Getting the ball rolling

by **Penny Noor** on November 24th, 2017, 12:25 am

90th Fall 517AV
Precious Predicaments - Gallery and event center

Anxiety was eating her alive but she wouldn’t show it - or rather was determined not to show it and doing quite the poor job at it nonetheless. Hiding the wrinkled forehead and disgruntled expression behind a sweet smile, she still chewed her lips and hunched and paced backwards and forwards around the entrance of the gallery boat. A few times she even considered scaling the ramp onto the deck but, with a painful shiver down her spine that reminded her of her ever present fear, she quickly chose against it. When she chose this profession she expected it not to have so much to do with blasted water, she thought.

On the inside was her friend Aija, whose experience and good name around Alvadas she often employed to settle her doings at this venue. The two exchanged favours often however the plethora of tasks Penny would often do for the talented beauty, the repayment always seemed the same; sort out things at the Precious Predicaments.

The conversation was about the recent gallery theme the two women, aided by the expertise of Emirin Hilliard, had come up with. And whilst Penny helped with carrying all the large pieces of paper that contained the sketches of sculptures, drawings and canvases, scapms of colour schemes and the like, the job of actually pitching the idea to the family who ran the gallery was left completely down to Aija for she was far too afraid.

And the fear was of course irrational. No doubt about that. What was the boat to do? It had been parked at the patchwork port for years. Did Penny imagine it would suddenly unstick itself from the algae and clams that now littered it’s underbelly only to swim into the stormy, open Suvan? Did she imagine the wooden floor boards to suddenly open up beneath her and drop her into the dark blue chasm of water beneath the vessel only for her to become stuck and drown? Well… logically Penny did rule out all of these options and more but emotionally she could not 100% guarantee that such events would not occur. After all with her luck just standing at the port which, after the death of her father had never looked the same to her, could cause some great rogue wave to come and sweep her into the Suvan by the raging grace of Laviku himself. The imagination of an artist is both a great asset and a great peril.

Finally the familiar voices echoed once more around the doorway of the waterborne gallery. A crack could be heard and then slowly the door swung ajar. Penny’s heart rose to her throat and then some. For just a moment on the inside the two voices conversed, one being that of Aija and the other of what Penny could only presume was Charlie Hozier. Although no matter how hard she’d listen in, how sharply she narrowed her ears to pick out at least the tiniest bits of conversation, the young illustrator couldn’t make any definitive words out among the crackle of the waves.

by **Penny Noor** on December 4th, 2017, 8:34 am

Finally after what seemed like an entire eternity in it’s own right, Aija’s smiling face appeared from inside, armed with a whole bundle of paper. Once she descended down the ramp, what seemed to take even longer to Penny’s anxious mind that drew out every second to feel like nothing less than a decade, the illustrator quickly hurried to help her hold that bundle, smoothing away any fly away paper so that they wouldn’t get loose in the afternoon breeze and fall into the sea. With a delicate wave the Hozier bid them farewell from the top of the boat only to disappear once more and that was pretty much as much as Penny saw of the woman, nothing but a flash of white teeth.

“So….” Penny pressed.

“So?” replied Aija, arching her brows, acting as if she had no clue of all the things going through Penny’s mind. Giving away the game so easy wasn’t her style.

“So! What did they say? Or shall you keep me in suspense all day?”

“That sounds like a fun plan now, doesn’t it.” she laughed but chose to take pity on the clearly distressed Penny. “They like the idea. Didn’t take that much persuading although they want the work a little more seasonal. Some of the details are a little off, we still have to tweak much but as a starting point they seemed happy to exhibit us.”

“Seasonal? Seriously?” Penny arched her brow, thinking for the moment that the owners of the floating gallery were mad. She had a habit of this, being so certain of her own ideas being the best ideas before realising that others had opinions too. And sometimes the visions of others made sense.

“Yes, Penn. Winter things. It’s an easy adaptation to make with a bit of a colour scheme change. It won’t be that difficult. But since there is no way we’ll be able to get all the work finished and dry by the last day of this seasons, I can see why they’re insistent on that. Apparently they’re planning some winter events to get the customers coming in…”

“No no, that’s ok.” Penny cut her off. There was no fighting about this. The customer was always right after all and a girl has to pay the bills somehow.

“They loved the centre piece idea though. The statue with canvas painted backgrounds.”

“Oh did they? That’s at least good to hear.”

“Indeed. They’re expecting it to be a big hit. Now we just have to do it.”

“Yeah.. now we just have to do it.” sighed Penny as they walked towards her house up a street that was much steeper than in reality it should be but then again, such was the nature of Alvadas, to make everything difficult.

It brought her far less pleasure to work for others as she did for herself. Sure, she might have been used to it by now, but it still didn’t change the fact that the looming finality of the work she had to create was always an unquantifiable pressure she could do without. The anxiety of messing up a drawing, especially in the final finishing stages, only to have to start again. And what if she underestimated the amount of time it would take? So many things would go wrong especially when working to such a tight schedule.

She wondered how Aija did it. Often Penny found herself so very jealous of the woman’s paintings, of her skills. It was an honour to work with her and even greater an honour to call her a friend, but that was still not enough for the ambitious illustrator. She wanted to be her to an extent. To gather the accolades Aija gathered and be a known name in Alvadas. Well, Penny still had a long road to go and that drove her crazy.

by **Penny Noor** on December 4th, 2017, 8:55 am

Alas, after turning more blind alleys than should be possible in one city, the two made it to her little home and after a cup of tea and a quick play with the cat, the two friends parted ways, leaving the bundle of paper and ideas at Penny’s where she once more found herself alone. Well… alone with a cat.

It was then that the illustrator finally had the chance to decelerate. Behind closed doors when no one could see her and no one could accuse her of not having all her marbles in the air at once. For she was a bad juggler, even in the metaphorical sense.

Pulling a chair up to the table, she slammed her head on it and breathed. An invisible cloud hung over her. A pressure on her shoulders from no one but the weight of her own expectations of herself. It was those moments when she knew what she was going to create was not only going to be seen by other people but, gasp, BOUGHT by other people, that stressed her even more than water did. For work on commission was far unlike that in her sketchbook. It lacked the freedom. It lacked the permission to fail and experiment and be free artistically, truly free and so it became static and unyielding and just difficult. In drawing her mind set was everything. With a good mindset Penny could draw nothing good all day and still be satisfied that her work and therefore by extension herself was worth something. But feeling like this was a hurdle to overcome and it didn’t become easier with time.

She could feel a fuzzy ball of fur brush past her ankles. It was comforting to feel Lopi’s warmth even though he likely didn’t empathise with the problems of the importance of aesthetic in her life all that much. For him food fell from the sky and money was no issue coss rats were free.

Reaching down she gave the creature a quick scratch behind the ears, sliding her face off of the wooden table. Her body language was that of defeat before she even started but it was only temporary. A bell or two had passed and finally the artist started snapping out of her overwhelmed demeanour by the sheer force of becoming steadily and steadily more overwhelmed the more she thought about it. No work was being done when she was sitting there, staring out the window thinking about doing it.

by **Penny Noor** on December 4th, 2017, 9:31 am

Step 1. Tea. As all great artists know this hot beverage of their choice is utmost paramount to their artistic practice. It’s hot, both comforting and refreshing and gives one super powers to draw and take over the world at the same time. No lie. Penny liked to think such silly thoughts to give herself a little more confidence, as she poured the lukewarm at best liquid from the pot on her hearth into a large mug and bringing it back to the table. There from the stash of pages she pulled one that detailed the drawings she had envisioned and planned.

“Problem solving, Penny.” she thought to herself staring at the paper for a moment. “Think seasonal, think cold thoughts…. Easier said than done with a warm tea and a Lopi sock,” her foot stroked the thick cat fur as she sat down. “Lopi, sock...”

Mindlessly Penny doodled right on the edge of the paper a small, upside down U shape and then little rounded off marks around the top of it, bringing the two prongs of the letter together in a fluffy mess. Her hand then traced a rough shape of a cartoonish cat that at this point was something of a visual shorthand to her. She drew two almonds for eyes and line thin irises pointing in two opposite directions, giving the doodle a silly look that made her giggle. Only after finishing the sketch did she realise she was going totally off topic…

“Focus!” she buried her head in her palms once more, feeling a rumble in her stomach. It was a habit, work first, any kind of self care always came second and so she’d draw on an empty stomach an awful lot.

Again she came back to the task at hand. The first idea she saw nothing wrong with; a series of drawings of a couple dancing. This was going to be the first one she tackled for this was the easiest and so she pulled out a separate piece of fine grain that she kept only for these situations. A cold pressed, good quality, thick and absorbent paper but with less texture than most watercolour papers. It was perfect for drawing and ink work but so expensive she only used it for commissions. After all she hated canvasses. They were unnecessary and bulky and the whole process of stretching them and prepping them was a hassle, especially since her drawings looked so much better on paper. It saddened her a little that the media she used brought down the price but they also allowed her to work so much quicker than most contemporary painters, including her friend Aija. At the end of the day more work was more money, no matter which way one did the math.

She started off by sketching shapes. Every single sketch, and there was roughly 24 of them, started with a line of flow that she laid down lightly and roughly to loosen up the figures she drew. In front of her she opened her sketchbook that had some anatomical studies within it’s pages that she kept for reference but otherwise the dancing silhouettes of the lovers she drew came completely from her mind with little care for anatomy but more for the capture of motion. She wanted to give the pieces a feeling of true movement not that static life capture of overworked oil paintings.

She moved from one sketch to another really fast, spending maybe 30 seconds to a minute on each to lay down the starting components. Light sketched shapes, drawn with just the finest, lightest press of a pencil against paper would make up Penny’s character’s bodies. Ovals for the hips of ladies, squares for those of men atop which broad triangles of shoulders sat. The smaller drawings where the silhouettes were further away had but mere elongated triangles for legs, the suggestions of steps and round locals for heads that ended in singular lines of the spinal columns. The ovals would face themselves and she drew, sometimes a little crescent shape to suggest a nose and loose flowing hair to give the drawings a feeling to intimacy. The sketches portrayed the lives of these characters. They didn’t look out to the viewer but instead were wholly entranced in the simplified world that Penny created.

by **Penny Noor** on December 4th, 2017, 9:42 am

Her intention was not to be very precious. Preciousness slowed her down and allowed her to fall back into the dark chasm of “I can’t do this”. One of the perks of working on loose paper was that any sketches she didn’t like she could just discard. And Oh did she discard quite a few, turning the page over and starting more more dancers on the other side. She couldn't waste good paper after all.

Watch time she came back to a figure drawing she’d spend 30 seconds more on it `and move on. Her hand had the knowledge of how to draw bodies. She just trusted it to make the right marks. And so on this process went, adding just a little bit more to each sketch; first rough shapes then bolder, cleaner lines. Larger drawings had more detail whilst the smaller ones only bore the bare minimum, focusing instead on the delicacy and fluctuation in line strength and width to guide the viewer’s eye around the peace.

Once she was done with the first 20 she found herself enjoying the experience with every consecutive sketch, loosening up her hand more and so she drew into the late hours of the evening, ending up with almost 60 such sketches, giving her the freedom to pick and choose which clusters of dancers she liked the most. And so she settled on 5 instead of the original 3 pieces of paper that each had a few silhouettes of dancers on them. Those 5 pages she then moved to the windowsill to catch the rays of the setting sun and she took the drawings that one step further.

Inking the work wasn’t her favourite thing in the world to do, as the more advanced technique still paid her some problems but it did give her drawings that more creative, professional feeling. And so that was the medium she decided to go with. The only alternative would be paint and she staid about as clear off of that as she did off water.

by **Penny Noor** on December 4th, 2017, 10:00 am

First, Penny dipped a rather fluffy, natural hair brush in water and outlined the figures with clear water so that a thin film of gloss would cover the paper. Then with a much finer brush she dipped it in ivory black ink and touching just the tip from to the paper surface, hovering it so very slowly so that it would only touch the water and not the paper. Of course a couple times she’d accidentally touch the paper. It still wasn’t a technique she had perfected but she tried very very hard and did it very very slowly. It wasn’t the end of the world if she did touch the paper after all. In that tiny area eventually over the time the pigments would dull as the initial pressure sunk them into the paper fibres but it was such a minute detail that only the close eye of a trained artist, or many an Alvadas listener, would spot the difference. And for the kind of atmosphere that Penny was trying to create some duller patches created desirable texture.

Still this wasn’t an excuse for her to be lazy and not perform the technique correctly. And even though her hands would shake and she held her breath to the point of feeling lightheaded as not to disturb the water surface, she would still dot the brush down onto the paper so so very very slowly. The entire time her tummy grumbled, aching somewhat, feeling like it was slowly sticking itself to her diaphragm. And still she ignored it.

The moment the brush tip made contact with the water, all of the pigment would be sucked out from it and sprawl onto the paper with black, furry tentacles of pigment blossoms. In the moments following, as it dried onto the paper it would become more blended into the lighter areas in an array of greys and blues and browns where the pigments separated in water, giving the black some lovely hues. Where the pet met the dry, lines of texture would form, in some places harsher than others but this chiaroscuro of light and dark Penny did use to her advantage, creating smoky, night time effects of diffused light around the silhouettes of the dancers. Often she’d go back into the dry paper with some more wet pigment to create lines with her brush, just the faintest suggestions of shapes in the background. Some were clean, some less so as her hands shook and made mistakes that were quickly rectified by simply making the objects bigger, following over the line that was messed up with a larger line. All shapes but half a tone darker than what was already on the paper to suggest just a hint of a setting.

Penny trusted the ink to do it’s own magic however. She did very little to manipulate it. It was in her experience that the more she overworked paint work the worse it looked.

With the larger silhouettes she’d repeat the process with very very diluted ink in the clothes, again letting the pigment and the paint itself make the patterns instead of her painfully trying to capture the tones with a very limited skill set. The faces however, she left white as the paper. The contract she thought to herself was quite beautiful.

Once she was done with one of the drawings she inked another until all 5 were complete. She’d go back into the with an even thinner paint brush and undiluted ink and thicken up some lines to really drive home the focal points and the feel of movement in the studies but overall they were finished. And by that point the sun had set and her stomach was emptier than her cup of tea.