(Thanks again to Alstonke for the big leader)

"You should have received a request from the Scholastic Group, is it a trial contract or a formal contract?"

Anna thought for a moment and asked a question that she was most concerned about.

The matter of a painter signing an agent will have a complex and professional legal contract, which will naturally not be handled well in two verbal sentences.

But now,

With simple conventions.

She can already officially get involved in the work of detective cats as an agent.

Anna was not good at asking before, because large film companies or publishing houses, in order to prevent the leakage of movie lines or plots in advance, ongoing manuscript projects generally have confidentiality restrictions.

It's hard for outsiders to meddle.

But even the strictest confidentiality agreements do not restrict artists from sharing their work with their agents.

The agent agent is the painter's closest partner in his career, and in many cases is one.

"Manuscript contract. They asked me to draw an illustration inspired by the first verse of chapter 8 of The Little Prince. ”

"You're done?"

"Well, but I haven't officially sent the sample to the project assistant's mailbox yet."

"Or do you stick to the knife?"

Anna confirmed.

"Yes, knife painting is very suitable for the temperament of fairy tale themes."

"Then send me a sample before you officially submit it, knife drawing is a difficult way to draw. I'm now your agent, and I'm going to test your graphics to decide if it requires you to change your drawing style. ”

Anna reminded seriously: "Make it clear in advance, I won't relax my request easily. ”

She was right.

Anna will never relax her standards because of her preference for detective cats.

Contrary

Instead, she hopes to be able to "kill" the majesty of the detective cat.

Many painters have lost too much time and energy on the wrong path.

Van Gogh had hoped to become an expert in drawing in his early years, and Manet compromised with traditional academics in order to gain official French recognition, including Picasso who spent a lot of time studying ceramics and sculpture...... In Anna's view, this is an act of not doing business properly on the wrong path.

Painting with a knife is not the right way.

Least...... It's a rugged trail that is hard to follow.

"The difficulty of knife painting lies in the fine control, and perhaps the best at this point is Boggs, a professor at the Brooke School of Art in the United States, who is especially good at depicting the weather. It is said that he was able to complete a full-fledged, small-scale snow scene in an hour while in the field, thanks to the control he had developed over half his life on a painting knife......"

Anna is going to recommend some of the works of mature knife artists she has in her impression to Detective Cat, hoping to give this big African sister a general impression of a real knife painting master.

Art is most afraid of being done behind closed doors.

Many painters can't get in touch with the trend of modern artists, and they feel that they are great after practicing half a bottle of water.

This is especially evident in painters in some small places.

The Scholastic Group is known as a temple for illustrators, and it doesn't mean that just because you're creative about your artwork, you're not going to let your expectations come true.

Without mature artistic skills,

It is difficult for the manuscript to pass the review of the art department.

It's not difficult to get started with a knife drawing, even if you are a newcomer who has not been exposed to painting, after playing for two or three months, it is not a big problem to draw and look bluffing.

But

Publishers are willing to pay more than $100,000 for a set of illustrations, so naturally they don't want to look bluffing.

Whether the color can have good expressiveness, whether the surface of the pigment is dirty, whether the level of the knife is unified, and whether the brushstrokes look stagnant......

This depends not only on the artist's own efforts, but also on her talent.

In short, the oil painting knife is easy to use, but without a lot of practice, there is no way to draw well.

Even if you have a lot of practice, whether you can draw well or not depends on your fate.

This is the cruelty of art.

Anna doesn't expect Detective Cat to have the level of the well-known knife artists she calls it, but she wants to get a formal contract for it.

Words that do not take into account Osborne's help.

She estimates that the detective cat must at least have the skills of these artists who have been immersed in unique skills for half their lives in her mouth to be stable.

It's not that the Scholastic Group is demanding, but it's an unpopular genre of painting like chalk drawings and paste-and-paste paintings.

There are only a few painters at the head of an industry, and if they can't go to a high place, it's just a void after all.

In fact, she hopes that the painting style of the detective cat can be built on the cornerstone of traditional popular painting.

Detective Cat was originally very good at drawing colored pencils, and even if he didn't change to oil painting, switching to watercolor painting was an excellent choice.

High-end water-soluble colored pencil drawing has a natural similarity with watercolor painting, and many watercolor painters have experience practicing colored pencils.

Whether you want to win an award or participate in an art exhibition in the future, it is easier than being obsessed with knife painting.

As the phone vibrates, a notification of new news comes to the inbox.

Detective Cat has sent his own illustrations.

Anna was still typing, and she just raised her eyelids slightly, and the movement of her fingertips stopped.

Complete, high-definition illustrations processed by artwork scanners are hundreds of megabytes in size.

The chat app WhatsApp doesn't have any restrictions on the file size of the photos it can be transferred. However, this kind of large file, before it is downloaded, only the thumbnail is loaded.

Anna couldn't see the details of the illustrations clearly.

But with just a thumbnail, she was immediately keenly aware of the special features of the illustration sent by the detective cat.

Rose-colored flowers bloom on the golden planet, the infinite universe is like a clear veil shrouded in the heavenly dome of the picture, there is a round of fiery red stars rising in the east, and the golden sunlight is like flying sand and gravel slowly peeping out of the cosmic net.

Everything in the picture is beautiful like a psychedelic and magnificent dream from childhood.

Anna blinked, momentarily distracted.

She took a soft breath, stretched out her finger, and tapped the screen.

The network in Austria is relatively average, and the signal in the museum is even worse, with a white loading circle rotating on the screen.

Anna frowned.

She knew that this would not help the download speed, but her fingertips kept tapping on her phone over and over again, like a pianist playing a fixed chord.

An illustration, even if it is just a vague shadow, is enough for an art critic like Anna to easily judge the artist's level.

What is good cannot become bad, and what is bad cannot become good.

It's like an exam, exactly the same subject, 80 points for excellent painting and 30 points for bad graffiti, and the final picture is very poorly expressive.

But the level of this painting, Anna can't say.

It's so beautiful.

Pretty almost perfect,

It was so beautiful that she couldn't even tell how good a painting was from the first impression of the thumbnail.

Just when Anna hesitated to go back to the car and use the WIFI in the car, the mobile phone finally downloaded the illustration sent by the detective cat lady to the local area.

The picture is automatically enlarged.

"Incredible."

The thought crossed her mind.

From the moment she was born, Anna has seen countless famous paintings.

Aesthetic, Romantic, Modern, Classical, Renaissance ...... She was even personally accompanied by a cardinal in the basement vault of the Vatican Museums, where she had a close encounter with several tempera paintings by the medieval painter Jan van Eyck, the inventor of oil painting, which was the early prototype of modern oil painting.

In a sense, it is more precious than Leonardo da Vinci's handwriting.

What kind of oil painting she hadn't seen.

But Anna has rarely seen this detective cat work to this extent.

Amazing.

This was Anna's first impression.

Oil paints, under a magnifying glass or a high-resolution digital catalogue, will show the appearance of cheese halfway between the surface of the moon and the cheese gnawed by ants.

This is the different shades of the brush's stray hairs sweeping off the surface of the paint, and it is also part of the texture of the picture.

It's hard to avoid.

Even the picture that has been treated with an oil painting knife is not smooth.

Whether it is a flat pressing method or a side pressure method, the blade extrudes the pigment, which can avoid the folds and cracks of the pigment due to different forces, as if it is swept by a fine steel wool ball.

And the detective cat gives Anna the impression of being clean.

It's so clean.

It's not that there are no uneven traces of paint, it's impossible, and an oil painting that is completely mirror-like is not an advantage, and it will lack sufficient layering.

However, in addition to the necessary layers of paint and the texture of the painting, Anna did not find any unnecessary scratches on the paint left by the knife surface of the oil painting knife for the time being.

One of the core problems of painting with a knife is that a knife is not like a pen, when the hard metal knife surface is rubbed across the surface of the paint, different knife marks are staggered, and it is easy to have messy knife marks.

This kind of clutter will make the picture look chaotic and sluggish.

The picture of the detective cat is very beautiful.

Even the ridge-like or line-like knife marks that are deliberately reserved to add depth to the picture are prominent, and they are very neat and uniform.

The whole picture is very relaxed, rounded and natural.

She stretched out her thumb and forefinger to zoom in on the image, carefully admiring the illustration from beginning to end, even if it was magnified several times, there were very few irregular knife marks on the paint.

"Is this a dispersion pressed out?"

Anna noticed that the pigments in the picture were very expressive and very distinctive, and the shallow pigments and dark pigments were regularly mixed and intertwined, full of mystery and dreaminess.

The more she looked, the more surprised she became.

This kind of color expression is really bold.

It seems to be a beautiful cobweb woven by hand with different pigments as thin threads.

Intense colors and hazy chromatic aberrations add a fairytale-like feel to the whole painting.

"Mr. Sloth, do you have any suggestions for my illustrations?"

The detective cat sent an inquiry.

Anna looked at the message she hadn't typed and shook her head, undoing all the half-edited messages.

Witness such a high-level masterpiece.

She didn't think she was better at drawing the knife artists she had just mentioned than Detective Cat, nor did she feel that she was qualified to dictate Detective Cat's work.

"It's really great."

Anna hesitated, biting her lip and typing.

“…… Detective Cat Lady, I appreciate your willingness to choose me as your agent. ”

Looking at the illustrations sent by the detective cat, Anna was even a little sad to see.

She gently moved the picture on the screen with her fingertips, staring at the paint that was still fresh enough to fully solidify, holding her breath slightly, and her cold eyes contained pity.

She couldn't imagine,

How much hardship does a painter have to endure and how much time does he have to spend in the studio day after day, before he can become proficient in using an oil painting knife to such a degree?

Anna felt particularly honored that such a painter was willing to entrust her career to her own hands.

"I'll make a contract soon, there's something I want to explain to you in advance."

Anna thought about it for a moment and said something a little apprehensively.

"I will find a suitable contract for you and provide professional advice, but for some personal reasons, I hope to be your agent anonymously as Mr. Sloth, please don't explore my real identity too much, I don't know if you are willing to agree to this request?"

is already in the whirlpool of public opinion.

It was inconvenient for her to sign a contract with the other party directly as Miss Elena.

This is not difficult to deal with contractually, and the reason why it is always easy to be targeted by money laundering gangs is because art trading has always been one of the most privacy-friendly industries.

But

Anonymous buyers and illustrators who only use pseudonyms are common.

Anonymous brokers are rarer. Unless it is a smuggling broker engaged in the sale of black art in the underground art black market.

"Can't I know who you really are?"

Sure enough, the detective cat on the opposite side seemed to be a little suspicious.

"It's hard for me to explain to you because of my own ...... For family reasons, we can sign the contract through a professional accounting firm as a confidential intermediary. The accounting firm also handles the division of the schedule into tax returns. ”

"I assure you that there will be no problems with the contract, and if you are not at ease, you can find a lawyer to see it."

Yangon, Koo's Book Gallery.

Gu Weijing was holding his mobile phone, and when he saw Mr. Sloth's request, he only hesitated for a moment, but still nodded.

Although he didn't know why Mr. Sloth was so mysterious, the other party was very well-connected in the art circle, and he was really good to himself.

That's enough.

Who doesn't have a little secret.

Isn't his own identity as an online illustrator also a secret?

Now the grass-stage team-style contract on Fiverr is no longer suitable for him, from the contract to the finance, he needs a more formal professional agent to deal with.

"Okay."

Gu Weijing thought for a while and said, "In this way, let's make a gentleman's agreement, we don't ask your identity, and you don't ask my identity." I'm just a detective cat and you're just Mr. Sloth. Okay? ”

(The next chapter is in the wee hours of the morning, I don't know what time it is when I'm done, go to bed early.) ）

(End of chapter)