Solo Air and Fire [Job thread #2]

[Trista]

85 Winter 514 There had been a fire. Trista couldn't tell exactly where the fire had been -- it was outside the city limits, somewhere out of sight. It probably hadn't been large either -- maybe nothing more than a downed tree or two. But nonetheless, as the Akvatari sat near the waterfront, sketchbook and pencils beside her, she could clearly see the tendrils of smoke grazing the surface of the Suvan Sea. It was, she thought, an excellent subject for a drawing, and also one that might give her something of a challenge. Since coming to Alvadas, she'd been doing more portraiture than anything else. It paid well enough, and enabled her to get a steady stream of work, but it would be a nice change of pace to do some nature drawing again. She took a very hard pencil, and began lightly blocking out the composition. Trista chose to look down the shoreline, placing the beach two thirds of the way to the left of the paper. The rest of the horizontal surface would be occupied by the water. Trista also added the horizon line, and the basic shape of a small fishing skiff that was passing by. Now that she knew where the parts of the drawing were going to go, she began by filling in the water. Trista switched to a much softer pencil, and started on the water. The waves were minimal, and so Trista rendered the ocean as flat, and very dark. It wasn't realism exactly -- true realism would require her to add some highlights and ripples -- it was more of a heightened realism, given that the black, expressionless ocean gave the picture some emotional tension that wouldn't have been there otherwise. She blocked in the skiff, which was pointed towards Trista's right. A figure, too distant to make out clearly, was standing up near the bow. She suggested it with a few medium strokes, just enough to indicate the shape. The rest of the skiff was filled in with a lighter pencil, giving the uneasy impression of a fragile box being slowly crushed by the surrounding darkness. Next, Trista began filling in the shore. She used a very hard pencil for the beach, in order to keep that section of the paper light, almost white. It made for a stark contrast with the night-dark water. The Akvatari then drew the trees that were just behind the beach. Their twisted trunks knifed into the sky, and she rendered them with a soft pencil, making them almost as dark as the water. Again, she drew the trunks and branches a bit more twisted than they actually were, in order to make the drawing more emotionally uncomfortable. The sky, on the other hand, she filled in with a very light pencil. She drew it as a flat gray, without clouds or other elements of interest. It was the blank slate of the end of winter, inscrutable and empty. The color contrasted with the trees and the water, but shared their unreadability. The Akvatari put down her pencil and stretched her arms. This whole process had taken well over a bell, and her forearms were cramping. Trista rotated her wrists, first in one direction, then in the other, trying to alleviate some of the tension in her body. When she'd gotten it down to a manageable level, Trista returned to the drawing. Almost all that was left to do was add the smoke. She chose a medium pencil, and then began making light, looping curves just above the horizon line. She repeated this process several times, producing a shapeless tangle that seemed to her to represent the amorphous clouds of smoke effectively. Then, she took her blending roll out, and ran it lightly over the smoke curls. This rendered them less distinct, more fluid -- which was what she was aiming for. Finally, she signed her name -- in the upper right corner this time, since the lower right was occupied by the dark water -- and added the date. Carefully, she blew on the paper to remove any excess pencil dust. It was, she thought, not a bad drawing. It wasn't an accurate representation of the scene in front of her, precisely, but that wasn't what she was going for. Certainly, it felt dramatic and ominous, and that reflected her goals for the piece. Carefully, Trista put the picture in her satchel. She would probably be able to sell this one down at the Bizarre, even though it hadn't been specifically comissioned.

[Trista]

Ah, the Bizarre. Alvadas itself was a truly strange city. Trista had been here for most of a season now, and she still didn't know quite what to make of it. It was constantly changing -- and Trista had certainly been in places that were often unstable before. But where Eloab, for instance, had been eerie and unsettling in its shifts from dead desert to buzzing unreality, Alvadas seemed somehow more playful. Playfulness wasn't really high on the list of Trista's character traits -- even her interest in anagrams and other linguistic games was more scholarly, more fierce than anything else. Nonetheless, she was hopeful that, even if the place itself wasn't a perfect match for her personality, she would be able to take elements of Alvadas and apply them in her art. At any rate, as odd as Alvadas in general was, the Bizarre ramped that oddness up by an order of magnitude. It was a series of contradictions that the Akvatari found impossible to fathom. How large was it? She couldn't think of any way that the interior could actually fit in the building, even through magical means. How many people were actually here? The largest city Trista had ever visited was Zeltiva, which was more than twice the size of Alvadas -- and yet, the Bizarre always seemed to have more people inside than she had ever seen in Zeltiva's most crowded spots. Why, given that the place was enormous, was it impossible to get lost inside the Bizarre and unable to find one's way out? Trista shook her head. It was better just to accept it, and not try to explain the inexplicable. That did seem to be the Alvadas way, after all. The Akvatari set herself down by the stall that she had rented. The work that she did on commission or while busking already had a buyer, but this was the best way to sell her other pieces, including the one that she had just done today.

[Trista]

"How much for this one?" Oh, how Trista hated that question. She was starting to get a better feel for pricing -- mostly by trial and error, and mostly in that she needed to charge more than she had initially thought -- but it was still the bane of her existence. To say that she had no fiscal sense was like calling the Valterrian "kind of a crummy day," or saying that the Syliran Knights "weren't fond of crime," or that the Zeltivans "liked boats." Money ran through Trista's hands almost instantaneously -- spent on art supplies, or dulcimer strings, or some shiny trinket that she saw. The best she could do was remember to pay her rent at the inn, and even that required all of her concentration. Frankly, if it weren't for the fact that she caught all of her own food, and could easily sleep in the open if need be, she probably would have died a long time ago. Fortunately, her Akvatari heritage made her remarkably tough physically, if not even good enough fiscally to qualify as a "financial idiot." Digressions aside, the person asking the question was a middle-aged woman, dressed in some kind of tunic that changed color at dizzying speed -- another Alvadan illusion. She was pointing at the drawing that Trista had executed that morning. "Five gold mizas," Trista said, a good deal more confidently than she felt. "Sold," the woman said, with an immediacy that made Trista curse herself inwardly -- she'd undoubtedly lowballed herself again. The woman handed the payment over, but then looked at the drawing again. "Is this nearby?" she asked. "Not too far away from the docks," the Akvatari answered. "Or at least, that's where it was when I was there." For a moment, the woman seemed surprised by Trista's deadpan response, but after a moment, she realized it had been a joke and laughed. "And did it look like this when you were there?" "Well, more or less," Trista responded. "The shoreline looks essentially like that, and that's where the trees are. The boat was there too, at least when I started drawing. But it's not meant to be entirely realistic. It's more a heightened-emotion piece, in the tradition of Akvatari artists such as Menamliosotia, with a bit of the techniques I picked up in Eyktol thrown in. The idea is for the value contrasts, and the slightly off-kilter shapes, to create a feeling of tension in the viewer." She paused there, wondering if that was more information than her customer wanted, but the woman seemed to be genuinely interested. "How do you get the ocean and the trees that dark?" "Mostly, it has to do with choosing the softest pencil I have, and going over the area repeatedly. It's also easier to do with a rougher paper, such as this one, although it's not that it can't be done on a smoother texture -- it just takes more going over the area and making sure to use a lot of hatching." "What's your name?" The woman seemed a bit embarrassed that she hadn't asked earlier. "Trista." "I'll remember you, Trista. You're a great artist -- and your work is so reasonably priced!" That last remark drew a bit of a groan from Trista once the woman had left the stall. She was glad for the compliment, and glad for the opportunity to discuss her techniques and ideas. She just wished she was better at the whole commerce part of art.

[Fable]

Grade Awarded!

Skills

➢ Writing +1
➢ Drawing +2
➢ Rhetoric +1
➢ Teaching +1
➢ Observation +2
➢ Negotiation +1
➢ Organization +1
➢ Planning +1
➢ Philosophy +1
➢ Storytelling +1
➢ Socialization +1

Lores

➢ Drawing: Smoke
➢ Alvadas: The Bizarre Bazaar
➢ Philosophy: The Impossibility of Alvadas

Comments

A nice little thread! Again, I really enjoy the amount of detail and effort put into drawing. Also, I just now realized she's "Artist - Trista". Shoot. Anyway, good work!