The Versatile Master Artist

Chapter 666: Chapter 306: Pandora

At first glance, everyone stayed silent, holding their breath gently, feeling it had a certain chewiness.

It didn’t have the outrageousness of “Corpse Burning Furnace”, yet carried its own hidden charm.

Perhaps it’s because the Painting Knife Painting makes it difficult to express the intricate facial expressions of characters.

Perhaps Detective Cat’s depiction of human facial features hasn’t reached the immersive level she attains when painting cats.

Or perhaps, after Amy left, Tony’s expression in photos always appeared uniformly spiritless and bewildered.

In any case.

The primary subject in the painting draft is vague.

Once Amy was replaced by Tony as the main character on the canvas,

Detective Cat, contrary to her previous meticulous and beautiful depiction of cats,

simply used the flat edge of a pear-shaped oil painting knife, dipped in paint, to roughly indicate the facial features of the character.

Eyebrows, eyes, ears, nose, mouth.

The painter simply brushed them over the canvas lightly, sketching them casually.

Their sole purpose was to prevent the painting from looking like a bizarre faceless person.

If Tony’s image were extracted from the canvas,

then this portrait would be completely incomparable to the liveliness of Amy in the earlier dozen paintings.

Nor would it be on the same level as the gentle and affectionate eyes of the little boy in the “Little Prince” cover art once created by Detective Cat.

This is a very perfunctory and rigid person.

However, the atmosphere of the whole painting’s background is anything but perfunctory and rigid.

The highlight is the background — although in the real photo the background is just pure white mountains, under Detective Cat’s brush, it’s depicted as beautifully grand and luxurious as an illustration of Frederick the Great’s court banquet.

The snow-covered mountains look as beautiful as the fairy-tale palaces.

The patterns formed by the white snow condensing in the air, the beech, linden, and Norway maple leaves neat the foot of the Alps in Southern Central Europe, are all vividly depicted by the painting knife.

Tony’s profile faces the sun directly.

Under the painting angle chosen by Detective Cat, the sky and mountains become flattened, and the sunlight shining on the leaves from various angles creates an unpredictable wondrous sight.

“Amazing.”

Her shown ability to masterly depict the environment with a painting knife hit the sweet spot of landscape painting master Professor Boggs.

The old man was thrilled watching it, incredibly delighted.

He marveled with praise.

This level of knife precision as a foundation, polished clearly, is a promising seedling that could specialize in natural scenery painting!

“A fairy-tale scene, dreamlike and fantastical, with light and shadow swaying. She gave the same colors different meanings.” Jean Arnou nodded slightly.

He believed that what was truly interesting in the painting draft was the handling of light.

The snowfield looked like a mirror focusing the sky’s sunset, rendering the ground with a uniquely soft pink texture.

Looking closely.

Detective Cat still heavily used cadmium orange as the theme color on the canvas.

The same color.

Under different light, different brightness completely portrayed different effects.

The burning fierce flames in the “Corpse Burning Furnace”, despite the high temperature capable of engulfing everything, only made the audience feel a chill to their bones.

In this current painting, the pale, flowing pink-orange light on the snowfield.

Clearly, Detective Cat painted a snowfield, yet the audience could still feel a warm atmosphere spilling out from the screen.

The cadmium orange continually gathered and condensed on the snowfield, finally concentrating under Tony’s feet.

Where the shadow should have been pitch black, a burning lively cat phantom was formed.

At first glance, viewers might believe it wasn’t a shadow but rather a cat crouched at his feet.

“I think I understand her idea, interesting… A rare treatment… Too rare.” Professor Boggs furrowed his brow slightly.

Subject of oil painting.

As long as the painting features people, the focus must always be on them, and only them.

An excellent portrait should actively guide viewers’ visual focus to remain on the figure’s face and even their pupils.

Anything else is just noise.

If the environment is too complex and the figure too thin, the painting will confuse the viewer, making the main focus unclear and the guests outshining the host.

In Professor Boggs’s “Amy”, the painting’s subject is always the cat.

As a result, in all his works, Tony only appeared partially.

A pair of eyes peeking from under the hairline, an arm pushing a ball… The purpose of this was to prevent conflicts between the humanoid figure and the cat for the viewer’s attention.

Yet,

In this painting, the evident subject is Tony, but the focus is the environment surrounding the person, which doesn’t follow the textbook art philosophy.

Overemphasizing irrelevant details in painting is one of the classic mistakes made by Art Academy students who are first introduced to portrait painting.

Professor Boggs has seen countless of them.

He murmured to himself because Detective Cat’s unconventional painting mindset didn’t produce a poor visual result.

To describe it more accurately.

Regarding the expressiveness of this painting draft,

rather than saying it’s chaotic without sequence, with a disjointed atmosphere between figures and scenery, it’s more to say… Detective Cat’s treatment has a lot of Eastern charm.

It also has an ancient style.

This involves the philosophical divide in Western art history concerning the oil painting of figures.

In art history, when people discuss Dutch painters and art styles, they mention the “two Vans (van).”

Undoubtedly, the most famous Dutch painter in history is Van Gogh, but in terms of lasting impact on art development, perhaps his compatriot from five hundred years ago, Van Wied, surpasses him.