In the video,

Thomas looked at the frame in Anna's hand.

He clasped his arms together and said to the judges, "I assure you that this is not the effect of the arranged show. Two paintings that are almost identical, ...... I first received the drawings."

Even he, a vlogger, was a little incredulous when he first received the art delivery.

Thomas thought something must have gone wrong, that a painter must have copied a copy of his painting and sent it in.

He even had his studio employees double-check the order to determine that the two paintings were by two completely different artists.

"They're all beautifully drawn, right, they're all incredibly good......"

As a vlogger who doesn't know much about art, when Thomas first saw these two colored pencil drawings, he was simply shocked by the vivid restoration of the brushwork.

"Utter mistake."

Anna mercilessly interrupted the other party's attempt to confuse the two illustrations.

"This illustration is excellent."

She placed the first frame she had turned over on the table and stared down at the remaining illustration.

"And this painting ...... It's truly incredible. ”

"But the two paintings look almost identical. What's the difference? ”

Thomas touched his chin in confusion and looked at the bearded uncle and the dreadlocked guy to the side.

They also shook their heads in confusion.

"Of course you don't understand, after all, you ......"

Anna hesitated for a moment, and her good upbringing made her not say the evaluation of "mediocrity" in the second half of the sentence to her face.

In her heart, 99 percent of the people in this world are mediocre.

These people may have a successful enough life in the eyes of ordinary people, but their souls are still chaotic.

Art appreciation, for Anna, is the process of using one soul to understand another.

Philistines can distinguish between beauty and ugliness, good and bad, but they cannot discern the difference between good and outstanding – seemingly infinitely close and infinitely distant.

The difference between 98 points and 100 points is never as simple as two points.

It is for this reason that the wealthy Florentine merchants in history had the courage to point fingers at Michelangelo's sculptures. Van Gogh will disappear in the sea of people, Gauguin will be regarded as a madman, generations of geniuses are lonely, masters are lonely, and only a few lucky people can understand them.

I am such a lucky person.

"Miss Yelena, I'm really confused right now, can you tell our audience about the basis for your judgment. Why do you give completely different evaluations of two paintings that are almost the same? ”

Thomas saw that the other party was slow to answer, so he asked.

The girl was silent for a few seconds.

Anna has an almost sickly cleanliness for art.

Being able to feel the excellence of this painting, she sees it as a special soul bond between herself and the master, and she is not willing to share this bond with other ordinary people easily.

However, after all, I am here to be a judge.

Out of professional ethics, she bit her lip and said, "If you can't intuitively feel the excellence of this painting, the easiest way is to do it." You can ask your photographer to give a close-up shot with a five-fold magnification...... No, magnify 10x zoom, as long as you can guarantee clarity. ”

The video cuts to a zoomed-in shot of the illustration in Anna's hand.

Thomas's video production team used Hollywood-grade professional camera lenses, and the 10x magnification is still sharp and sharp, with almost no distortion visible at the edges of the frame.

"This hand sketch is so beautiful."

Mrs. Sakai exclaimed that when they were in the long shot, they could only see the general outline of the painting when they watched the video.

Only Professor Sakai, who has the most experience in painting, vaguely felt the difference between the two illustrations.

At this time, the picture is magnified by the lens like a magnifying glass, and the brushstrokes become clear instantly, and you can even see the direction of each line.

Let's not talk about the content of the painting, but the sketch brush is completely master-level.

"At this level, if not colored pencil drawing, it is a way of painting that has only been invented in the last century or so. It even gave me the feeling of visiting a 19th-century court art exhibition, as if it had been recreated. ”

Professor Sakai is also looking at the pencil skills of this painting.

Whether the artistic expression of painting is spiraling upwards or whether it is inferior to the present is a cliché.

However, in terms of traditional painting techniques, compared with the masters of a century or two ago, today's painters may not dare to say that they are better than others.

For a long time before the invention of the camera, painters were considered to be people who could magically keep time.

They have the responsibility of recording history and major events just like historians, and painting is not only a kind of artistic creation, but also a kind of work to record reality.

It was the golden age of realist painting.

From Frederick the Great's court balls to Madame de Pompadour's art salons in Paris. From Napoleon's self-crowning, to Queen Victoria's accession to the throne, to the battleground of life-and-death struggle between Tsarist Russia and the Ottoman Empire in muddy lands.

Any historical occasion that shakes the world has the shadow of a painter with a paintbrush in hand.

The daughters of the upper class and the handsome young painters are in love. The great painters, wearing well-dressed tuxedos, wore medals from the emperor on their chests, and walked freely through the court with their heads held high.

But today, the art form is on the verge of decline.

The microphone in the hands of journalists and the clicking camera in the hands of photographers have replaced the paintbrush in the hands of painters, and the art of painting has completely metamorphosed into a purely aesthetic form.

Practitioners are more chasing abstract concepts that can be sold for a large price, and there are many people who are good at sketching, but few people who are so good at painting.

But Professor Sakai thinks that the power that impresses him in the dark is not just a good sketch, it is so simple.

What is it exactly?

"Wait, Katsuko, look at it, it's not just the sketches that are good, the muscle lines—"

In the right half of the video, there is a photograph that Mr. Hyperion provided to the seven illustrators to use as a reference for illustrations.

At this time, Uncle Sakai finally seemed to have discovered something terrible.

He didn't even care that it was a crowded café.

Professor Sakai slammed the table and waved the coffee cup in his hand, as if he was watching a fan who had spotted a World Wave fairy ball at the World Cup.

"Perfect! Pretty! It's remarkable! He said loudly.

In the video,

Anna is also comparing the muscle lines in the photos and illustrations.

"In realistic figure painting, naturalness and precision are the highest praise for muscular lines. This is extremely difficult to do. Even if you are a great painter, it is difficult to completely restore the slightest muscle activity of a person, and if you want to deliberately imitate it, you often go in the opposite direction. ”

"Matisse, the founder of Fauvism, once put forward the artistic slogan of "precise is not natural."

"Probably the best in the world of illustration in this regard is the Norman Rockwell I mentioned to you, who was a student of the anatomical painter George Burriman, and inherited the virtues of the old gentleman."

A hint of regret flashed on Anna's face: "Old Mr. Burriman is recognized as one of the world's top anatomical painters, but unfortunately, he has devoted his whole life to the study of muscle curves and the teaching of drawing methods, and his own works of art are very few. ”

"However, I didn't expect it at all. In this picture, even with a magnifying glass, I can barely find a trace of unnatural and uncoordinated muscles. This surprised me more than the sketching skills of the painter himself. He really managed to achieve the perfect unity of naturalness and precision. ”

"So Mr. Matisse, you are wrong, it is not nature that is deliberately precise, but perfect precision can achieve harmony with nature, and this painting is proof of this."