Completed [Job Thread] "To The Artist"

[Aislyn Leavold]

80th of Summer, 515 AV

On the 79th day of summer, 515 AV, a letter was slipped under to door of Aislyn's abode, concealed in a small white envelope sealed with a simple stamp. The envelope had just one word written on it’s back, ”Artist”. It was simplistic, and if Aislyn had actually specified her name anywhere on any of her advertisements, would have been rude.
Inside was more of a note than a letter, on a piece of parchment only a few inches wide. It was strange for such a small demand to come in, but perhaps not entirely unnatural. Maybe the patron just had very, very small handwriting.
Or, it seemed, as Aislyn investigated the note, very few demands.

”To The Artist,


Surprise me.
I’ll pay 50 gold."

Well then.

This had to have been the strangest request Aislyn had ever received, and over the seasons, she had received quite a lot. Various requests for portraits of animals, plants, strange things, small things, big things, common things. Buildings like Ionu’s Mercy, or the gate to the city. Even specific people the artist had been assigned to find and draw. For those cases, however, Aislyn often ended up taking a much more liberal, abstract route. Geometrically inspired portraits roughly reflecting the character that was described. She’d always had some basis, that she would infect with her own style. Usually, that went well.
This time, though… This time was different. No basis, no starting point. Just surprise me. And for a fair amount, too. Fifty gold pieces, enough to get her about a fifth or a sixth the way through the season. Her prices, obviously, had never been set on the advertisements she'd sent out, instead relying on the common sense of the people to get her through. Though this didn't always work out, most of the time it earned her a living wage; one that was fairly good for an artist with no expectations.

Flipping the note over, Aislyn found more writing. Or rather, an address.

The Acumen Asylum
91st of Summer

So that was her deadline, then? The final day of the summer season, a fortnight away. Usually, such a far-off deadline would result in the artist pushing off the work until, most of the time, she had no days left to reschedule. This request, though... This one required care.
And besides, Aislyn had nothing better to do.

Collecting her materials was almost an automatic sort of movement, retrieving items from where they had always been, and always were. Her sketchbook from the smallest table, her charcoals from the chest by the bed. Routine, routine.
After that, it was time to improvise.

[Aislyn Leavold]

Familiar streets in unfamiliar places passed by as Aislyn went on her walk, footsteps setting into a sort of calming rhythm. The woman was rather good at blocking out sound on her walks, whether she had a purpose to or not. It was an acquired skill, in her opinion. It made her seem far more alone. Which she liked.
It seemed abnormally quiet that day, though. The woman had, of course, zoned out as she collected her items, but finally coming off of autopilot made her notice the absence of sound. No birds chirping, no bears roaring, no people screaming as they were swept away by a flash flood and/or silk sled. Even as people walked by her, nothing.

No footsteps, no wind, no cheerful hellos.

It was glorious.

It was so much better than simply tuning people out. No matter how good Aislyn was, she couldn’t remove a person’s voice from their mouths. Only Alvadas, glorious Alvadas, could do that. It was a city-wide mute.
There were many visual illusions that Aislyn loved, but this, by far, was her favourite auditory one.

As she made her way down the streets in search of an idea, the artist took the time to appreciate the silence. She walked to the side of the street, slowing her pace. It felt more like a vision than a true experience, really. Aislyn was surprised she hadn’t noticed earlier, if she was honest. Perhaps she was too good at tuning people out.


In an attempt to test the silence, Aislyn began to whistle. She went through all the same motions, all the same precepts, but no noise came out. Not even the sound of air moving. It was so strange and so nice at the same time.

Forcing herself to concentrate on the task at hand, Aislyn looked for something to draw. Surprise me…. Surprise me… What would someone that entrusted 50 gold to a stranger want to see on a piece of paper? What would they enjoy? If she just knew a little more, maybe she’d be able to start on something. Maybe she could sketch the image of the Asylum. That must have some importance to this mystery person, mustn’t it? If they’d managed to arrange to pick up a piece of art from there, they must visit often. Which, being an asylum, was rather worrying.
Perhaps Aislyn would have to visit.

It wasn’t a bad idea. She hadn’t been to the Acumen Asylum in recent memory, or, as she thought about it, ever. For some reason, it had always been a place in the back of her mind. She know of it, but not about it. She’d heard whispers of it being a secretive sort of school, when people still whispered about things like that. But the question was, if it was a school, why was it called an ‘asylum’? It couldn’t be both, could it? Learning arithmetic one day, learning how society worked the next. It was a rather morbid concept, if she thought about it.
Aislyn would definitely have to visit.

[Aislyn Leavold]

The Acumen Asylum was a rather peculiar place.
It was old, yet new at the same time. The main entrance was covered in vines, in an almost woven pattern that continued up the walls. In some places, the vines even broke through the windows of higher rooms. It reached several stories up, in an off-center kind of way that made it difficult to really tell how many floors the building really contained. Not all the windows lined up, as if the floor wasn’t the same height in all places.
It was almost patchwork, with a sort of architecture that no sane person could have designed by themselves.
Then again, perhaps that was the intent.

In the silence of the evening, Aislyn tried to notice everything. There were plenty of things that, in theory, she could use as her subject. They were all good things, of course, and she made no lack of notes to return to the Asylum when she had more time. However, none of them were quite right. They didn’t seem like things that someone who wanted a surprise would be satisfied by. What would someone like that want? A surprise, a surprise…
She’d come to the asylum for answers, and found more questions.

Maybe she could draw the vines, or maybe the sunset, whenever that happened.

But she’d done that before. That wasn’t a surprise. Well, maybe it would be a surprise to this mystery patron, but not to her. And that made all the difference. She needed something new. It was like a challenge, for her to find something new to draw, in a new place, all before the sun set on the horizon. Which gave her a bell and a half, at most.
What hadn’t she done before?

Well, she hadn’t strayed outside her medium of charcoal much before, except to paint, but she couldn’t learn a whole new method of art. Maybe she could change the subject? But that would mean drawing something she didn’t know how to draw. Without a reference. She could use colour, but that meant using a resource that was limited. She couldn’t do that for a commission she’d never see again.
What else was there?
Words. Maybe she could put words in it.

That was something she’d never done before. She could combine things- a unique topic, and then put something on top of it. What words she’d add, Aislyn hadn’t figured out yet. Maybe something about surprises.
The only question after that was what goes underneath the words?
She couldn’t just draw words. That wouldn’t be art, it would be writing. And Aislyn wasn’t exactly the best writer. She stuck to her medium, and her medium was art. A medium that, contrary to popular belief, was not absurdly easy.
She had her work cut out for her, that was for sure.

[Aislyn Leavold]

Aislyn started her search for inspiration where any systematic person would. The front door.

Dancing her way around the flower beds and across the cracked cobblestones, Aislyn peered into the great entrance of the Asylum. The air was still, and, of course, silent, giving the place an air of desertion. The woman had no idea if she was alone or not, the silence of the day being very misleading. It certainly seemed abandoned, but Aislyn, of course, couldn’t be sure, since there was no way to be certain. She, of course, couldn’t see anyone as she entered what appeared to be foyer, but that didn’t mean no one was there. After all, this was a school, was it not? It couldn’t be entirely abandoned, because, unless all classes were cancelled, there had to be lessons going on.
The image of someone trying to teach a child how to do arithmetic without being able to speak was an amusing image. Aislyn had never been to school, and didn’t feel like she’d particularly missed out. A repetitive schedule, every day, returning to the same things with the same people every day, day after day, wasn’t her cup of tea.

In a city like Alvadas, what kind of fun was doing the same thing, over and over again? Even learning wasn’t worth that, no matter how fascinating. Aislyn loved learning, of course, but school was simply not the way to learn. Books were alright, as they could be moved as easily as anything. There was a difference between reading the same book in the same classroom every day and reading the same book in a tree one day or a rooftop the next.

Inspecting what appeared to be a roster on a dusty table in the center of the room, Aislyn found a list of names and… Subjects. A class list, it seemed.
Scanning the list, Aislyn found a particular box that caught her attention.
Drawing -- Miss Rihea
Painting -- Miss Rihea
Art classes. Surprisingly, Aislyn hadn’t predicted that.

School classes were for things like language, or mathematics. Plain, colourless things. She’d never considered the idea of art being taught. After all, drawing, painting… They all seemed like very personal things. Like Aislyn was the only one who could pick up a charcoal piece and draw a recognizable image. She’d never really interacted with other artists before, which raised the question; would she be willing to?
She had sworn to herself, so many seasons before, that she’d make an effort to change her life for the better. Was this not an opportunity?

Shaking her head, Aislyn told herself she had a job to do. She’d debate art classes later, for now, she had to find something to surprise a certain patreon.

A surprise… A surprise.
If Aislyn ordered a drawing, what would be surprising?

The woman tried to put herself in the frame of mind of her commissioner. They- whoever they were- must have had money. The ability to purchase art on a whim, with full trust in the fact that ‘surprise me’ would be enough instruction to get what they wanted out of an artist, showed that mizas were of no obstacle. Not to mention that the pickup location, the Asylum, was a relatively prestigious place. One, two hundred mizas per season for classes. That begged the question, why the Acumen Asylum? What was this mystery figure’s connection? Did they work here? Take lessons here? Or were they more towards the Asylum part of the equation?

Were insane asylum occupants allowed to order art pieces?

[Aislyn Leavold]

Brushing the majority of a heavy layer of dust off of one of the desks, Aislyn took a seat. In all reality, she only succeeded in covering her hand in a thick layer of grey, but sat down nonetheless. It was just one image, one drawing. In the long run, it didn’t really matter all that much. If she just put her mind to it, sat down, and drew, eventually she’d create a sketch she’d like. So that’s exactly what she did.

The first sketch was relatively primitive, just the classroom she was sat in. The seats were filled with ghostly images that could, if you squinted hard enough, possibly be children. There was no teacher, and Aislyn had, admittedly, been a bit lazy around the edges. She didn’t particularly like the picture, and, after just a few chimes of drawing out the blobby figures, abandoned the idea.
The next idea was the vines that had been climbing up the walls outside. But she didn’t like that either. It was too much of a pattern, repeated dully over and over again, even as she tried to add dimension to it.
No amount of fine details, no matter how much Aislyn hated them, could fix a picture that was simply boring.
The next sketch followed the same pattern. A window, each pane a different view outside. An interesting concept, but Aislyn didn’t like it in practice. She just couldn’t get the perspective right.
Three crumpled up pieces of parchment later, the artist decided to change state again. Something about the atmosphere… The feel of the room, the stuffiness, or something. She just needed some fresh air, then an idea would come to her. She couldn’t force it.

Thirty chimes of not forcing it later, Aislyn was left sitting on a window sill of another abandoned classroom, notebook on her lap and a single charcoal piece staining her fingers, but all art supplies otherwise packed up. On her way there, she’d happened across a music lesson, that, of course, with the lack of sound, wasn’t going very well. Aislyn had observed the teacher trying nonetheless, showing silent fingers over frets, to demonstrate the proper way to place one’s fingers on a mandolin.
Despite the lack of sound, they made do. Maybe the woman could learn something from them.

Sighing, Aislyn glanced up at the sky, finding the sun to be setting at a worryingly fast pace. The fall nights ushered in an ever-sooner sunset, which, though wonderful (because it gave her more hours of dark), was rather problematic for one that needed to see. It would be dark soon, and then what would she do? Usually, she finished commission sketches- preliminary, at least- in a day. Darker, permanent lines could be done in a single session as well if she tried. Colouring, if it was needed, then took all day. But now, she’d been out for at least a bell, wandering Alvadas, and eventually the Asylum, to no avail. Plenty of sketches, but none quite right.
Ideas she had, but they weren’t any good.

Absentmindedly, Aislyn flipped her notebook open to a blank page. It wasn’t what she was meant to be doing, but she enjoyed drawing the sunset. It was easy; without colours, it was just a circle on the horizon. At least, when she was lazily sketching in her notebook, it was.
It was peaceful, in a frustrating way. It was so easy to draw something so simple, yet there was always the fact that she had something else to be doing that hung over her head.
She just needed an idea. Any idea.

Looking down at the mess of a sketch that had formed on the page, Aislyn had an idea. Whoever had ordered the drawing would be surprised no matter what, really. They’d have no idea what was going to come their way, and therefor, her drawing didn’t have to be a ‘work’ drawing. It could just be a polished sketch. Something she drew as a hobby- to learn how to draw. She had the artistic freedom of everything, but she was wasting it up on a rooftop watching the sunset.
Well, not wasting. The sunset was quite nice.

Maybe venturing outside what she was good at was not the way to make things unique. The piece needed to be good, else she’d receive an unfavourable result. So maybe, a combination would be in order. A compromise.
What a wonderful idea.

[Aislyn Leavold]

And so it was decided.
A combination piece- words, art, maybe even colours, if Aislyn found the need. The sunset, first and foremost, forming the background of the picture. Then, in negative space, words. Negative space was a wonderful medium, and the artist used it surprisingly rarely considering how much she loved it. She’d just need to find something to cover up the space, to make nice, neat lines. She could use the scrap sheets of parchment she’d used for sketches to cover up the space, then draw around it.
Dangling her feet over the edge of the windowsill, Aislyn took out a blank slate, a new piece of decent quality parchment. Resting on her notebook, she began to sketch the horizon as quickly as she could while still retaining the shape of the sky. A large circle, surrounded by smaller, blobby shapes. Clouds, in various densities of the charcoal. In the absence of colour, shading helped quite a bit with the dimension of the image.

Squinting at the sunset, Aislyn managed to get the rough shape of Alvadas’s streets and, beyond that, the sky, before the sun disappeared, leaving Akajia to rule the landscape. For a moment, she let her hand rest, taking the last moments of sunlight to reminisce. Drawing was relaxing for her, though not without its occasional frustrations. She’d gained her skill from boredom and drawing something almost every day on loose sheets of paper she’d find around her home. As she got better, the drawings got bigger, more time consuming. Up until the day she’d decided to find herself her second job, she’d never considered her art ‘work’. It was just something she did, that she was good at. Not something people paid for- no, she wasn’t good enough for that. But, low and behold, people did. And now she was sitting in the window of an insane asylum wondering what surprise me really meant.
All in a day’s work.’

Dragging her charcoal, blunt side down, over the edges of the image, Aislyn smudged the dusty medium, effectively filling in the image of the sun. She needed to work on containing the smudge within what she was smudging, instead of accidentally dragging it outside the lines. The ability to smudge was charcoal’s virtue and downside. When it was on purpose, it made shading things easy, but when it was on accident, it could easily ruin a drawing. It was messy, and could be easily wrecked on accident if not contained properly. Aislyn had more than her fair share of charcoal stains on almost every item of clothing she owned. Smudges, smears, and chalky accidents led to a whole lot of long term washing to be done. It was, however, Aislyn’s favoured medium, and a hard one at that.
She was, of course, hoping to learn how to paint, but there was no replacing her beloved charcoal.

Scrutinizing what she had drawn, Aislyn wiped her hands on the sill beside her, creating little streaks of black that faded to grey. Her hands were almost always covered in charcoal, to some extent, whether she made an effort to avoid it or not. That was another downside of charcoal. It was very, very messy.
The upside, however, was how satisfying it was to complete a piece.

As Leth finally took over in the sky and Aislyn began to have to squint in order to see what she was doing, she took a look over what she had done. It was a little fuzzy, thanks to her lack of ability when it came to keeping her hand from resting on the page as she worked, but otherwise a quality she liked. She had a sunset, with several strips of paper guarding a strip in the center from being marked. Around the edges of the paper were tiny versions of the Asylum’s vines, crawling into the image. On some of the leaves, Aislyn had drawn symbols, just to make the drawing seem more interesting than what the artist was able to create. One leaf held the image of an inverted triangle, the other a very very small bird that was little more than a couple of lines in the shape of two wings and thin legs. One particularly large leaf held an image of a stick figure-esqe person picking up a scroll, the next leaf on the vine had the same figure opening it. The final leaf had a little rectangle with a circle lying on top of a line within it, meant to represent the drawing with the sunset in it.
The artist loved adding in tiny bits of personality to her drawings, even knowing that the majority of them would be overlooked.

When she removed the protective strips of scrap paper, Aislyn was left with a fresh new part of her drawing to work on. Using what charcoal had rubbed off on her fingers, she finger-painted a message into the blank space.

Surprise!

[Kaleidoscope]

 

Aislyn

Skills

• Drawing: +2
• Observation: +2
• Organisation: +1
• Planning: +2

Lores

• Alvadas event: ‘Hush’ 80 Summer 515 AV
• Alvadas location: Acumen Asylum
• Acumen Asylum: Offers art classes

Comments: Despite it being one of your only threads in the season, it was very fun! I enjoyed Aislyn's thought processes. The detail you put into the drawing was certainly very nice too. Keep up the good work.

Enjoy your grade, and please don't forget to delete/edit out your grade request. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to send me a PM.