Completed Painting at the orphanage

[Valo]

18nd of Fall, 512 A.V.
The Farson Home for Orphans
Evening

The little girl sat very still with a smile on her face. She had loved Valo's drawings and trembled with excitement as it was her turn to be a little model. Anxious for him to finish, she would attempt to look over the paper and he would lift it out of her sight with a cheeky smile. "Be patient." he urged.

He used a thicker paper today, well stretched to fit the medium. It wasn't often that he worked in ink, but today he brought his best brushes and a calligraphy pen. It was just another medium to master.

Thinning the ink with some water, he dipped the pen and began to sketch out the rough outline of her eye. The ink barely showed up, but it was enough for the keen eyes of an artist. With few simple structural lines, both eyes were now in place and he began working on the shape of the nose. Very little and round and perky, frosted with tiny freckles. They would become the finishing touches. Eventually all the shapes and outlines were in place. The sweet smiling face of a the girl emerged out of the paper. Her head tilted slightly adding sweetness to the overall mood of the work.

Valo produced a box of seven shades of water paint from his bag. Two shades of red, two shades of blue, two of yellow and white. He rarely used any more than that as he believed a real artist can mix his own shades of paint. With a few washes he filled in the white of the paper and finally added details like the freckles and eyelashes with his pen. At the sight of the painting, the little girl jumped with excitement. As he knew he would not be able to sell the painting, it became a gift of gratitude to the little girl.

[Valo]

Valo had returned tot he orphanage over the next several days. He would paint in the morning, doing a vast array of still life. Beautiful delicate printings of simple items, fruit etcetera, on large canvases of geometric textured patterns. He would then help out with the children in the afternoons and paint portraits in the evening. And he did this so frequently that the children began calling him uncle Valo.

There was a sense of serenity about the orphanage. Beyond the sheet of squalor and sadness was a floral universe of juvenile imagination. A world in which he had amerced him self so eagerly. A world of a vintage hue, where everything was not at all what it seemed. This feeling inspired him. It produced such meticulous art work with Valo's hands, as if it was the walls them selves who had taken control over his hands and painted. He indeed began submerging him self in the frivolous mentality of the children. After all an educated mind must find the most flamboyant of ways to amuse it self.

In this ritual Valo had produced one painting which seemed to shadow all the others with it's beauty. A very large canvas, almost reaching his own rib cage. A perfect rectangular shape in which the vertical sides were twice the length of the horizontal sides. There was something wonderful about such a shape and Valo contemplated it during the stretching of the canvas.

The painting it self was a small pot of brown glass which seemed scratched and old and within it were several brushes with red handles and mangled bristles. The small object sat alienated among crisp geometry which Valo had observed that morning. There was the line of the window which took up two thirds of the painting with its dark ebony frames. There once was a beautiful woman who sat upon that window, but this pot had solemnly replaced her. The scenery behind was out of focus and the buildings were nothing more than smudges upon the canvas. The surrounding walls were textured so that a darker layer of paint loomed from beyond a lighter, which had been applied once the previous one was dry. The dry paint seemed to soak up the medium from the paint, leaving the matt feeling of the pure white pigment on top.

There was also a curve of a shadow looming from the very right of the painting. The shadow of his own shoulder at the time when he was painting it. And that shadow was the same lamp black colour as the light reflecting bristles of the brushes. A simple technique to give the painting a seance of unity.

Valo's brush work seemed to be improving. instead of neatly blending every colour into another, he wasn't afraid to leave a harsh spot of light where it was needed. In fact the whole painting was made up of brush marks which described the forms, rather than depicting them. So it was only a distance away that the true photorealism of his work could be noticed. Close up the intricate webbing of marks and colours seemed to confuse the eye.

[Valo]

It was the third day into his painting at the orphanage, that Valo began experimenting with surfaces upon which he painted. He once brought in a couple of sheets of thin wood, which was not polished so that the oil medium of his paint could soak into the grain. He loved how the matted pigments looked and how this effect could not be replicated with any other kind of paint, on any other kind of surface.

He produced a series of three paintings of flowers he had brought in, each in similar brown glass pots. He waited until the flowers began wilting slightly, and then placed their delicate forms in the very corners of the wooden surface. Once again keeping the actual objects very small inn comparison tot he actual size of the painting. They however were positioned so that soft diffused light fell on them, showing every intricate feature of the plant, all the discolourations and the shrivelled greenery in all it's magnificence. And with this, there were long and equally as detailed shadows upon the walls.

The actual paintings were studies of textures of the walls. The exquisite ways in which only oil paint could replicate the peeling of paint, the roughness of wallpaper. The colour palettes of muted mints which he observed in whites; the gentle lavenders in overbearing rusts and reads. He was in love with colour.

Valo had noticed that everything he was ever taught about colour was wrong. Shadows were not always purple. Sometimes they were yellow and sometimes red and sometimes a mix of the three. Similarly the leaves and stems of a plant were not always green. the pinks were not always pink, just like yellows were not always yellow. It seemed an artist's job to lift all those other tones and clashing tints from beneath the block colour which was form. And this made the plants and the pots seem as if they were truly alive.

Colour theory was a handy tool, he thought to him self as he was mixing a particularly interesting dark. Stepping away from convention, he left the tube of black pigment in his bag, which was much too imposing for his tastes, and decided to mix his own. Now teachers had always told him that if one wanted to make a dark colour, he would take the three primary colours, yellow blue and red, and mix them together. But Valo did not agree. He didn't want a brown, but a warm and a very dark grey.

Scientific thinking was a strong point for Valo. He dabbed his brush in ultramarine, which was a warm blue and created the most vibrant of purples with pigments such as permanent violet or rose. But instead of choosing those cool toned reds, he mixed it with a cadmium red light. A warm toned red with a strong tendency toward orange, similar to vermilion but much softer in nature. Anyone would have thought that this combination would make a really ugly purple, but it wasn't the case. For there cadmium red completely cancelled out the purple undertones in the blue, creating a muted dark. Not a black, not a brown and not a purple. Just dark. The absence of colour, which was what shadows were made of in his mind.

Thinning this with some linseed oil, he created a soft wash over the underneath texture of the painting, creating a soft shadow of a lilly on the background.

[Valo]

On the tenth day Valo had a whole collection of fine paintings. Each one better than the other, although he would not allow praise. In an artist's eye, his work could always improve.

Despite his modesty, he eventually gathered quite a crowd of people who were interested in his paintings. Some were art critics and some merely rich individuals who looked for something new to decorate their homes with. The series of three flowers seemed to have earned him the largest sum, as the elderly man who bought it commented endlessly on Valo's sophisticated and elaborate colour palette. He seemed almost delighted to see how each colour was created with such meticulousness and thought.

[Echelon]

Adventurer's Loot A Gift Experience is its own reward. Val's Loot : Valo Skill XP Reward Drawing +2XP Observation +1XP Painting +1XP Flower Arranging +2XP Lore: Mastery of Mood Primary Colour: Complexity From Purity Mutual Gift: Experience For Memory Vintage: Painting One's Own Youth Canvas: Body of Paint Exaggerated Contrast: Life From Inaccuracy Patience and Persistence Simplicity of A Wood Canvas Always Experimenting Sensuality of Oil Painted Texture Painting: The Discipline of Learning That Everything You Have Been Taught To See Was Flawed Items or Consequences: SP +8 (Time and care given rarely goes unnoticed in Zeltiva) Notes: You really ought to work on carpentry skill if you wish to construct your own frames and canvas. (I find it interesting that you never mention how weary Valo must get, or how he keeps up such contestant stamina of passion. I'd very much like to see was occurred within Valo some time during his working stints, not just without and on the canvas. Just because he doesn't introspect does not mean that we, as the audience, should be robbed of the experience. Just a thought. Oh, and if you ever find occasion to spend time with the children again, or write another post in which you did perhaps you could converse with them, even if not Valo is a strong enough artist now to hold conversations with his subjects in general, if you want to spice up the threads a bit. After all, an artist must truly know his subject, in many ways, to capture their... essence.) - if you have ANY questions or concerns about this grading, please PM me.