dimensional sense of alienation on the paper.

For example, water is colorless, so it needs to be highlighted by the black color of stone.

Sunlight is also colorless and needs to be set off by the gray of clouds.

Everything, from the flow of water, the hardness of stone, the warmth of the sun, the softness of clouds... these spatial textures must be expressed with the simplest contrast of light and dark colors.

Draw black and leave white.

Leave blank space, leave blank space. The so-called "leave blank space" is the same as "drawing black", and is drawn with brush strokes.

Good sketching.

To paint black is to paint white.

In the sketch on the sketch paper, a listless cat lies on the mat.

This is a big cat. Looking at its tall skeleton, people can imagine the power it had like a little tiger when its shiny hair was supported by its strong muscles a long, long time ago.

but now.

The cat on paper is older than the old patriarch Dutronom, and thinner than Macavity, who is "so thin that he almost floats in the air."

It lay there dejectedly.

The hair has become sparse. The British Shorthair cat's already short hair is now tied into small knots, and under the sunlight it looks like bald hair.

The tail that once made it proud was now carefully hidden under its butt, with only a mottled section exposed.

The opposite of Skinbox, who has shaggy, dense hair.

This cat encountered many men who, in middle age, were afraid but could not avoid facing the fact that:

It's like Mr. Gu.

Bald.

People can deceive themselves by applying hair growth products vigorously.

But not cats.

It's bald, it's bald.

Even Gus the Theatre Cat, who once roared like a tiger on stage, dressed up as a ghost to scare children, was once majestic - "chasing an Indian colonel and driving him into the gutter."

But now.

It's just a sad, bleak, bald cat with a funny tail.

When Gu Weijing was drawing this sketch of "Theater Cat".

The sluggishness of the body, the sparse spaces between the tangled cat hair, and the bald spot on the tail are all achieved by "leaving white space".

The blank space in the sketch is not nothingness, not air.

Nothingness is emptiness, it is philosophical loneliness.

There is no emptiness in color.

Even if it is transparent air, it should be fully diffused in every part of the drawing paper, supporting the weight of the brushstrokes of the entire work and becoming the carrier for the flow of colors.

White should be a very high-quality color in painting.

The blank spaces on Gus' body, when illuminated by light from different angles, take on thickness and weight, becoming a unique, substantial form with a bleak texture.

Gu Weijing calls this feeling of desolation "the color of bald hair" - in the white gaps, flows the world's malice towards old men.

Wait until the official drawing is ready.

When switching from pen sketching to watercolor, you can use exactly the same painting techniques.

Simply replace the dark black, light black, and different grayscale ink lines with cool colors of different brightness.

It will also look brighter.

pity.

Whether it is the little girl Jasmine or the fat baby Budao.

They are still too young.

Life in an orphanage provides plenty of opportunities for a person to experience the fickleness of the world, but children of this age still do not fully understand the helpless weakness of middle-aged men.

They were not very interested in the painting.

"The audience selection was not good. It seems that children are not very touched by this kind of painting."

Gu Weijing thought about it and decided that if his old classmate Gu was still struggling to paint Chinese paintings, he would give the painting of bald cat to Gu Tongxiang so that he could appreciate it.

See if you can swing the whip and whip the other person's soul to inspire him or her to strive for progress.

The last page of this set of sketches.

It is a big fat cat.

The cat curled up into a ball and sat on the drawing paper...

Ok.

Maybe he was just sitting there normally.

But when a cat becomes so fat that its belly is rounder than its butt, it looks like a big ball when it just sits there normally.

Bastof, the fattest and most plump cat in the world as described by Eliot.

In the musical, Bastof actually doesn't show any obvious personality traits, if his love of rice pudding doesn't count as a personality trait.

But the characteristic of being "fat" alone is enough.

He is fat and round, and walks like a bouncing ball.

No thinking required.

The agility of a cat plus the characteristics of a human, for this "Bastof", it is the roundness of Awang and the softness of Uncle Sakai.

(End of this chapter)